If they're pushing the release or upgrading the version number, it would be nice to have more minor UI bugs squashed. Adding features is great, but some of these glitches make the program look amature and have been around an embarassingly long time.
There's a growing chorus of people complaining about what's on television and radio and that's what you're seeing the commission respond to.
What I notice is that they are all complaining to the FCC, not doing what will really get the industry's attention: stop watching TV.
Seriously. If you don't like what's on TV, don't watch it, and write your letter to the television studios producing this crap. Explain to them why you are writing them and make sure to tell them you have stopped watching their shows (/channels/ service) because of this. Once the letters start rolling in as fast as they apparently are at the FCC, and viewership and advertising profits start going down, you can bet they'll make changes. The media companies are businesses, after all. They wont survive long if you don't want their product.
Why is it that gasoline filling stations are few of the companies out there that actually tell you up front how much something is going to cost (with a big sign visible to boot)? Everywhere else I go, I can expect to pay an additional 10 to 30 someodd percent additional on my bill for the things that the company "forgot" to put on the price.
There really is no reason for this practice, especially given that tax rates change far less often than the price the store normally charges for an item gets changed. So "we'd have to resticker everything" is hardly an excuse (except when one considers a store would have to resticker everything simultanously).
The reason they don't is that it's not how things "usually are". And if one store did, most people wouldn't catch that the price includes tax (even if the store hung up big banner proclaiming it). And to shopper it would simply appear the store was more expensive than everyone else (I know, this prediction seems a little pessimistic).
He wants to energize the deployment of broadband in America?
Yeah, I really didn't see how "[loosening] rules so neither phone nor cable companies will be required to share their Internet connections with competitors" is going to increase broadband adoption. Just sounds like a way to lower competion and help the telco/cablecos.
Disallow cities from forcing companies to pay extortion to them in "franchise fees", one of the biggest hurdles and deterrents to small business starting up in an area.
Broadband companies don't pay the franchise fees, they just pass them on to their subscribers.
Not sure why the Telcos and cable companies are fighting this. They can make a killing in managing these networks.
But they wont own them so they can't exert complete control of them. The city will be free to let upstart providers on the networks. It's just like the telco's fighting to keep from having to lease the lines they own to other providers. As far as I remember, since data service is an "information service" and not a "telephone service" the big media corps would be free to exclude everyone if they built their own fiber network. The city network would introduce competition, which the big media corps don't want,
...seeing as how big they are on free market economics
Therein lies the problem. There is no "elsewhere" to take it in most rural areas. Cable & phone companies are government sanctioned monopolies. I'm sure you have cable in your area. Let's say it is Cox. Try taking your cable business to Charter and see what answer you get.
If you are seriously disatisifed with your cable service, the people to complain to are not the ones working the phones at the cable companies, it's the franchising authority for your municipality. (Note: the FCC requires their contact info be printed on your cable bill.) This is the local government body who gives your cable company the right to be a monopoly in the area. If the city is up in arms with dissatisfaction in service, they can revoke the business' franscise license of COX, Charter, ect and allow another company to come in. It can also allow more than one company the right to do business in an area (this is where line ownership is generally the limiting factor to competition).
Govt. is not a market force. Govt. intervention means, by definition, that the market is not free.
...And the Government is not intervening in anyone's ability to deploy fiber. If Cox and BellSouth want to start running fiber tomorrow, they are more than welcome to.
The people have simply stated they would like their municipality to run a fiber network of it's own, and have agreed by way of their vote, to pay for it. If Cox and BellSouth see this as a competitive move, they are free to treat the government as a competitor, and show through superior products and services they are a better choice. If they do nothing, it was their choice to not rise to their customers' demand. That is how a free market works.
It just boggles the mind that people would throw out a Windows machine and then replace it with another! Windows machine which is immediately susceptible and commonly infected within twenty minutes or so of being re-connected to the Internet.
Does that mean they're buying a new PC every twenty minutes?!
That must explain all the computer specials on ShopNBC.
It's quite easy to recover files that haven't been over written.
Hence my requiremnet of this DRM system that the original files be overwritten, however many times you see fit.
I doubt users are going to put up with software on their system hogging the disk to do a complete DOD 7 pass write over deleted sectors...
