I'm not a fan of government regulation, but if you eliminate the FCC, every Tom, Dick and Harry could build an inexpensive transmitter in their basement. (With an antenna on the roof) With all those transmitters going at whatever frequency they please, nobody anywhere would be able to pick up anything. As small-government as I am, I still think that there needs to be some regulating body over the airwaves, just for the simple matter of making sure that transmitters aren't walking over each other. (BTW, regulating body doesn't necessarily need to be a government agency, but DOES need to have some authority to shut down illegal broadcasting.)
It seems that we just accept these things now as inevitable. When products were produced, even as little as 10-20 years ago, I think they went through a much more thorough testing cycle before they were released to the public. With the advent of the Internet, expecially with software products, this idea of "release broken, patch later" just became the normal way of doing things. Since everyone running a business uses computers, this idea started creeping into products that couldn't be patched over the Internet. Of course, when companies start getting hit with the massive bills for these kinds of failures, I think we'll see the pendulum swing the other way. It's not even about massive consumer backlash anymore. (Which used to be the only motovating factor) It's simply that if Phillips has to pay a technician $30 - $50 (or more) to go onsite and replace a cheap defective part for 12,000 TV sets, they will start paying more attention to testing.
Sure, but the "Average Joe" doesn't usually buy equipment on online retailers, or from eBay. Also, you need to make sure that you purchase the model that will work with US GSM providers, and most people find that intimidating. (Obviously not the slashdot crowd.)
I think what the author finds disappointing is that these are only available on the "grey" or perhaps "slightly off-white" market. i.e. they are not easy to come by from providers directly.
None, at the moment, but that's not stopping them from looking into the possiility. There have been several recent "discussions" in Congress to pass bills that would allow the FCC (not Congress directly, but surely indirectly) to regulate cable content. It's not going to happen any time soon, but I believe that there is groundwork being laid right now.
I know that those articles are kind of dated. With Howard Stern off terrestrial radio, a lot of the censorship talk has quieted a bit in the last year, but I do believe that if this administration had its druthers, you'd see an end to free speech in any broadcast medium, whether it be radio, satellite, cable, or even (and this would be neigh impossible, but "they" would still love to see it) the Internet. It's a scary prospect, but we citiznes just need to keep our eye on the ball and stop getting upset when a boobie accidentally flashes on the screen.
Actually, in my comment, I was specifically not referring to Salieri. He was considered a great in his time. He was the head composer in the royal court of Austria. I might be wrong, but I think of him like maybe the modern equivalent of The Police or something. Very talented, very well respected, lots of hits, but not The Beatles. Salieri didn't revolutionize music the way Mozart did, and The Police didn't revolutionize music the way The Beatles did.
No, in my post, I was specifically referring to the 99% of everything that was written in the classical period that we've never even heard before. No manuscripts exist because nobody cared to save them. Think less Salieri and more Joseph the Barrel Maker who wrote a really catchy bar song. It was sung for years in all the bars in town, but is now completely forgotten. That will the the entire Hangin' Tough album by New Kids on the Block in 200 years time.
This is a common sentiment, and there is a good reason why people say it. It's because time usually filters out the crap. Sure, there were really bad movies in the 60's, but are they remembered? No. We remember The Graduate and 2001: A Space Odyssey but those were (arguably) some of the best movies of their time. But do people still talk about The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies anymore? No, because it sucked. It will be remembered even less when the people who were alive back then are dead. The same is true of music. We can wax nostalgic and say that classical music is the only good music, but I'm sure there was plenty of crap written back in Mozart's time. But it was bad, so people didn't write about it, perform it, or remember it. So now, it's mostly forgotten, even in the history books.
Look at it like this: Will you ever buy the movie Battlefield: Earth and show it to your kids? (Assuming you're not a Scientologist.) How about Howard the Duck or Batman and Robin? Unless you want to mess them up, I doubt it. In 50 years, they will only remember the good movies and people will say "Man, movies have really gone down the toilet these days." forgetting entirely about The Toxic Avenger.
