Only the subject line is a shameless troll. Hear me out.
I've just finished another article for TuxMagazine (tuxmagazine.com) about MEPIS, which I settled on as the easiest-to-run, most-productive Linux after going through Mandriva and Linspire and Lycoris and a few others.
But for installation, all of them, and Ubuntu, and, yes, WindowsXP are dead easy installs on the most popular hardware. Just keep hitting YES or NEXT or whatever for all of them.
Alas, you "can't beat Windows" because it is ALREADY installed. Almost nobody ever installs it, except people who could also install Linux if they wanted.
And people who could install Linux (i.e. anybody who ever wrestled with DOS and original Windows, anybody who cares to spend a few hours reading and patiently following prompts)...they mostly install Windows anyway because "everybody has it" (see "pre-installed", above).
The only way to break that positive-feedback loop would be for Microsoft to ACTUALLY ensure that everybody really pays >$100 for Windows and for regulating governments to ensure that everybody has the option to get a bare machine.
Which hasn't happened and doesn't seem to be about to. Microsoft would rather see piracy than see Linux become an alternative, so piracy goes unchecked in places where money is tight (ie all of Asia, Africa, etc - Windows CDs are a buck each.) And hardware vendors virtually never offer a bare machine or a pre-installed Linux except for expensive servers.
Only when the few minor alternatives like the Wal-Mart Linux offerings become much more major will you see any change.
But the problem this writer claims? Doesn't really exist.
Thanks for the kind words. My own small DVD collection is also often in the category of "evangelism", i.e. I want to be able to press them into people's hands. (Some are political documentaries I agree with, for instance.)
And then there's "Buffy" - all 7 seasons. I expect to develop a great urge to see that show again in several years, after I've forgotten them well enough - and also after they've disappeared from the rerun rotation via overkill.
Renting TV series is harder than movies - only a few of the most popular become rentable at all and I think there's a fair concern the rental stores will dispose of them sooner than they would a movie that doesn't get a lot of rentals.
I'd agree with your $10/$5 price; in fact, I still have a laserdisc player because when the store was getting out of that medium, they sold off their 12" laserdiscs for first $5 then 2-for-$5 and I bought a total of 20 titles.
But I think the current pricing on DVDs is going to be with us for some time - although one may be able to do what I did with laserdiscs with DVDs in surprisingly few years when HD has become standard!
By my estimate, around 16GB it would cease to matter to me. 16GB is about 1/4 of my whole music collection - which, by the 80/20 rule, means over 80% of the music I actually listen to with any frequency. iTunes could automatically cycle me through the other 48GB, if I had iTunes, or I could write a Linux shell script in 30 minutes to do the same (delete the "rotation" directory and select a random 1GB from the "library" to fill it with).
Until 16GB, though, I'm happy with a $49 player with a $69 1GB USB key plugged into it.
I have a very small DVD collection because I tend to ask myself a question when I look at one: "How many times am I going to watch it?" The answer is "once or twice" for most movies, "three" is rare. Then I multiply by the rental cost and generally come up with half the price on the sticker. And move along.
Alas for me, other people do not ask this question. They just want to own it because they like owning movies, having the shelf-full. At least that's what they say when I ask them the "how many times..." question. This urge means that "all the traffic will bear" is over twice the price that (I think) it should be.
If people WILL PAY such a price - and DVD's have been flying off the shelves for years, a stunning growth market that very happily surprised the studios so that they are now frantically printing their whole back catalog and blowing the dust off 60's TV series - why would any sane businessman charge less? "All the traffic will bear" has always been the price for ANYTHING in history unless tightly government regulated.
So quit calling them greedy.
Granted, they have a monopoly of sorts - only the copyright holder for "Air Force One" can sell you a DVD of "Air Force One". But the products are fungible to the extent that you can spend your evening watching other movies, too. If all the studios are in collusion to hold the price up, that's oligopoly and charges are possible - and have been done with music companies.
Pursuing an oligopoly is a serious government priority if they're driving up the price of wheat or steel and affecting the economy - but driving up the price of leisure products that people didn't have a few years ago and don't really need because they could just rent? Not a priority. (They'd have to arrest most of the fashion industry first - why "protect" people from $30 DVDs when they pay $300 for jeans?)
Piracy here isn't like Asia: No wide-open, over-the-counter sales possible; our "pirates" have to spend about an hour finding and downloading and burning and it severely limits the "competition". Even quick-to-download MP3s only took (at most) a few percent of the "market" and reduced CD prices at very most 10%.
Not only can I not be bothered paying $20 for "Batman Begins" I can't be bothered finding it and downloading it and all that - there's more likely something worth my time on my ad-free movie channels (no doubt "Batman Begins" in another six or ten months), or on my DVR, or at worst rentable for $3.
The only thing that will make our prices drop significantly is for people to get over that "I just want to own a copy" urge, and pay only rational prices. This isn't food we're talking about; it's a luxury good - particularly when they can be rented for $3 when they leave the "new" shelf in a few months.
He's at http://www.lomborg.com/...where you can hardly avoid reading or watching interviews where he stresses that he accepts global warming and discusses the issue mostly in the context of the IPCC report - the major one that predicted global warming between 1.4C and 5.8C by 2100, with a couple of "most likely" scenarios around 2.2C.
A page or two of 'The SE' did ah, "cover the controversy" about global warming itself, Lomborg mentions that there are data that point the other way, scientists who disagree.
Then he basically waves all that aside and stipulates the conclusions of the IPCC report are true and should form the basis of deciding our response.
My English usage isn't perfect, but I do try; I'm one of those guys who fusses over not putting an apostrophe in "its" when expressing something possessed by "it" because the apostrophe is only for "It is".
I find that when I take the trouble to be careful of my English usage, it gets me automatic respect - a hearing of what I have to say even in a roomful of corporate senior management.
I also very deliberately roughen up my usage, include slang and grammatic errors, when talking to the labour force that haven't picked up a book since high school. (But I never over-act, which is always obvious to people for whom it is normal speech; I just relax my speech to the way I talked in high school.)
Why? To not put them off. In Britain, and almost as much in North America, grammar and sentence construction are as background-based ("class-based" if you must) as the accents on your vowels. Carefully correct usage automatically sounds upper class to most people.