How are we "hogging" disk space to do a seven pass overwrite? If we overwrite the same hard drive blocks that originally made up a 46 kb file, the size of of the overwrite will be the size of those blocks, nothing more.
Also, I think it can be agreed seven passes is really overkill for most applications. Having the original file overwritten at all is going to make it difficult to retrieve, more trouble than most would go to to retrieve it if we're talking about media files or everyday company documents.
And the possibility that files not intended to be wiped are killed by mistake.
What file system randomly overwrites sectors that do not coinside with the file it is immediately working with? The likelyhood would be the same as the risk of your existing file system mucking things up.
This hypothetical system's main premise is that for all intents and purposes, there is no 'copy' function anymore. Only MOVE enforced by the OS.
With modern systems, this DRM scheme could operate completly invisible to the end user. Encrytion and file verification all handled in the background by the OS, the only thing they'd notice is they couldn't duplicate the file to a separate disk.
With digital files there is no differnce between copying and moving.
The differnce is when you move something the original copy is then deleted. So a DRM scheme for a document could concievably be that the old copy must be deleted and overwritten with random 1's and 0's during the move. The most obvious way around this is you disconnect the source drive after the copy of the file but before the delete of the original. So the next iteration of the DRM scheme is the old file is copied to a temporary (perhaps encryted) "holding space", be it scratch HD space, memory, ect and the old file deleted and overwritten before the new copy is written.
But a system like this would have to also verify and validate the intergrity of it's temporary copy before it deletes the original, lest the copy be corrupted.
For such a system to work, the DRM would have to be supported on a file system level, and be unreadable by any disk scanning tools (compulsory encryption of home folders anyone?). Also, it would have to be savegaurded for disk imaging apps, disk diagnostic tools, ect.
But I see this MOVE!=COPY method of DRM being very doable. Just a pain to implement.
The Creative Audigy 2, for example, automatically disables its digital audio output when you play DVD-A....no one forced Creative to do this; they were quite happy to implement it themselves.
How do you know that? Couldn't they have easily been approached by the MPEG licensing authority about the fact leaving the digital output on *might* allow someone to make digital copies of the audio and therefore *might* be interpretted as the company endorsing piracy, which *might* cause litigation.
Nowadays a company has to look at the worst case scenario use for their product vs. the chances of that happening and the positive uses for it. Most companies can't afford to defend themselves against constant lawsuits, frivolous or not.
Take those expressway billboards and put up Amber Alerts on them. Instead of the dot matrix text message we have on highway overpass displays, we can do full color pictures with the child's stats. The technology allows us to easily change and remove the image when the child is found (via Wi-Fi or cellular connection to Police headquarters).
One thing I notice about Google is how they have pretty much locked the everyman from buying them and gaining any of these fantastic gains they've seen in their first year being public.
To start with there's the dutch auction and the financial requirements one had to meet to be a part of it, pretty much the only people able to get involved were the financial powerhouses. But look at Google's price today: $330.89. Then look at other tech stocks: Microsoft: $25.79, Apple: $40.79 (after a stock split when it was pushing $80), Intel: $27.88, Yahoo: $36.86. Google's share price has skyrocketed, but they haven't even mentioned the possibility of splitting. This puts the entry price of Google much higher than other stocks, making it out of reach for small investors.
"It's no different if I went out and bought a Microsoft program and started sharing it with everyone in my apartment. It's theft," said Kena Lewis, spokeswoman for Bright House Networks in Orlando. "Just because a crime may be undetectable doesn't make it right."
Maybe then, by this reckoning, giving your wireless password to those friends and family who happen to live nearby would in fact be okay.
Except that your broadband provider sells their service with the idea it's being sold to just your household, not your address and whoever is within wireless range and can get on. So if your friends/family don't live in your house you're still providing them with service beyond the usage ideas of your Cable/DSL provider.
Remember that before routers and NAT became so commonplace broadband providers charged additional fees for more than one computer being allowed on at once, and even had clauses in their TOS saying you couldn't use a Firewall or other device with NAT capability. But these policies became so unpopular with consumers, and because it wasn't so easy to track offenders down, they had to drop them.
This is the same discussion we have on Slashdot when someone talks about getting a T1 and splitting the costs with their neighbors and some their goonish internet provider comes at them with TOS violations for sharing the connection.