This is sort of sucks. I still have my original TiVo Series 1 (Made by Sony) that is at least 5 years old now. (Maybe more.) I got a lifetime subscription for like $200 when I bought it, and it's still chugging along. To most people, the lifetime subscription option was particularly attractive, because most don't want another monthly bill. And in retrospect, it was worth it, because I have been paying an average of $3.33 a month.
I know that the industry wants to maintain a sustainable income source, but companies used to do that my innovating with new products. Now they just want to charge a monthly fee for everything. TiVo had a really great idea, but they haven't done much innovating since their first product. (Sure, bigger, faster, higher resolution, but nothing really new) I hope that the pendulum starts to swing the other way, and soon. I'd rather pay more for a product up front than keep getting hit with monthly charges. Gives me the feeling of ownership.
Perfect case in point: I have a 4 year old laptop that I keep in my kitchen. It's running Windows XP (barely) but it's really low on memory. (192MB minus video memory) I like to listen to music on it, since it's in my kitchen and readily accessible. I recently installed the only downloadable version of WinAMP on it, and it uses almost 80-100MB of RAM while it's running. Now, when I used to run WinAMP on my old 233MHz Pentium with 32MB of memory, and I'm pretty sure it wasn't using 80MB of RAM while running. I don't need visual effects. I don't need an integrated web browser. I don't need a catalog of my 200GB music collection. I just want to listen to music... And it's not like iTunes or Windows Media Player are any better. They're hogs, too. I tried Foobar2000, but it hates my sound card and uses a lot of CPU. So I'm stuck. Whenever I start WinAMP, it takes 5 minutes to load, and when I quit, it takes 5 minutes to unload from memory.
Again, I think it's great to generate interest. (See my previous post in this thread) My point here is that to generate interest and deliver nothing is leaving all of us high and dry. Hype is great if you deliver something at the end. Microsoft told us in 2003 that they had a search engine that was better than Google "right around the corner." I work for a software company that has had a great product "right around the corner" for about three and a half years now. What we don't do is send out press releases to our potential clients telling them how great this software will be when and if it's ever released. (Note, I'm a sysadmin, not a developer, so I take no responsibility for product slippage.)
Forgive me for sounding cynical, but we've been hearing a steady stream of these announcements for years now from multiple companies.
If they were going to have a search engine better than Google, they would just do it, not announce it 6 months in advance. What, do they think that we need to prepare for this momentous event? Like our society isn't ready for a search engine of this power yet, so they need to warn us 6 months in advance to give us time to prepare?
In all seriousness... build a rocket, fly to the asteroid, land on said asteroid and plant your flag. Develop the technology to mine it, and bring back the ore. I'm certain that most people will recognize you as "owning" that asteroid. (Assuming it is sufficiently small. If it's a large asteroid, you might have to plant lots of flags.)
Now, of course, once you have property, you must defend it. If I come to your asteroid, detonate a small nuke just above your ship, then walk around and pluck up all your flags and replace them with my own, most people would agree that I now own the asteroid.
Any property "laws" that we pass now won't be enforcable. I could sit here at my desk and claim ownership of an asteroid, but if someone else builds a ship, goes up there and does all the work to mine it, what court is going to enforce that his mining take really belongs to me? It's a lot like the people who "owned" the wreck of the S.S. Central America. Sure, it took up about 10 years in court, but the people who found the wreck were eventually awarded 92% of the take, and the people who "owned it" (on paper, at least) got 8%. (IMHO, 8% for doing absolutely nothing for 140 years is way too much. If I were in charge, they would have got the honor to pay the court costs for the defendant.)
I always appreciate a fresh take on things. "Thinking outside of the box" is good, however, this doesn't seem very practical to me. There's nothing that this device does that other technologies couldn't handle more effectively.