While spouting alarmist arm-waving about Good English going by the way, try to remember that a few generations back, very few people spoke like Sherlock Holmes or wrote like Ernest Hemingway; 80% of the population sounded more like the lower-class characters in the same novels. "Ain't" was probably twice as common as it is today in America. I heard phrases like "She brung it", or "I seen it" MORE often as a child (in the 60's) than I do today - and even then it was often older people.
Meanwhile, I notice that almost all the *well-regarded* bloggers use decent English, with clear sentence construction and few errors, even though most are dashing off a first draft straight to the blog.
The most popular fiction in history - Harry Potter - is about teenagers and both the dialogue and narration are in excellent English, and modern teenagers identify with them despite their lack of slang and smileys.
There are a few things deteriorating. More business communication is quite casual; it's easier to send an E-mail that write a paper letter, so a lot more casual usage is accepted because of the medium... even in closing million-dollar deals. (But the deal is finally put to paper by lawyers who literally DO construct their English the way a programmer writes a program...) The casual E-mail usage is the price of a LOT more communication happening in a typical office worker's life than 50 years ago, the price of more productivity.
The other thing running downhill is English usage by the media. It used to be that almost no error of grammar or spelling slipped past a newspaper editor. Now one sees them every day.
But I'm about 1% as concerned by that as I am by the amount of awful things in the world that the media doesn't write a single word about, while concentrating on the personal lives of celebrities.
Let's see some (more) alarmism about THAT.
DRM makes "content to the PC" nearly pointless...
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The Great HDCP Fiasco
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· Score: 4, Insightful
The entire point of DRM is to forbid copying, saving, manipulating the content... which is what a PC is for. The whole reason to jump from paper to PC was that it made it easy to save, copy, repeatedly print, and manipulate information.
If all you can do is watch on your PC, what have you got? A $2000 19" TV! Big deal; most people will be doing their watching on the new 42" in the living room with the cable-company-supplied HD DVR.
HDCP, in short, will kill any sales of PC equipment and content, save to enthusiasts like slashdotters, and to content makers - including everybody with home cameras. But nin Blu-Ray disks out of ten will be put into consumer boxes rather than PCs because the PC won't do anything special with it.
This outcome is fine, for Hollywood; they don't see "available on PC" as a big selling point for their product. They're happy to just keep their content off the platform altogether.
About 15 senior engineers and managers of the water & wastewater utilities that serve a city of a million people (combined yearly budget: >$250M) gathered in a conference room with the manager that handles the IT budget (>$4M) for both - to watch an American Waterworks Association "Webcast" about "Managing Your Assets" that uses streaming media, your choice of Win Media or Real.
Tried the Windows Media player - no go. "We saw a Webcast at another boardroom", said one guy - "we had to use Real - because of the corporate firewall.". Didn't have Real. Tried to install. But the manager for all our IT did not have an Admin login on the XP machine - or any other XP machine that she signs off on over a million dollars a year for, to get corporate IT support.
NOBODY outside the actual IT dept has an admin password on any machine connected to our network; and believe me, they are so locked down I have icons on my desktop I can't delete; and I certainly can't install anything that doesn't run entirely in my own home directory; "C:\" is locked to me, for instance. Almost every installer just dies before it starts with a message that "your account can't install this".
I agree this is a good thing for 90% of users; but the manager in question - and I - were doing PC support and Unix workstation builds back when the first 286 hit the corporation. Doesn't matter. No exceptions.
Anyway, the whole meeting broke up, the reps from some local companies that are much smaller and, ahhh, less formal about such things, shaking their heads in wonder.
It's the "no exceptions" thing that is the mistake. So my vote is "Yeah, It's Gone Too Far".
I just searched all responses and was astonished to find only two promoting books as an alternative.
As near as I can figure out from 15 min. of googling, books cost about $2 to print. And I suspect that's high if you're talking about a print run of 10 million, and can tolerate pulp paper.
With a little care, even crappy pulp paperbacks last decades. That automatically means these are several times cheaper than the laptops even if you bought each kid the full $100 worth of books, because the laptops aren't going to make it past the age of 5, maybe 10 in the rarest cases. (NB: How repairable will the cheap ones be? Will they be useless when the ENTER key starts sticking?)
Whereas you could do 10 sets of 25 books, for 10 age levels. Then older kids could hand theirs down to younger and receive books from kids older still; effectively every kid in his childhood would receive not 25 but 250 books.
Yes, there's lots of stuff the books won't do that laptops will. But since you can get a lot MORE out there for the same donated dollars, I submit that the total good done will be much higher.
That said, poverty is a spectrum. Yes, 1/5th of the world gets by on $1/day, another 1/5th on $2 or so. But there's also about 1/5th of the world that has reasonable security of food, clothing, shelter and schools, already have their own books, and have some hundreds, even thousands, of dollars per family per year of pure disposable income - think of places like Mexico & Turkey where the huge depressing cinderblock slums (at least they seem so to us) have flickering TV light coming out of nearly every door by night.
I suspect they will just BUY their own dang laptops if they come out at a price point those people can afford, like the $50 TV they already have...and if the laptop actually does something more for their kids than an equivalent purchase of books.
" It won't come to a screeching halt at any obvious point, but expect to see smaller improvements spread further apart."
Nearly 10 years back, before the word "blog" existed, I did a little web article called The End of Moore's Law - Thank God! that used the info in two excellent Scientific American articles which hypothesized a slow levelling off of the Moore's Law exponent around... well, a year or two ago, actually, rather than a few years from now. But close enough.
The second Sci. Am. article stressed that it was an economic decision and drew parallels both to aviation (aircraft grew in size rapidly until the 747) and to trains (the biggest-ever locomotive was designed in the 50's)
In both cases, you wound up with the entire market being needed to pay the costs of the last generation of development. Presumably, the "Last Fab" will require a consortium of Intel, IBM, AMD, Motorola, etc - and make chips for all of them to pay off the $10 Billion construction cost.
I suspect that people WILL be able to see this; I seem to recall that when 6 megapixel cameras came out, camera connaisseur John Dvorak wrote in his column that they were then hitting the effective resolution of 35mm film.
But movies have had some success at 70mm frames and IMAX frames that are each about 4X the pixel count, successively...I'm not sure that 33 megapixels is yet as good as an IMAX frame.
So even without ultraviolet-ray 18-layer disks, I'm imagining IMAX Theatres going digital by just mailing 10TB hard drives around the country in 2010. If it makes economic sense, that is.