I haven't really looked to far into what BitTorrent actually puts into a PC. So it may be thumb-drivable, maybe not. I'll have to do more research to see if BitTorrent requires any special DLL files be installed in/Windows or/System for it to work. That is the main stumbling block.
What's the inherent advantage of an integrated client?
The client is integrated, therefore becomes as portable as Firefox on a flash drive. So I can now download torrents on machines I don't have administrator access on to install BitTorrent.
The ISP defense that it's like sharing one copy of MS Office is pretty poor, as the bandwidth is fixed; it's more like sharing a video, which seems to me to be entirely legal AFAICT.
No it's not. You can only share it with family/friends. Allowing anyone to watch the video too is not legal. This is where the FBI warning and the "for private home exhibitation only" clause come in.
"It's no different if I went out and bought a Microsoft program and started sharing it with everyone in my apartment. It's theft," said Kena Lewis, spokeswoman for Bright House Networks in Orlando.
Shouldn't they be arresting the owner of the access point then? After all, they bought the internet access and are sharing it with everyone within 150 feet.
Crack dealers are often very good businessmen, and have to work hard to keep the supply chains running, salesmen on the streets, etc. We don't normally see them working for the DEA afterwards, or getting jobs on Wall Street with their acquired skills. Instead we lock them up for 20 years.
Crack dealers may be great businessmen on the streets, but often there are a different set of skills required to make it in legitimate businesses. Respect for social structure, having "cultural capital" (the ability to maneuver in these structures) and deal with gov't beuracracy, ect are things one working in underground markets doesn't have to deal with as much. For an example of an drug dealer trying to make it in legal business, I would suggest reading Philippe Bourgois's In Search of Respect : Selling Crack in El Barrio. A text common in many Sociology classes.
Slashdot Mirror
WTF is "Mahir" ? Never heard of it/him/her/that.
Yeah I was asking the same thing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahir
If they're pushing the release or upgrading the version number, it would be nice to have more minor UI bugs squashed. Adding features is great, but some of these glitches make the program look amature and have been around an embarassingly long time.
8
... for over four years!
Here's one of my favorites:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=7682
(you'll need to cut'n paste and remove the space since bugzilla doesn't like slashdot links)
Arrows always showing on a long bookmarks menu, even when you at the top or bottom of the list.
There's a growing chorus of people complaining about what's on television and radio and that's what you're seeing the commission respond to.
What I notice is that they are all complaining to the FCC, not doing what will really get the industry's attention: stop watching TV.
Seriously. If you don't like what's on TV, don't watch it, and write your letter to the television studios producing this crap. Explain to them why you are writing them and make sure to tell them you have stopped watching their shows (/channels/ service) because of this. Once the letters start rolling in as fast as they apparently are at the FCC, and viewership and advertising profits start going down, you can bet they'll make changes. The media companies are businesses, after all. They wont survive long if you don't want their product.
Why is it that gasoline filling stations are few of the companies out there that actually tell you up front how much something is going to cost (with a big sign visible to boot)? Everywhere else I go, I can expect to pay an additional 10 to 30 someodd percent additional on my bill for the things that the company "forgot" to put on the price.
There really is no reason for this practice, especially given that tax rates change far less often than the price the store normally charges for an item gets changed. So "we'd have to resticker everything" is hardly an excuse (except when one considers a store would have to resticker everything simultanously).
The reason they don't is that it's not how things "usually are". And if one store did, most people wouldn't catch that the price includes tax (even if the store hung up big banner proclaiming it). And to shopper it would simply appear the store was more expensive than everyone else (I know, this prediction seems a little pessimistic).
He wants to energize the deployment of broadband in America?
Yeah, I really didn't see how "[loosening] rules so neither phone nor cable companies will be required to share their Internet connections with competitors" is going to increase broadband adoption. Just sounds like a way to lower competion and help the telco/cablecos.
Disallow cities from forcing companies to pay extortion to them in "franchise fees", one of the biggest hurdles and deterrents to small business starting up in an area.
Broadband companies don't pay the franchise fees, they just pass them on to their subscribers.
