Unless Wal-Mart can do something a lot better than Netflix, I'd be reluctant to switch.
Wal-Mart has been in the news recently for covering up Cosmopolitan magazine. Are they going to push movie suppliers for reedited versions of films, the way Blockbuster has done?
I know that most people won't look at it this way, and Wal-Mart is an 800-lb gorilla that will probably squash Netflix. But I can't imagine Wal-Mart's politics not getting in the way of their ability to do a good job in this business.
Doesn't this give companies with EU offices a competitive advantage?
If you're based in the US, you have to manage 15 different tax rates, and do 15 times as much paperwork. If you're based in the EU, you can use your local rate, and do it once instead of 15 times.
Public key cryptography won't let me trust a calculation done on your computer.
It will let me know that your computer is willing to vouch for the result (ie., it's affixed the signature), but it requires me to trust your computer.
This is different. When I get a certain kind of signature from a trusted computing enabled machine, I know that a specific chunk of code produced the signature, and that it wasn't modified by you or your machine. That's the point.
That's why it would make spoofing p2p systems harder. That's why it would make offline digicash micropayment systems that prevent double spending possible. That's why it would make it possible to suppress cheating on online multiplayer games. And yes, the same technical building blocks can be used for DRM.
In a previous article (with quotes from ron rivest?), it was pointed out that the question is whether or not people will be able to control the signed code that runs on their machines.
If you need an official MS signature on the code, things like p2p networks probably aren't going to fly.
Unfortunately, the knee-jerk "MS is the devil" reaction hurts everyone. Technology that allows other people to trust information coming out of your machine is useful. This paper describes a good example of an application for that technology.
The problem is going to be in the details -- specifically, as rivest (I think) pointed out, whether or not you need an MS signature to load the code on your machine.
Instead of saying "palladium is evil", we should be pushing for comparatively open implementations. Any system that runs trusted code on my machine ought to be under my control and transparent. I ought to be able to decide what I want to run, and how that code will communicate with the rest of the world.
Unfortunately, that's not going to happen, because everyone is taking a simplistic view of the issue. No one is engaging MS seriously on this, and because of that they're going to deploy a system that's not under user control, and that's not transparent.
2. Will playing a biofeedback game teach you how to do things with your state of mind that are difficult to learn in other ways?
It's an intresting idea... the devil (or God) will be in the details, though.
SCO is the villain, not MS
on
Today's SCO News
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I've read lots of posts accusing MS of orchestrating this whole thing. I don't understand why people are so willing to believe that -- occam's razor leads us to a simpler explanation.
SCO is in bad shape. On the conference call the other day, they talked about web services, that's the actual product that they're going to try to sell. But what can they do that will stand up to.NET and Java? Maybe they've got something really incredible -- but it seems pretty unlikely to me.
Anyone who has ever had the misfortune to use SCO knows that it sucks when compared to Linux. Are they going to sell that?
They're in a bad position. They have to make money the best way that they can. This lawsuit seems to be an indication of where they think their best options lie.
Sure, when MS saw the lawsuit, they were filled with glee and they went out and bought a license. But that doesn't mean that they created the situation, that they planned it.
I really think the MS paranoia here tends to miss the point.
Has anyone looked at what SCO managers are doing with their stock?
When I hear stuff like this, I wonder if they're trying to push the price up so they can bail out.
I want to stress that I have no information that this is happening, and I'm not making any accusations. It's just the sort of thing I wonder about in situations like this.
You'd be surprised at what judges allow. The basic reality that litigation costs money, and that frivolous suits do a lot of damage to people hasn't really sunk in.
It's amazing, when you think about it, that there haven't been more lawsuits. Not because there are grounds for them, but because it's a convenient way to harass people.
The community needs to come up with a way to respond to this incident, and to other things like it.
If SCO ignores the German suit, how long will it take for them to be fined, and how big will the fine be?
If they produce documents in the German suit, will they be available in the US suit against IBM? Or can they stick to their original timetable for releasing docs here in the states?
It's amazing -- I didn't think it would be possible to dislike SCO any more than I did after I had to work on their OS a few years ago, but here we are. They pulled it off.
It sounds like you know a lot more about this than I do, but your point about the DB cache is exactly what I thought about when I read the article.
I used MS-SQL server for a web project. Our database wasn't huge, but it was bigger than the RAM on the server. Even so, it managed to cache most of what was important. We just threw RAM at the server, and let the cache take care of the rest. It worked pretty well.
In that case, the whole business was pretty much contained in the database -- losing the data would have probably put the company under. So we had to put a lot of thought into backups, and things like offsite replication. We worried more about making sure the data was protected than we did about performance.
So as an amateur DBA, that would be my main concern -- how does using a RAM based scheme impact my ability to protect the data?
Most people who study coding imagine that they'll work as a professional programmer, probably in a group of other programmers, on projects that are fairly big or well defined.