Personally, I've held off buying any HDTV because I'm certain that all the various HDTV formats will eventually molder away in favour of 1080p as that becomes affordable.
The question is, 'what's next?' The now-hot-selling HDTVs will be worn out in about 10 years, and the relentless progress of digital monitors will mean that at least 4X HDTV resolution will be cheap and common by then. Will they go to that? Or hang on to 1080 as a maximum for another decade and try to get people to upgrade to say 4096x8192.
There's no question that people will keep upgrading to the limits of human perception, where they just can't tell between the old model and the new. But I think that's a long way off.
The other issue is refresh rate - there's no question that moving pictures look much more real at 48 frames/sec than 24. Roger Ebert really fell for such a technology - just stick his name and "digital" into Google and you'll probably find the column. He was profoundly unimpressed with the digital projectors now being foisted on the industry, compared to a simple retrofit device that allows 48fps movies.
This is just the kind of screwed-up priorities that cause companies to lose all competitive edge.
Good (?) accounting tends to highlight grand total costs of small things. Good Lord, we spend $27,000 per year on paper clips! Better control them under lock & key. The lost-opportunity cost of the contract bid missed because somebody was hunting for paperclips does not, of course, appear on and ledger.
Now somebody has summed up the electrical costs of a really large server room and come up with a sum close to a human salary. That always impresses people. (Man is the measure of all things.)
But what is it as a fraction of total operations and capital?
At 11 cents per kilowatt-hour (a common residential cost except in badly-gouged locales; but high for major consumers, at least until lately and those 27% increases) your rule-of-thumb for 7x24 consumption is:
a buck per watt per year.
500-watt average constant consumption from a basic 3u rack server = $500/year. Easy, no?
But that's a pretty serious machine, home machines don't commonly have over 400W power supplies - and certainly don't use the 400W all the time. So we're allowing for air conditioning power in the estimate.
But a serious server starts at $10,000 and you won't get five years out of it, so the capital cost alone is $2000/year and up.
All but the most automated shops surely have a salaried sysadmin (and/or DBA, backup specialty guy...) for every ten machines. And those guys all cost $50,000 dead minimum. So that's another $5,000 per machined per year for care & feeding.
So that's $7000/year, plus power at $500. Maybe skyrocketing to $700 and a full 10% of costs.
And of course I had to assume that the $10,000 included 5 years of vendor support to keep it that low. Never mind insurance, rent on the space, huge UPS's, fire systems, air conditioning (not the power for it, the machinery). In truth, I can hardly imagine power reaching 10% of the operations cost.
Also, I'm taking some place like NCAR as my site: gargantuan computing power at the service of a dozen professors and their retinue of grad students. Totally running their own programs, not million-dollar software packages like SAP on Oracle. In short, the normal "IT" costs of programmers, analysts, support techs, software vendors, don't exist.
Because when they do, they dwarf the cost of running the server room and power dwindles down to being 10% of 10% of your total IT budget. Which in most companies is 5%-9% of total operating expenditure.
Wailing about this cost - which springs out on the accounting spreadsheet because it is up a large percentage from last year - leads to classic penny-wise, pound-foolish decisions.
Perhaps: "we'll use less power if we consolidate a dozen servers down into one big one". A lot of this has been done by IT departments, whom I swear are pining for the days of the mainframe.
But at least where I work, business didn't move off the mainframe because it was such a high cost per compute cycle - often enough we were increasing our total computing costs to go PC and small server. We did it for the flexibility.
And loss of flexibility could cost a business big - for want of a paperclip.
The "two tier model" of which the article speaks is a pathetically small fig-leaf. There is nothing remotely difficult about imposing restrictions on resellers not to sell to repressive regimes or for any use to curtail freedom of speech.
When it's your own country that's repressed by dictators, those who help them do it are called "collaborators" by the rest of the populace. When it's somebody else's country, well......I still call them collaborators.
Briefly, he urged that the digital-media market would go to the machine that 'plays everybody's records' - urged them to give up on hopeless DRM and indeed break everybody else's with their players.
I'll admit to never having had better than mid-range, mass-market equipment, but I finally got a 1970's-era joke about Dark Side of the Moon ending with an old guy saying "There is no dark side, really, it's all dark"....when I finally heard it for the first time on the "20th anniversary" CD I bought.
You have to crank the sound up a fair bit to hear it, and that made the hum & static pretty hard to ignore... on my LP.
Could a really well-kept LP and a really good turntable beat a CD system? Oh, I suppose...but the matter is strictly theoretical to me and to over 90% of former turntable owners.
One similarity - I did know audiophiles who, as part of their obsessive LP-protectiion efforts, would promptly tape any new LP and then almost never play it again.
But one does not have to be an obsessive audiophile to avoid playing a CD very often - because all of mine now get one play to MP3 them, then maybe one play per DECADE thereafter.
So the complaint about "mildly scratched" CDs sounding bad is quite theoretical to me, as well.
Theo and some of his visitors over the years have been very generous about speaking at meetings of the Calgary Unix Users Group.
This year, we cap off our best month in history, in which we have Richard M. Stallman speaking on May 18 at the University Science Theatres (seats 500). Less than a week later, Theo and the entire 50-ish turnout for the Hackathon, invited to the John Dutton Theatre of the main downtown library (seats 400), on May 24th.
The topic is PF, the packet filter; and the scheduled speaker, Ryan McBride - but the rest of the PF team will be there for question & answer. And with the entire Hackathon invited, the topic could wander a bit.
If you can make it, look for details at our web site:
Just to clarify - the Gershwin project used not "piano rolls" per se, but recordings of a device truly like the MIDI pianos - it recorded the weight of key impact, the use of pedals, everything.
I caught this concert with the Yamaha player-less piano together with the local symphony and it was uncanny.
Even better, the McKinsey quarterly uses telco stats to compute the "reach" of broadband, that is to say, the percentage of total households that can be equipped with broadband if they choose to pay for it:
Korea: 95% US: 89% Canada: 87%
The houses that actually purchase broadband:
Korea: 54% US: 13% Canada: 25%
In short, it isn't for lack of ability to provide the broadband. It's the price offered to the consumer. It's cheaper in Canada and much cheaper in Korea.