But they wont own them so they can't exert complete control of them. The city will be free to let upstart providers on the networks. It's just like the telco's fighting to keep from having to lease the lines they own to other providers. As far as I remember, since data service is an "information service" and not a "telephone service" the big media corps would be free to exclude everyone if they built their own fiber network. The city network would introduce competition, which the big media corps don't want,
Therein lies the problem. There is no "elsewhere" to take it in most rural areas. Cable & phone companies are government sanctioned monopolies. I'm sure you have cable in your area. Let's say it is Cox. Try taking your cable business to Charter and see what answer you get.
If you are seriously disatisifed with your cable service, the people to complain to are not the ones working the phones at the cable companies, it's the franchising authority for your municipality. (Note: the FCC requires their contact info be printed on your cable bill.) This is the local government body who gives your cable company the right to be a monopoly in the area. If the city is up in arms with dissatisfaction in service, they can revoke the business' franscise license of COX, Charter, ect and allow another company to come in. It can also allow more than one company the right to do business in an area (this is where line ownership is generally the limiting factor to competition).
The people have simply stated they would like their municipality to run a fiber network of it's own, and have agreed by way of their vote, to pay for it. If Cox and BellSouth see this as a competitive move, they are free to treat the government as a competitor, and show through superior products and services they are a better choice. If they do nothing, it was their choice to not rise to their customers' demand. That is how a free market works.
It just boggles the mind that people would throw out a Windows machine and then replace it with another! Windows machine which is immediately susceptible and commonly infected within twenty minutes or so of being re-connected to the Internet.
Does that mean they're buying a new PC every twenty minutes?!
That must explain all the computer specials on ShopNBC.
It's quite easy to recover files that haven't been over written.
Hence my requiremnet of this DRM system that the original files be overwritten, however many times you see fit.
I doubt users are going to put up with software on their system hogging the disk to do a complete DOD 7 pass write over deleted sectors...
How are we "hogging" disk space to do a seven pass overwrite? If we overwrite the same hard drive blocks that originally made up a 46 kb file, the size of of the overwrite will be the size of those blocks, nothing more.
Also, I think it can be agreed seven passes is really overkill for most applications. Having the original file overwritten at all is going to make it difficult to retrieve, more trouble than most would go to to retrieve it if we're talking about media files or everyday company documents.
And the possibility that files not intended to be wiped are killed by mistake.
What file system randomly overwrites sectors that do not coinside with the file it is immediately working with? The likelyhood would be the same as the risk of your existing file system mucking things up.
This hypothetical system's main premise is that for all intents and purposes, there is no 'copy' function anymore. Only MOVE enforced by the OS.
With modern systems, this DRM scheme could operate completly invisible to the end user. Encrytion and file verification all handled in the background by the OS, the only thing they'd notice is they couldn't duplicate the file to a separate disk.
With digital files there is no differnce between copying and moving.
The differnce is when you move something the original copy is then deleted. So a DRM scheme for a document could concievably be that the old copy must be deleted and overwritten with random 1's and 0's during the move. The most obvious way around this is you disconnect the source drive after the copy of the file but before the delete of the original. So the next iteration of the DRM scheme is the old file is copied to a temporary (perhaps encryted) "holding space", be it scratch HD space, memory, ect and the old file deleted and overwritten before the new copy is written.
But a system like this would have to also verify and validate the intergrity of it's temporary copy before it deletes the original, lest the copy be corrupted.
For such a system to work, the DRM would have to be supported on a file system level, and be unreadable by any disk scanning tools (compulsory encryption of home folders anyone?). Also, it would have to be savegaurded for disk imaging apps, disk diagnostic tools, ect.
But I see this MOVE!=COPY method of DRM being very doable. Just a pain to implement.
The Creative Audigy 2, for example, automatically disables its digital audio output when you play DVD-A. ...no one forced Creative to do this; they were quite happy to implement it themselves.
How do you know that? Couldn't they have easily been approached by the MPEG licensing authority about the fact leaving the digital output on *might* allow someone to make digital copies of the audio and therefore *might* be interpretted as the company endorsing piracy, which *might* cause litigation.
Nowadays a company has to look at the worst case scenario use for their product vs. the chances of that happening and the positive uses for it. Most companies can't afford to defend themselves against constant lawsuits, frivolous or not.
people generally don't want to buy crap (tm)
No, they want the item/service in question and to part with the least amount of money possible to get it.