Many of the most successful small businesspeople I've known, though, have been people who knew their businesses very well, and had the ability to write code to automate what they were doing. Usually those guys are not great coders by geek standards, but their ability to just do something and make it work, without having to spec out a project, go through committees, spends tons of cash, etc., makes it possible for them to get things done.
Someone who was good at writing simple database applications, for example, could become indispensible very quickly in almost any small or medium sized business just by starting to crank out code that does useful stuff.
In general, I think that people who combine strong, but not totally elite, computer skills with real knowledge of specific industries can go a long way.
Cable company competition
on
TiVo Basic
·
· Score: 1
My cable company is advertising PVRs that they say start at $4.95/month, including the hardware. They're looking for pre-registration, and I'm not sure what you get, or if the price will hold once the service goes beyond the vapor stage.
I have a 20G archos jukebox, and I feel constrained by the size. 60G would be about right.
Also, I don't know about these other players, but the archos can be used as a USB 2.0 drive, so even if you didn't have enough music, you'd probably be able to use the space somehow.
As soon as my warranty expires, I'm going to see if I can replace the drive with something bigger.
What do you think about the durability of MPEG-2? I notice you said that MPEG-1 would last, and that MPEG-4 would probably turn out the same way, but you didn't say anything about MPEG-2.
I know (ie., I've read) that DivX5 and Xvid are both based on MPEG-4, as are some codecs that MS distributes, but I'm not sure I understand why they don't seem to interoperate, and how that affects durability. If I have Divx5 installed on a machine, it won't play Xvid encoded AVI files, and vice versa.
I don't know if the problem is that they're really incompatibile, or if it's a consequence of my creating.avi files instead of.mpg files, and the.avi format insisting on a certain codec.
I understand your points, and I really felt the same way before 9/11. And it's a hard thing to talk about, because the government seems to keep a lot of information from us.
But I wonder: why don't we see more terrorism here than we do? Why do other countries, who are far less involved in the rest of the world, see so much more? It's especially puzzling when you think about how open our society is -- it's easy to move around, to do whatever it is that you want to do.
Part of it, I think, is that people know that we will respond with overwhelming force. That's what happened to Afghanistan.
But part of it, I think, is the surveillance. I think it's a big part of it.
On the flip side, I don't see much of that information, the stuff they get by doing surveillance, showing up in everyday life. I know people who use drugs, who do unusual things sexually, who send emails back and forth criticizing the government and the president, etc. And nothing bad ever happens to them. Whoever is listening, if anyone is listening, isn't acting on that sort of stuff.
It seems to me that we have, as a practical matter, the freedom to do just about whatever we want. I say this because I know people who do all sorts of stuff, things that society disapproves of, even things that are illegal. And the system, such as it is, tolerates this.
The fear of surveillance is that it will produce a police state. I just don't see that we're living in a police state. I went to berlin and a couple of eastern bloc countries before the iron curtain came down, and this isn't like that. You can do what you want here.
On a practical level, I don't think there's any question that what we're giving up is more than paid for by what we get by the surveillance. The problems that I see with it are either (a) philosophical, or (b) fears about what might happen in the future, when the people running the system will probably be less scrupulous than they are now. The last thing, in particular, is a real problem for me.
It is really extraordinary, though, that the US can be as hated around the world as it is, that we can be as open as we are, even going so far as to have lots of the people who hate us living here, and that things are nonetheless quite safe.
My feeling is that we have to acknowledge that, on a certain level, before we start agitating. I'm not suggesting that things couldn't be better than they are -- just that before we talk about changing things, it makes sense to acknowledge the good things in the status quo, so as to make sure we don't inadvertently toss that stuff out when we make changes.
I really love the idea of opportunistic encryption, and I used to think that I'd like to see it added to email. Once people have exhcnaged mail with each other, all further traffic would be encrypted. This could be done in the clients, and wouldn't require any changes to the email infrastructure at all.
I know that there are lots of problems with it, mostly related to key management. It wouldn't be perfect security, it might not even be good security. But it's a lot better than plaintext.
What you'd want would be a way to take control of the keys when you thought it was necessary, an opportunistic system that would get the best key that it could find, but which would allow you to override whatever the opportunistic system would do on its own.
The problem I have with this now is that I'm not sure I oppose government surveillance any more. It's a horrible thing to say for someone who spent the early nineties lurking on cypherpunks. I think that they've been able to clamp down on terrorism pretty effectively, and I don't see much evidence that the power has been misused.
I'm getting old, and turning into one of those people I had contempt for -- a guy who is willing to trade freedom for security, and who deserves neither.
But I do think that from a technlogical standpoint, opportunistic encryption is the way to go. It's a great, clean, simple idea.
The most successful use of crypto for the general public is SSL on the web. It works because it's transparent, no one has to think about it. That's why opportunistic encryption rocks.