For one, that "KnocKey" is huge. It's like carrying a deck of playing cards in your pocket. Granted, you'd only have to carry one, but that's only for the doors equipped with the system. Then, of course, you'll have to carry the "Knockerator" for the competing brand of doors, and an infra-red transmitter for yet another brand of security doors that will hit the market in about 6 months. Plus, you'll still have to schlep around regular keys. All this for the "increased security" of not having a keyhole.
Other ideas:
1. RFID - MUCH smaller, still no keyhole, could be universally adaptable if the vendors all agreed on a standard. Probably more secure, and can transmit a 256-bit rolling security code much more efficiently than and knocking mechanism.
2. Biometrics - Nothing to lose, forget, get stolen or water-logged. Lots of options. (Voice print, finger print, iris scan, just to name a few.)
3. Keypad entry - Again, nothing material to lose. (although you could forget) Already commonly in use. Could be cumbersome if you had to remember many different passcodes.
This is all in 10 minutes of brainstorming, and I am not even a remotely related field. Just imagine if I worked for a lock company and got paid to sit around and think of ideas all day. I can't think of a single reason that this knocker is any better than the three ideas above. It seems like a novelty, and not really practical. Still, kudos to the designers for thinking outside the box. Just because a problem has been solved doesn't mean we should stop thinking about it. Still, I don't know if it was a wise product to bring to market. I guess we'll see.
If the disk isn't writable, and if the disk doesn't require some kind of external activation, then this is impossible.
Actually, that's the bitch of it. Both the HD-DVD and Blu-ray call for a small portion of the disc that is writable only by approved and licensed players. We consumers won't have any write access to this block (in theory) and they can write whatever they want on it using the licensed DVD player. I assume this means they could write the serial number to your player on the disc, and if anyone else puts it in their player, it will refuse to play. Obviously, it will be a matter of hours until people figure out a way to:
a) make their players not write the code, b) make their players ignore the code, c) hack their HD and BD writers on their PC's to gain access to this "secret" block, d) Fashion some sort of circumvention technique using duct tape, e) some other fantastic means of circumventing this stupid policy.
Unfortunately, Joe Consumer will likely never access these tricks and will play right into the MPAA's hand. If you want proof, just Google "DVD region hack" to see all the effort that's been put into circumventing region encoding. It's all for naught, though, becuase 95% of people just blindly obey the gestapo tactics used by the MPAA
Of course, I reserve the right to be completely wring here, but that's my understanding of the situation.
MSN is offering free nights at the Four Seasons and other goodies to people who search for one of roughly a thousand terms on a rotating list.
1000 terms, eh? I don't think any Slashdotters will ever win.
Asian sluts [click]...damn Teenage sluts [click]...damn Paris Hilton blowjob [click]...damn Hardcore action [click]...Damn MILF [click]...Damn! Mail order brides [click]...DAMN Mother's Day Presents [click]...DAMN! Online dating [click]...DAMN!!!
Doesn't it make sense, thought, that after a long cycle of firing IT workers that they will need to hire some of that lost staff? Just because hiring is on the rise doesn't mean the IT field is suddenly healthy again. If I start up a company and hire 100 workers over 5 years, then I fire 75 of them, then a year later hire 25 more, I could rightfully claim that my company is growing faster than ever. Doesn't mean it's more healthy than ever. Doesn't mean my company is better off than it was 3 years ago.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not a fan of government regulation, but if you eliminate the FCC, every Tom, Dick and Harry could build an inexpensive transmitter in their basement. (With an antenna on the roof) With all those transmitters going at whatever frequency they please, nobody anywhere would be able to pick up anything. As small-government as I am, I still think that there needs to be some regulating body over the airwaves, just for the simple matter of making sure that transmitters aren't walking over each other. (BTW, regulating body doesn't necessarily need to be a government agency, but DOES need to have some authority to shut down illegal broadcasting.)
The Internet was nice while it lasted. Rest in peace.