NB: Disposable income is lower in Canada and much lower in Korea. But the prices for broadband are that much lower again.
http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/planning/census/cps2k.ht m
They use telco stats to compute the "reach" of broadband, that is to say, the percentage of total households that can be equipped with broadband if they choose to pay for it:
Korea: 95% US: 89% Canada: 87%
Ok, Korea has an edge there with over 19 households able to get broadband for every 18 in the US. That doesn't explain the difference in pentration rates, though, the houses that actually purchase broadband:
Korea: 54% US: 13% Canada: 25%
Maybe Canadians and Koreans can afford it more easily? Not likely:
Korea $17,800 - 2.9 - 22.5
US $37,800 - 1.8 - 30.5
Canada $29,800 - 2.8 - 23.8
The dollar figures are all $US equiv for "GDP per capita" the individual "purchasing power". The other two figures give you an idea how evenly total wealth is distributed. It's the percentage of all GDP in the "per capitas" of the lowest-income 10% and highest-income 10% of the country. All are from the CIA world factbook
Clearly the US poor (and probably middle-class) have a smaller share of their large GDP than in Canada and Korea, but it hardly outweighs having a 25% more purchasing power per cap than Canada and more than DOUBLE that of Korea.
I'll spare you the graphs and regressions: lower broadband in the US is absolutely not due to lower population density and certainly not due to lack of educated populace or money available in their hands. It's all about the COST of the product.
Broadband cost in Calgary is about $30 US per month. ($35 Cdn/mo DSL, $40 cable) If it is $50 US per month in the States, then clearly it's too high to really catch on.
Building a network, any network, be it roads, sewer pipes or broadband, requires a large upfront costs, long-term payback, acceptance of some risk, and very long-term vision; plus perhaps a sense that some of the payback may come to society as a whole, not the network provider, and won't be measured in dollars anyway.
Here in Alberta, both the electrical and phone networks started off as government projects, then were privatized AFTER they were mature and no "vision thing" was needed any more. But when the Internet came along we promptly invested $100 million (from 3 million people) in the "Alberta Supernet" and various other stimulating projects. They got results. Calgary probably has the highest broadband penetration in North America, over 70%; the only US communities in our league are around MIT and Silicon Valley.
The available evidence from many nations, not just these three, indicates that the level of public participation in the process corresponds closely to broadband pentration...and not many other factors do. Certainly not the excuses being bandied about on slashdot today.
Actually, it wasn't a great simile. A football team can whip up & encourage low behaviour from fan clubs, but "Linux" can't get Linux enthusiasts to do anything...
"Nutjobs" have been doing this stuff to Linux critics for about 10 years now. If any damage were possible, it's long been done. Instead, Linux has grown steadily and rapidly in respectability. It would appear the market has the ability to distinguish between enthusiasts and the thing they're enthused about.
Football-team fan maniacs don't detract from the respectability of the team itself, for instance.
Calling people at home with abuse is way over the line and certainly nobody should approve of it. I think anybody who imagined they could speak for the "Linux community" and apologized to her would be doing so on behalf of 99% of Linux enthusiasts, certainly including myself.
But you know, oddly enough, few criticize more organized bodies corporate - you know, those profit-taking ones with shares and offices - when they sue the daylights out of somebody for "maligning" their IP. Frequently, they force apologies and settlements out of those who offended them, even when the criticism was perfectly correct.
Compared to that, Ms. Didio may have gotten off lucky...well, sort of.
The question ISN'T "What are the barriers?"
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Women Leaving I.T.
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· Score: 1
It's "What has changed in the last few years".
Skimming these posts at 4, I mostly saw discussion of cultural barriers to women in IT. They're real enough, but they only change slowly, that kind of change takes decades, not years.
It's 20 years this year since my graduation from CS. And back then, the ratio at my university was maybe 1:4 or at worst 1:5. The one poster was claiming 40/800 or a 1:20 ratio. Quite a drop.
And anybody claiming that the last 20 years have seen a cultural shift AGAINST women being respected in the workplace -- well, show me some evidence. I think any change, while slow, has been for the better.
The "cultural barriers" argument, "I don't get no respect", therefore explains only my old 1:4 or 1:5. It's not explaining a further recent decrease.
So the question posed by the rapid and recent drop in women in IT, is "what has changed so recently?"
And I can' think of any answer myself except "Less opportunity and less money".
In my case it was Engineering, which came first. CS was my backup plan when engineering went through a very dry period in my city for a decade.
Then things got better and I became an engineer with a specialty and a lot of value to other engineers - the guy that could deal with the IT department - rather than an IT guy with an added degree they didn't appreciate.
And that will run through most jobs. You'll find your best employment options are in the field of the OTHER degree, not in IT per se.
CS is just a generally useful addition to almost any other specialty that gives you a special status and opportunities. (In most IT departments, the only one that will be appreciated is accounting, because half of business programming involves it.)
Oh, yeah, forgot one point. My parts list for the proposed MythTV box ran $1500 Cdn. The DVR was $750 . Half the price for, I repeat, 80% of the functionality.
Yes, yes, the two aren't comparable. The MythTV box would have had a top-end burner, a 200GB hard drive, the Hauppage 350 top-end video capture, and a $150 sound card that did 7.1 digital sound.
But honestly? I wouldn't have used most of that functionality except on "Star Wars" type heavy-sound movies. And it all would have been obsolete in 3 years when HDTV is mainstream.
So will the DVR be, but I'll only have spent half as much on it. In 3 years, MythTV will be much more stable and featureful, and a MythTV box that can digitize HDTV (if content controls even allow that) will probably be under $1500 - and I'll still have half that much unspent in the bank.
Slashdot Mirror
Only the subject line is a shameless troll. Hear me out.
I've just finished another article for TuxMagazine (tuxmagazine.com) about MEPIS, which I settled on as the easiest-to-run, most-productive Linux after going through Mandriva and Linspire and Lycoris and a few others.
But for installation, all of them, and Ubuntu, and, yes, WindowsXP are dead easy installs on the most popular hardware. Just keep hitting YES or NEXT or whatever for all of them.
Alas, you "can't beat Windows" because it is ALREADY installed. Almost nobody ever installs it, except people who could also install Linux if they wanted.
And people who could install Linux (i.e. anybody who ever wrestled with DOS and original Windows, anybody who cares to spend a few hours reading and patiently following prompts)...they mostly install Windows anyway because "everybody has it" (see "pre-installed", above).