But then this same groups expect the item they paid the least amount for to perform the same as the more expensive item.
Actually, what we need is a messaging protocol that isn't tied to some website.
AOL Instant Messenger wasn't tied to any webmail account until AOL recently began giving people new email accounts to go with their AIM usernames.
iChat can form ad-hoc instant messenging networks within network without a server to dole things out.
Some P2P networks have chat functions.
and then someone already mentioned Jabber.
Take those expressway billboards and put up Amber Alerts on them. Instead of the dot matrix text message we have on highway overpass displays, we can do full color pictures with the child's stats. The technology allows us to easily change and remove the image when the child is found (via Wi-Fi or cellular connection to Police headquarters).
your electronic papers show YOU!
One thing I notice about Google is how they have pretty much locked the everyman from buying them and gaining any of these fantastic gains they've seen in their first year being public.
To start with there's the dutch auction and the financial requirements one had to meet to be a part of it, pretty much the only people able to get involved were the financial powerhouses. But look at Google's price today: $330.89. Then look at other tech stocks: Microsoft: $25.79, Apple: $40.79 (after a stock split when it was pushing $80), Intel: $27.88, Yahoo: $36.86. Google's share price has skyrocketed, but they haven't even mentioned the possibility of splitting. This puts the entry price of Google much higher than other stocks, making it out of reach for small investors.
Is this those "Strong ARM" government tactics I keep hearing about.
"It's no different if I went out and bought a Microsoft program and started sharing it with everyone in my apartment. It's theft," said Kena Lewis, spokeswoman for Bright House Networks in Orlando. "Just because a crime may be undetectable doesn't make it right."
Maybe then, by this reckoning, giving your wireless password to those friends and family who happen to live nearby would in fact be okay.
Except that your broadband provider sells their service with the idea it's being sold to just your household, not your address and whoever is within wireless range and can get on. So if your friends/family don't live in your house you're still providing them with service beyond the usage ideas of your Cable/DSL provider.
Remember that before routers and NAT became so commonplace broadband providers charged additional fees for more than one computer being allowed on at once, and even had clauses in their TOS saying you couldn't use a Firewall or other device with NAT capability. But these policies became so unpopular with consumers, and because it wasn't so easy to track offenders down, they had to drop them.
This is the same discussion we have on Slashdot when someone talks about getting a T1 and splitting the costs with their neighbors and some their goonish internet provider comes at them with TOS violations for sharing the connection.
I haven't really looked to far into what BitTorrent actually puts into a PC. So it may be thumb-drivable, maybe not. I'll have to do more research to see if BitTorrent requires any special DLL files be installed in /Windows or /System for it to work. That is the main stumbling block.
What's the inherent advantage of an integrated client?
The client is integrated, therefore becomes as portable as Firefox on a flash drive. So I can now download torrents on machines I don't have administrator access on to install BitTorrent.
The ISP defense that it's like sharing one copy of MS Office is pretty poor, as the bandwidth is fixed; it's more like sharing a video, which seems to me to be entirely legal AFAICT.
No it's not. You can only share it with family/friends. Allowing anyone to watch the video too is not legal. This is where the FBI warning and the "for private home exhibitation only" clause come in.
"It's no different if I went out and bought a Microsoft program and started sharing it with everyone in my apartment. It's theft," said Kena Lewis, spokeswoman for Bright House Networks in Orlando.
Shouldn't they be arresting the owner of the access point then? After all, they bought the internet access and are sharing it with everyone within 150 feet.
Sorry. I linked to the old edition.
This is the current one.
Crack dealers are often very good businessmen, and have to work hard to keep the supply chains running, salesmen on the streets, etc. We don't normally see them working for the DEA afterwards, or getting jobs on Wall Street with their acquired skills. Instead we lock them up for 20 years.
Crack dealers may be great businessmen on the streets, but often there are a different set of skills required to make it in legitimate businesses. Respect for social structure, having "cultural capital" (the ability to maneuver in these structures) and deal with gov't beuracracy, ect are things one working in underground markets doesn't have to deal with as much. For an example of an drug dealer trying to make it in legal business, I would suggest reading Philippe Bourgois's In Search of Respect : Selling Crack in El Barrio. A text common in many Sociology classes.