Reminds me of the old Onion article "Microsoft to patent zeroes, ones." Isn't the term "Super Hero" pretty generic?
It seems that we just accept these things now as inevitable. When products were produced, even as little as 10-20 years ago, I think they went through a much more thorough testing cycle before they were released to the public. With the advent of the Internet, expecially with software products, this idea of "release broken, patch later" just became the normal way of doing things. Since everyone running a business uses computers, this idea started creeping into products that couldn't be patched over the Internet. Of course, when companies start getting hit with the massive bills for these kinds of failures, I think we'll see the pendulum swing the other way. It's not even about massive consumer backlash anymore. (Which used to be the only motovating factor) It's simply that if Phillips has to pay a technician $30 - $50 (or more) to go onsite and replace a cheap defective part for 12,000 TV sets, they will start paying more attention to testing.
And what is the third type?
OK, OK... I get the joke.
Sure, but the "Average Joe" doesn't usually buy equipment on online retailers, or from eBay. Also, you need to make sure that you purchase the model that will work with US GSM providers, and most people find that intimidating. (Obviously not the slashdot crowd.)
I think what the author finds disappointing is that these are only available on the "grey" or perhaps "slightly off-white" market. i.e. they are not easy to come by from providers directly.
None, at the moment, but that's not stopping them from looking into the possiility. There have been several recent "discussions" in Congress to pass bills that would allow the FCC (not Congress directly, but surely indirectly) to regulate cable content. It's not going to happen any time soon, but I believe that there is groundwork being laid right now.
f irst-amendment-updates
http://penusa.org/go/programs/action-alert/241/4/
http://www.slate.com/id/2095398
I know that those articles are kind of dated. With Howard Stern off terrestrial radio, a lot of the censorship talk has quieted a bit in the last year, but I do believe that if this administration had its druthers, you'd see an end to free speech in any broadcast medium, whether it be radio, satellite, cable, or even (and this would be neigh impossible, but "they" would still love to see it) the Internet. It's a scary prospect, but we citiznes just need to keep our eye on the ball and stop getting upset when a boobie accidentally flashes on the screen.
Actually, in my comment, I was specifically not referring to Salieri. He was considered a great in his time. He was the head composer in the royal court of Austria. I might be wrong, but I think of him like maybe the modern equivalent of The Police or something. Very talented, very well respected, lots of hits, but not The Beatles. Salieri didn't revolutionize music the way Mozart did, and The Police didn't revolutionize music the way The Beatles did.
No, in my post, I was specifically referring to the 99% of everything that was written in the classical period that we've never even heard before. No manuscripts exist because nobody cared to save them. Think less Salieri and more Joseph the Barrel Maker who wrote a really catchy bar song. It was sung for years in all the bars in town, but is now completely forgotten. That will the the entire Hangin' Tough album by New Kids on the Block in 200 years time.
This is a common sentiment, and there is a good reason why people say it. It's because time usually filters out the crap. Sure, there were really bad movies in the 60's, but are they remembered? No. We remember The Graduate and 2001: A Space Odyssey but those were (arguably) some of the best movies of their time. But do people still talk about The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies anymore? No, because it sucked. It will be remembered even less when the people who were alive back then are dead. The same is true of music. We can wax nostalgic and say that classical music is the only good music, but I'm sure there was plenty of crap written back in Mozart's time. But it was bad, so people didn't write about it, perform it, or remember it. So now, it's mostly forgotten, even in the history books.
Look at it like this: Will you ever buy the movie Battlefield: Earth and show it to your kids? (Assuming you're not a Scientologist.) How about Howard the Duck or Batman and Robin? Unless you want to mess them up, I doubt it. In 50 years, they will only remember the good movies and people will say "Man, movies have really gone down the toilet these days." forgetting entirely about The Toxic Avenger.