The only way to break that positive-feedback loop would be for Microsoft to ACTUALLY ensure that everybody really pays >$100 for Windows and for regulating governments to ensure that everybody has the option to get a bare machine.
Which hasn't happened and doesn't seem to be about to. Microsoft would rather see piracy than see Linux become an alternative, so piracy goes unchecked in places where money is tight (ie all of Asia, Africa, etc - Windows CDs are a buck each.) And hardware vendors virtually never offer a bare machine or a pre-installed Linux except for expensive servers.
Only when the few minor alternatives like the Wal-Mart Linux offerings become much more major will you see any change.
But the problem this writer claims? Doesn't really exist.
Thanks for the kind words. My own small DVD collection is also often in the category of "evangelism", i.e. I want to be able to press them into people's hands. (Some are political documentaries I agree with, for instance.)
And then there's "Buffy" - all 7 seasons. I expect to develop a great urge to see that show again in several years, after I've forgotten them well enough - and also after they've disappeared from the rerun rotation via overkill.
Renting TV series is harder than movies - only a few of the most popular become rentable at all and I think there's a fair concern the rental stores will dispose of them sooner than they would a movie that doesn't get a lot of rentals.
I'd agree with your $10/$5 price; in fact, I still have a laserdisc player because when the store was getting out of that medium, they sold off their 12" laserdiscs for first $5 then 2-for-$5 and I bought a total of 20 titles.
But I think the current pricing on DVDs is going to be with us for some time - although one may be able to do what I did with laserdiscs with DVDs in surprisingly few years when HD has become standard!
By my estimate, around 16GB it would cease to matter to me. 16GB is about 1/4 of my whole music collection - which, by the 80/20 rule, means over 80% of the music I actually listen to with any frequency. iTunes could automatically cycle me through the other 48GB, if I had iTunes, or I could write a Linux shell script in 30 minutes to do the same (delete the "rotation" directory and select a random 1GB from the "library" to fill it with).
Until 16GB, though, I'm happy with a $49 player with a $69 1GB USB key plugged into it.
I have a very small DVD collection because I tend to ask myself a question when I look at one: "How many times am I going to watch it?" The answer is "once or twice" for most movies, "three" is rare. Then I multiply by the rental cost and generally come up with half the price on the sticker. And move along.
Alas for me, other people do not ask this question. They just want to own it because they like owning movies, having the shelf-full. At least that's what they say when I ask them the "how many times..." question. This urge means that "all the traffic will bear" is over twice the price that (I think) it should be.
If people WILL PAY such a price - and DVD's have been flying off the shelves for years, a stunning growth market that very happily surprised the studios so that they are now frantically printing their whole back catalog and blowing the dust off 60's TV series - why would any sane businessman charge less? "All the traffic will bear" has always been the price for ANYTHING in history unless tightly government regulated.
So quit calling them greedy.
Granted, they have a monopoly of sorts - only the copyright holder for "Air Force One" can sell you a DVD of "Air Force One". But the products are fungible to the extent that you can spend your evening watching other movies, too. If all the studios are in collusion to hold the price up, that's oligopoly and charges are possible - and have been done with music companies.
Pursuing an oligopoly is a serious government priority if they're driving up the price of wheat or steel and affecting the economy - but driving up the price of leisure products that people didn't have a few years ago and don't really need because they could just rent? Not a priority. (They'd have to arrest most of the fashion industry first - why "protect" people from $30 DVDs when they pay $300 for jeans?)
Piracy here isn't like Asia: No wide-open, over-the-counter sales possible; our "pirates" have to spend about an hour finding and downloading and burning and it severely limits the "competition". Even quick-to-download MP3s only took (at most) a few percent of the "market" and reduced CD prices at very most 10%.
Not only can I not be bothered paying $20 for "Batman Begins" I can't be bothered finding it and downloading it and all that - there's more likely something worth my time on my ad-free movie channels (no doubt "Batman Begins" in another six or ten months), or on my DVR, or at worst rentable for $3.
The only thing that will make our prices drop significantly is for people to get over that "I just want to own a copy" urge, and pay only rational prices. This isn't food we're talking about; it's a luxury good - particularly when they can be rented for $3 when they leave the "new" shelf in a few months.
He's at http://www.lomborg.com/ ...where you can hardly avoid reading or watching interviews where he stresses that he accepts global warming and discusses the issue mostly in the context of the IPCC report - the major one that predicted global warming between 1.4C and 5.8C by 2100, with a couple of "most likely" scenarios around 2.2C.
A page or two of 'The SE' did ah, "cover the controversy" about global warming itself, Lomborg mentions that there are data that point the other way, scientists who disagree.
Then he basically waves all that aside and stipulates the conclusions of the IPCC report are true and should form the basis of deciding our response.
My English usage isn't perfect, but I do try; I'm one of those guys who fusses over not putting an apostrophe in "its" when expressing something possessed by "it" because the apostrophe is only for "It is".
... even in closing million-dollar deals. (But the deal is finally put to paper by lawyers who literally DO construct their English the way a programmer writes a program...) The casual E-mail usage is the price of a LOT more communication happening in a typical office worker's life than 50 years ago, the price of more productivity.
I find that when I take the trouble to be careful of my English usage, it gets me automatic respect - a hearing of what I have to say even in a roomful of corporate senior management.
I also very deliberately roughen up my usage, include slang and grammatic errors, when talking to the labour force that haven't picked up a book since high school. (But I never over-act, which is always obvious to people for whom it is normal speech; I just relax my speech to the way I talked in high school.)
Why? To not put them off. In Britain, and almost as much in North America, grammar and sentence construction are as background-based ("class-based" if you must) as the accents on your vowels. Carefully correct usage automatically sounds upper class to most people.
While spouting alarmist arm-waving about Good English going by the way, try to remember that a few generations back, very few people spoke like Sherlock Holmes or wrote like Ernest Hemingway; 80% of the population sounded more like the lower-class characters in the same novels. "Ain't" was probably twice as common as it is today in America. I heard phrases like "She brung it", or "I seen it" MORE often as a child (in the 60's) than I do today - and even then it was often older people.
Meanwhile, I notice that almost all the *well-regarded* bloggers use decent English, with clear sentence construction and few errors, even though most are dashing off a first draft straight to the blog.