This is sort of sucks. I still have my original TiVo Series 1 (Made by Sony) that is at least 5 years old now. (Maybe more.) I got a lifetime subscription for like $200 when I bought it, and it's still chugging along. To most people, the lifetime subscription option was particularly attractive, because most don't want another monthly bill. And in retrospect, it was worth it, because I have been paying an average of $3.33 a month.
I know that the industry wants to maintain a sustainable income source, but companies used to do that my innovating with new products. Now they just want to charge a monthly fee for everything. TiVo had a really great idea, but they haven't done much innovating since their first product. (Sure, bigger, faster, higher resolution, but nothing really new) I hope that the pendulum starts to swing the other way, and soon. I'd rather pay more for a product up front than keep getting hit with monthly charges. Gives me the feeling of ownership.
Thanks! I was hoping for a couple suggestions. :)
Oh, and side note, if you're from the RIAA, I meant 200MB music collection which I legally ripped from my CD collection.
30 or 40 builds, eh? What software company do you work for again? ;)
Perfect case in point: I have a 4 year old laptop that I keep in my kitchen. It's running Windows XP (barely) but it's really low on memory. (192MB minus video memory) I like to listen to music on it, since it's in my kitchen and readily accessible. I recently installed the only downloadable version of WinAMP on it, and it uses almost 80-100MB of RAM while it's running. Now, when I used to run WinAMP on my old 233MHz Pentium with 32MB of memory, and I'm pretty sure it wasn't using 80MB of RAM while running. I don't need visual effects. I don't need an integrated web browser. I don't need a catalog of my 200GB music collection. I just want to listen to music... And it's not like iTunes or Windows Media Player are any better. They're hogs, too. I tried Foobar2000, but it hates my sound card and uses a lot of CPU. So I'm stuck. Whenever I start WinAMP, it takes 5 minutes to load, and when I quit, it takes 5 minutes to unload from memory.
I can't wait to get home and install WinAMP 2.0!
Again, I think it's great to generate interest. (See my previous post in this thread) My point here is that to generate interest and deliver nothing is leaving all of us high and dry. Hype is great if you deliver something at the end. Microsoft told us in 2003 that they had a search engine that was better than Google "right around the corner." I work for a software company that has had a great product "right around the corner" for about three and a half years now. What we don't do is send out press releases to our potential clients telling them how great this software will be when and if it's ever released. (Note, I'm a sysadmin, not a developer, so I take no responsibility for product slippage.)
I would give that line of thinking some credibility if we hadn't already heard this before.
Note - Every one of those articles is older than 6 months. Once, I was like you and wanted to believe the hype. Now, I'm just cynical.
Forgive me for sounding cynical, but we've been hearing a steady stream of these announcements for years now from multiple companies.
If they were going to have a search engine better than Google, they would just do it, not announce it 6 months in advance. What, do they think that we need to prepare for this momentous event? Like our society isn't ready for a search engine of this power yet, so they need to warn us 6 months in advance to give us time to prepare?
Stop making announcements and do it already.
In all seriousness... build a rocket, fly to the asteroid, land on said asteroid and plant your flag. Develop the technology to mine it, and bring back the ore. I'm certain that most people will recognize you as "owning" that asteroid. (Assuming it is sufficiently small. If it's a large asteroid, you might have to plant lots of flags.)
Now, of course, once you have property, you must defend it. If I come to your asteroid, detonate a small nuke just above your ship, then walk around and pluck up all your flags and replace them with my own, most people would agree that I now own the asteroid.
Any property "laws" that we pass now won't be enforcable. I could sit here at my desk and claim ownership of an asteroid, but if someone else builds a ship, goes up there and does all the work to mine it, what court is going to enforce that his mining take really belongs to me? It's a lot like the people who "owned" the wreck of the S.S. Central America. Sure, it took up about 10 years in court, but the people who found the wreck were eventually awarded 92% of the take, and the people who "owned it" (on paper, at least) got 8%. (IMHO, 8% for doing absolutely nothing for 140 years is way too much. If I were in charge, they would have got the honor to pay the court costs for the defendant.)
I always appreciate a fresh take on things. "Thinking outside of the box" is good, however, this doesn't seem very practical to me. There's nothing that this device does that other technologies couldn't handle more effectively.
For one, that "KnocKey" is huge. It's like carrying a deck of playing cards in your pocket. Granted, you'd only have to carry one, but that's only for the doors equipped with the system. Then, of course, you'll have to carry the "Knockerator" for the competing brand of doors, and an infra-red transmitter for yet another brand of security doors that will hit the market in about 6 months. Plus, you'll still have to schlep around regular keys. All this for the "increased security" of not having a keyhole.
Other ideas:
1. RFID - MUCH smaller, still no keyhole, could be universally adaptable if the vendors all agreed on a standard. Probably more secure, and can transmit a 256-bit rolling security code much more efficiently than and knocking mechanism.
2. Biometrics - Nothing to lose, forget, get stolen or water-logged. Lots of options. (Voice print, finger print, iris scan, just to name a few.)
3. Keypad entry - Again, nothing material to lose. (although you could forget) Already commonly in use. Could be cumbersome if you had to remember many different passcodes.
This is all in 10 minutes of brainstorming, and I am not even a remotely related field. Just imagine if I worked for a lock company and got paid to sit around and think of ideas all day. I can't think of a single reason that this knocker is any better than the three ideas above. It seems like a novelty, and not really practical. Still, kudos to the designers for thinking outside the box. Just because a problem has been solved doesn't mean we should stop thinking about it. Still, I don't know if it was a wise product to bring to market. I guess we'll see.
Why take up valuable time and space by actually posting articles? At least once a day, Slashdot should just post:
DRM.
Go.
Actually, that's the bitch of it. Both the HD-DVD and Blu-ray call for a small portion of the disc that is writable only by approved and licensed players. We consumers won't have any write access to this block (in theory) and they can write whatever they want on it using the licensed DVD player. I assume this means they could write the serial number to your player on the disc, and if anyone else puts it in their player, it will refuse to play. Obviously, it will be a matter of hours until people figure out a way to:
a) make their players not write the code,
b) make their players ignore the code,
c) hack their HD and BD writers on their PC's to gain access to this "secret" block,
d) Fashion some sort of circumvention technique using duct tape,
e) some other fantastic means of circumventing this stupid policy.
Unfortunately, Joe Consumer will likely never access these tricks and will play right into the MPAA's hand. If you want proof, just Google "DVD region hack" to see all the effort that's been put into circumventing region encoding. It's all for naught, though, becuase 95% of people just blindly obey the gestapo tactics used by the MPAA
Of course, I reserve the right to be completely wring here, but that's my understanding of the situation.
Since when was searching for pr0n illegal? At least not here in the US (as implied by your FBI remark...) Now kiddie pr0n on the other hand...
1000 terms, eh? I don't think any Slashdotters will ever win.
Asian sluts [click]
Teenage sluts [click]
Paris Hilton blowjob [click]
Hardcore action [click]
MILF [click]
Mail order brides [click]
Mother's Day Presents [click]
Online dating [click]
Operator:"How many..."
Computer:"Seven"
Operator:"Why are the..."
Computer:"Because they love cats"
Operator:"...but if they..."
Computer:"No, they don't"
Operator:"Then if you had..."
Computer:"About 15 weeks, but only if they are rounded at the end."
Operator:"Whoa..."
Doesn't it make sense, thought, that after a long cycle of firing IT workers that they will need to hire some of that lost staff? Just because hiring is on the rise doesn't mean the IT field is suddenly healthy again. If I start up a company and hire 100 workers over 5 years, then I fire 75 of them, then a year later hire 25 more, I could rightfully claim that my company is growing faster than ever. Doesn't mean it's more healthy than ever. Doesn't mean my company is better off than it was 3 years ago.