The most popular fiction in history - Harry Potter - is about teenagers and both the dialogue and narration are in excellent English, and modern teenagers identify with them despite their lack of slang and smileys.
There are a few things deteriorating. More business communication is quite casual; it's easier to send an E-mail that write a paper letter, so a lot more casual usage is accepted because of the medium
The other thing running downhill is English usage by the media. It used to be that almost no error of grammar or spelling slipped past a newspaper editor. Now one sees them every day.
But I'm about 1% as concerned by that as I am by the amount of awful things in the world that the media doesn't write a single word about, while concentrating on the personal lives of celebrities.
Let's see some (more) alarmism about THAT.
The entire point of DRM is to forbid copying, saving, manipulating the content ... which is what a PC is for. The whole reason to jump from paper to PC was that it made it easy to save, copy, repeatedly print, and manipulate information.
If all you can do is watch on your PC, what have you got? A $2000 19" TV! Big deal; most people will be doing their watching on the new 42" in the living room with the cable-company-supplied HD DVR.
HDCP, in short, will kill any sales of PC equipment and content, save to enthusiasts like slashdotters, and to content makers - including everybody with home cameras. But nin Blu-Ray disks out of ten will be put into consumer boxes rather than PCs because the PC won't do anything special with it.
This outcome is fine, for Hollywood; they don't see "available on PC" as a big selling point for their product. They're happy to just keep their content off the platform altogether.
About 15 senior engineers and managers of the water & wastewater utilities that serve a city of a million people (combined yearly budget: >$250M) gathered in a conference room with the manager that handles the IT budget (>$4M) for both - to watch an American Waterworks Association "Webcast" about "Managing Your Assets" that uses streaming media, your choice of Win Media or Real.
Tried the Windows Media player - no go. "We saw a Webcast at another boardroom", said one guy - "we had to use Real - because of the corporate firewall.". Didn't have Real. Tried to install. But the manager for all our IT did not have an Admin login on the XP machine - or any other XP machine that she signs off on over a million dollars a year for, to get corporate IT support.
NOBODY outside the actual IT dept has an admin password on any machine connected to our network; and believe me, they are so locked down I have icons on my desktop I can't delete; and I certainly can't install anything that doesn't run entirely in my own home directory; "C:\" is locked to me, for instance. Almost every installer just dies before it starts with a message that "your account can't install this".
I agree this is a good thing for 90% of users; but the manager in question - and I - were doing PC support and Unix workstation builds back when the first 286 hit the corporation. Doesn't matter. No exceptions.
Anyway, the whole meeting broke up, the reps from some local companies that are much smaller and, ahhh, less formal about such things, shaking their heads in wonder.
It's the "no exceptions" thing that is the mistake. So my vote is "Yeah, It's Gone Too Far".
I just searched all responses and was astonished to find only two promoting books as an alternative.
As near as I can figure out from 15 min. of googling, books cost about $2 to print. And I suspect that's high if you're talking about a print run of 10 million, and can tolerate pulp paper.
With a little care, even crappy pulp paperbacks last decades. That automatically means these are several times cheaper than the laptops even if you bought each kid the full $100 worth of books, because the laptops aren't going to make it past the age of 5, maybe 10 in the rarest cases. (NB: How repairable will the cheap ones be? Will they be useless when the ENTER key starts sticking?)
Whereas you could do 10 sets of 25 books, for 10 age levels. Then older kids could hand theirs down to younger and receive books from kids older still; effectively every kid in his childhood would receive not 25 but 250 books.
Yes, there's lots of stuff the books won't do that laptops will. But since you can get a lot MORE out there for the same donated dollars, I submit that the total good done will be much higher.
That said, poverty is a spectrum. Yes, 1/5th of the world gets by on $1/day, another 1/5th on $2 or so. But there's also about 1/5th of the world that has reasonable security of food, clothing, shelter and schools, already have their own books, and have some hundreds, even thousands, of dollars per family per year of pure disposable income - think of places like Mexico & Turkey where the huge depressing cinderblock slums (at least they seem so to us) have flickering TV light coming out of nearly every door by night.
I suspect they will just BUY their own dang laptops if they come out at a price point those people can afford, like the $50 TV they already have...and if the laptop actually does something more for their kids than an equivalent purchase of books.
If that's the policy, the Right Move is to give them TWO MONTHS of notice!
Nearly 10 years back, before the word "blog" existed, I did a little web article called The End of Moore's Law - Thank God! that used the info in two excellent Scientific American articles which hypothesized a slow levelling off of the Moore's Law exponent around ... well, a year or two ago, actually, rather than a few years from now. But close enough.
The second Sci. Am. article stressed that it was an economic decision and drew parallels both to aviation (aircraft grew in size rapidly until the 747) and to trains (the biggest-ever locomotive was designed in the 50's)
In both cases, you wound up with the entire market being needed to pay the costs of the last generation of development. Presumably, the "Last Fab" will require a consortium of Intel, IBM, AMD, Motorola, etc - and make chips for all of them to pay off the $10 Billion construction cost.
I suspect that people WILL be able to see this; I seem to recall that when 6 megapixel cameras came out, camera connaisseur John Dvorak wrote in his column that they were then hitting the effective resolution of 35mm film.
But movies have had some success at 70mm frames and IMAX frames that are each about 4X the pixel count, successively...I'm not sure that 33 megapixels is yet as good as an IMAX frame.
So even without ultraviolet-ray 18-layer disks, I'm imagining IMAX Theatres going digital by just mailing 10TB hard drives around the country in 2010. If it makes economic sense, that is.
Personally, I've held off buying any HDTV because I'm certain that all the various HDTV formats will eventually molder away in favour of 1080p as that becomes affordable.
The question is, 'what's next?' The now-hot-selling HDTVs will be worn out in about 10 years, and the relentless progress of digital monitors will mean that at least 4X HDTV resolution will be cheap and common by then. Will they go to that? Or hang on to 1080 as a maximum for another decade and
try to get people to upgrade to say 4096x8192.
There's no question that people will keep upgrading to the limits of human perception, where they just can't tell between the old model and the new. But I think that's a long way off.
The other issue is refresh rate - there's no question that moving pictures look much more real at 48 frames/sec than 24. Roger Ebert really fell for such a technology - just stick his name and "digital" into Google and you'll probably find the column. He was profoundly unimpressed with the digital projectors now being foisted on the industry, compared to a simple retrofit device that allows 48fps movies.
This is just the kind of screwed-up priorities that cause companies to lose all competitive edge.
Good (?) accounting tends to highlight grand total costs of small things. Good Lord, we spend $27,000 per year on paper clips! Better control them under lock & key. The lost-opportunity cost of the contract bid missed because somebody was hunting for paperclips does not, of course, appear on and ledger.
Now somebody has summed up the electrical costs of a really large server room and come up with a sum close to a human salary. That always impresses people. (Man is the measure of all things.)
But what is it as a fraction of total operations and capital?
At 11 cents per kilowatt-hour (a common residential cost except in badly-gouged locales; but high for major consumers, at least until lately and those 27% increases) your rule-of-thumb for 7x24 consumption is:
a buck per watt per year.
500-watt average constant consumption from a basic 3u rack server = $500/year. Easy, no?
But that's a pretty serious machine, home machines don't commonly have over 400W power supplies - and certainly don't use the 400W all the time. So we're allowing for air conditioning power in the estimate.
But a serious server starts at $10,000 and you won't get five years out of it, so the capital cost alone is $2000/year and up.
All but the most automated shops surely have a salaried sysadmin (and/or DBA, backup specialty guy...) for every ten machines. And those guys all cost $50,000 dead minimum. So that's another $5,000 per machined per year for care & feeding.
So that's $7000/year, plus power at $500. Maybe skyrocketing to $700 and a full 10% of costs.
And of course I had to assume that the $10,000 included 5 years of vendor support to keep it that low. Never mind insurance, rent on the space, huge UPS's, fire systems, air conditioning (not the power for it, the machinery). In truth, I can hardly imagine power reaching 10% of the operations cost.
Also, I'm taking some place like NCAR as my site: gargantuan computing power at the service of a dozen professors and their retinue of grad students. Totally running their own programs, not million-dollar software packages like SAP on Oracle. In short, the normal "IT" costs of programmers, analysts, support techs, software vendors, don't exist.
Because when they do, they dwarf the cost of running the server room and power dwindles down to being 10% of 10% of your total IT budget. Which in most companies is 5%-9% of total operating expenditure.
Wailing about this cost - which springs out on the accounting spreadsheet because it is up a large percentage from last year - leads to classic penny-wise, pound-foolish decisions.
Perhaps: "we'll use less power if we consolidate a dozen servers down into one big one". A lot of this has been done by IT departments, whom I swear are pining for the days of the mainframe.
But at least where I work, business didn't move off the mainframe because it was such a high cost per compute cycle - often enough we were increasing our total computing costs to go PC and small server. We did it for the flexibility.
And loss of flexibility could cost a business big - for want of a paperclip.
The "two tier model" of which the article speaks is a pathetically small fig-leaf. There is nothing remotely difficult about imposing restrictions on resellers not to sell to repressive regimes or for any use to curtail freedom of speech.
...I still call them collaborators.
When it's your own country that's repressed by dictators, those who help them do it are called "collaborators" by the rest of the populace. When it's somebody else's country, well...
I think it was slashdot that first referenced this speech Cory Doctrow gave to a Microsoft audience about DRM:
http://www.craphound.com/msftdrm.txt
Briefly, he urged that the digital-media market would go to the machine that 'plays everybody's records' - urged them to give up on hopeless DRM and indeed break everybody else's with their players.
Wonderful set of anti-DRM arguments.
I'll admit to never having had better than mid-range, mass-market equipment, but I finally got a 1970's-era joke about Dark Side of the Moon ending with an old guy saying "There is no dark side, really, it's all dark"....when I finally heard it for the first time on the "20th anniversary" CD I bought.
... on my LP.
You have to crank the sound up a fair bit to hear it, and that made the hum & static pretty hard to ignore
Could a really well-kept LP and a really good turntable beat a CD system? Oh, I suppose...but the matter is strictly theoretical to me and to over 90% of former turntable owners.
One similarity - I did know audiophiles who, as part of their obsessive LP-protectiion efforts, would promptly tape any new LP and then almost never play it again.
But one does not have to be an obsessive audiophile to avoid playing a CD very often - because all of mine now get one play to MP3 them, then maybe one play per DECADE thereafter.
So the complaint about "mildly scratched" CDs sounding bad is quite theoretical to me, as well.
Theo and some of his visitors over the years have been very generous about speaking at meetings of the Calgary Unix Users Group.
This year, we cap off our best month in history, in which we have Richard M. Stallman speaking on May 18 at the University Science Theatres (seats 500). Less than a week later, Theo and the entire 50-ish turnout for the Hackathon, invited to the John Dutton Theatre of the main downtown library (seats 400), on May 24th.
The topic is PF, the packet filter; and the scheduled speaker, Ryan McBride - but the rest of the PF team will be there for question & answer. And with the entire Hackathon invited, the topic could wander a bit.
If you can make it, look for details at our web site:
http://www.cuug.ab.ca/
Roy Brander, P.Eng.
Chair, Calgary Unix Users Group
Just to clarify - the Gershwin project used not "piano rolls" per se, but recordings of a device truly like the MIDI pianos - it recorded the weight of key impact, the use of pedals, everything.
I caught this concert with the Yamaha player-less piano together with the local symphony and it was uncanny.
This story seems to be nearly a dupe of yesterays. So I'll dupe the facts I looked up for that one:
t m
E / 2004002/tables/pdf/44_01.pdf
- d ist.html
_ 2_ sense_of_broadband.pdf
Canada, the US, and Korea are all about equally urbanized.
US, 2000 census: 79.2% urban population
Canada 2001: 79.6% (statistics canada)
Korea, 2000: 77% urban
Even better, the McKinsey quarterly uses telco stats to compute the "reach" of broadband, that is to say, the percentage of total households that can be equipped with broadband if they choose to pay for it:
Korea: 95%
US: 89%
Canada: 87%
The houses that actually purchase broadband:
Korea: 54%
US: 13%
Canada: 25%
In short, it isn't for lack of ability to provide the broadband. It's the price offered to the consumer. It's cheaper in Canada and much cheaper in Korea.
NB: Disposable income is lower in Canada and much lower in Korea. But the prices for broadband are that much lower again.
http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/planning/census/cps2k.h
http://www.statcan.ca/english/freepub/82-221-XI
www.paulnoll.com/Korea/History/South-Korean-pop
http://www.dalfarra.ch/nds/zusatzdokumente/2003
Please, you guys arguing without facts have to drop the notion that this is anything to do with urbanization levels.
s us/cps2k.htm )
2 -221-XIE/ 2004002/tables/pdf/44_01.pdf)
a n-pop-d ist.html)
_ 2_ sense_of_broadband.pdf
Canada, the US, and Korea are all about equally urbanized.
US, 2000 census: 79.2% urban population
(http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/planning/cen
Canada 2001: 79.6% urban (statistics canada)
(http://www.statcan.ca/english/freepub/8
Korea, 2000: 77% urban
(www.paulnoll.com/Korea/History/South-Kore
Or you can simply go to this document in the McKinsey quarterly:
http://www.dalfarra.ch/nds/zusatzdokumente/2003
They use telco stats to compute the "reach" of broadband, that is to say, the percentage of total households that can be equipped with broadband if they choose to pay for it:
Korea: 95%
US: 89%
Canada: 87%
Ok, Korea has an edge there with over 19 households able to get broadband for every 18 in the US. That doesn't explain the difference in pentration rates, though, the houses that actually purchase broadband:
Korea: 54%
US: 13%
Canada: 25%
Maybe Canadians and Koreans can afford it more easily? Not likely:
Korea $17,800 - 2.9 - 22.5
US $37,800 - 1.8 - 30.5
Canada $29,800 - 2.8 - 23.8
The dollar figures are all $US equiv for "GDP per capita" the individual "purchasing power". The other two figures give you an idea how evenly total wealth is distributed. It's the percentage of all GDP in the "per capitas" of the lowest-income 10% and highest-income 10% of the country. All are from the CIA world factbook
Clearly the US poor (and probably middle-class) have a smaller share of their large GDP than in Canada and Korea, but it hardly outweighs having a 25% more purchasing power per cap than Canada and more than DOUBLE that of Korea.
I'll spare you the graphs and regressions: lower broadband in the US is absolutely not due to lower population density and certainly not due to lack of educated populace or money available in their hands. It's all about the COST of the product.
Broadband cost in Calgary is about $30 US per month. ($35 Cdn/mo DSL, $40 cable) If it is $50 US per month in the States, then clearly it's too high to really catch on.
Building a network, any network, be it roads, sewer pipes or broadband, requires a large upfront costs, long-term payback, acceptance of some risk, and very long-term vision; plus perhaps a sense that some of the payback may come to society as a whole, not the network provider, and won't be measured in dollars anyway.
Here in Alberta, both the electrical and phone networks started off as government projects, then were privatized AFTER they were mature and no "vision thing" was needed any more. But when the Internet came along we promptly invested $100 million (from 3 million people) in the "Alberta Supernet" and various other stimulating projects. They got results. Calgary probably has the highest broadband penetration in North America, over 70%; the only US communities in our league are around MIT and Silicon Valley.
The available evidence from many nations, not just these three, indicates that the level of public participation in the process corresponds closely to broadband pentration...and not many other factors do. Certainly not the excuses being bandied about on slashdot today.
Actually, it wasn't a great simile. A football team can whip up & encourage low behaviour from fan clubs, but "Linux" can't get Linux enthusiasts to do anything...
"Nutjobs" have been doing this stuff to Linux critics for about 10 years now. If any damage were possible, it's long been done. Instead, Linux has grown steadily and rapidly in respectability. It would appear the market has the ability to distinguish between enthusiasts and the thing they're enthused about.
Football-team fan maniacs don't detract from the respectability of the team itself, for instance.
Calling people at home with abuse is way over the line and certainly nobody should approve of it. I think anybody who imagined they could speak for the "Linux community" and apologized to her would be doing so on behalf of 99% of Linux enthusiasts, certainly including myself.
But you know, oddly enough, few criticize more organized bodies corporate - you know, those profit-taking ones with shares and offices - when they sue the daylights out of somebody for "maligning" their IP. Frequently, they force apologies and settlements out of those who offended them, even when the criticism was perfectly correct.
Compared to that, Ms. Didio may have gotten off lucky...well, sort of.
It's "What has changed in the last few years".
Skimming these posts at 4, I mostly saw discussion of cultural barriers to women in IT. They're real enough, but they only change slowly, that kind of change takes decades, not years.
It's 20 years this year since my graduation from CS. And back then, the ratio at my university was maybe 1:4 or at worst 1:5. The one poster was claiming 40/800 or a 1:20 ratio. Quite a drop.
And anybody claiming that the last 20 years have seen a cultural shift AGAINST women being respected in the workplace -- well, show me some evidence. I think any change, while slow, has been for the better.
The "cultural barriers" argument, "I don't get no respect", therefore explains only my old 1:4 or 1:5. It's not explaining a further recent decrease.
So the question posed by the rapid and recent drop in women in IT, is "what has changed so recently?"
And I can' think of any answer myself except "Less opportunity and less money".
In my case it was Engineering, which came first. CS was my backup plan when engineering went through a very dry period in my city for a decade.
Then things got better and I became an engineer with a specialty and a lot of value to other engineers - the guy that could deal with the IT department - rather than an IT guy with an added degree they didn't appreciate.
And that will run through most jobs. You'll find your best employment options are in the field of the OTHER degree, not in IT per se.
CS is just a generally useful addition to almost any other specialty that gives you a special status and opportunities. (In most IT departments, the only one that will be appreciated is accounting, because half of business programming involves it.)
Oh, yeah, forgot one point. My parts list for the proposed MythTV box ran $1500 Cdn. The DVR was $750 . Half the price for, I repeat, 80% of the functionality.
Yes, yes, the two aren't comparable. The MythTV box would have had a top-end burner, a 200GB hard drive, the Hauppage 350 top-end video capture, and a $150 sound card that did 7.1 digital sound.
But honestly? I wouldn't have used most of that functionality except on "Star Wars" type heavy-sound movies. And it all would have been obsolete in 3 years when HDTV is mainstream.
So will the DVR be, but I'll only have spent half as much on it. In 3 years, MythTV will be much more stable and featureful, and a MythTV box that can digitize HDTV (if content controls even allow that) will probably be under $1500 - and I'll still have half that much unspent in the bank.