Perhaps -- and this is a real stretch -- what we really want is a whole new email system, one that's designed to be robust in the face of things like spam, and that includes things like encryption, etc. Dual protocol clients could "opportunistically" move communications from the old system to the new one totally transparently. After a few years, we could all turn off the old email protocol.
Opportunism is a great way to look at upgrading protocols.
We've all heard and experienced horror stories with ink jet printing.
But is there anyone selling a decent printer now that lets you refill the cartridges, a printer that's reliable, at a fair price?
I'm not talking about a printer that can compete on price with the subsized prices that the ones with the expensive cartridges go for -- just a printer that's priced fairly, and cartridges that are refillable without going broke.
Even a suggestion for old models to look for on ebay would be helpful.
That's a good point -- I don't dispute what you're saying.
But it's one thing to have this feature in the machines that make up a cluster that runs a big DB, and another thing to have it in every machine. The story said that MS is talking about putting it every version of windows, to help spread the technology's adoption.
Slashdot Mirror
What's going to happen when these countries who sell out finally get wired? What will they do for domains?
Gates can fire Ballamer, and Ballamer can't fire Gates.
Owning stock trumps a title.
Unless Wal-Mart can do something a lot better than Netflix, I'd be reluctant to switch.
Wal-Mart has been in the news recently for covering up Cosmopolitan magazine. Are they going to push movie suppliers for reedited versions of films, the way Blockbuster has done?
I know that most people won't look at it this way, and Wal-Mart is an 800-lb gorilla that will probably squash Netflix. But I can't imagine Wal-Mart's politics not getting in the way of their ability to do a good job in this business.
Doesn't this give companies with EU offices a competitive advantage?
If you're based in the US, you have to manage 15 different tax rates, and do 15 times as much paperwork. If you're based in the EU, you can use your local rate, and do it once instead of 15 times.
I had the same reaction -- Reiser didn't seem so far out of line to me.
Public key cryptography won't let me trust a calculation done on your computer.
It will let me know that your computer is willing to vouch for the result (ie., it's affixed the signature), but it requires me to trust your computer.
This is different. When I get a certain kind of signature from a trusted computing enabled machine, I know that a specific chunk of code produced the signature, and that it wasn't modified by you or your machine. That's the point.
That's why it would make spoofing p2p systems harder. That's why it would make offline digicash micropayment systems that prevent double spending possible. That's why it would make it possible to suppress cheating on online multiplayer games. And yes, the same technical building blocks can be used for DRM.
In a previous article (with quotes from ron rivest?), it was pointed out that the question is whether or not people will be able to control the signed code that runs on their machines.
If you need an official MS signature on the code, things like p2p networks probably aren't going to fly.
Unfortunately, the knee-jerk "MS is the devil" reaction hurts everyone. Technology that allows other people to trust information coming out of your machine is useful. This paper describes a good example of an application for that technology.
The problem is going to be in the details -- specifically, as rivest (I think) pointed out, whether or not you need an MS signature to load the code on your machine.
Instead of saying "palladium is evil", we should be pushing for comparatively open implementations. Any system that runs trusted code on my machine ought to be under my control and transparent. I ought to be able to decide what I want to run, and how that code will communicate with the rest of the world.
Unfortunately, that's not going to happen, because everyone is taking a simplistic view of the issue. No one is engaging MS seriously on this, and because of that they're going to deploy a system that's not under user control, and that's not transparent.
I don't think pollution is a problem for hydrogen engines -- they don't burn hydrocarbons.
1. Will the game be fun to play?
2. Will playing a biofeedback game teach you how to do things with your state of mind that are difficult to learn in other ways?
It's an intresting idea... the devil (or God) will be in the details, though.
I've read lots of posts accusing MS of orchestrating this whole thing. I don't understand why people are so willing to believe that -- occam's razor leads us to a simpler explanation.
.NET and Java? Maybe they've got something really incredible -- but it seems pretty unlikely to me.
SCO is in bad shape. On the conference call the other day, they talked about web services, that's the actual product that they're going to try to sell. But what can they do that will stand up to
Anyone who has ever had the misfortune to use SCO knows that it sucks when compared to Linux. Are they going to sell that?
They're in a bad position. They have to make money the best way that they can. This lawsuit seems to be an indication of where they think their best options lie.
Sure, when MS saw the lawsuit, they were filled with glee and they went out and bought a license. But that doesn't mean that they created the situation, that they planned it.
I really think the MS paranoia here tends to miss the point.
Has anyone looked at what SCO managers are doing with their stock?
When I hear stuff like this, I wonder if they're trying to push the price up so they can bail out.
I want to stress that I have no information that this is happening, and I'm not making any accusations. It's just the sort of thing I wonder about in situations like this.
You'd be surprised at what judges allow. The basic reality that litigation costs money, and that frivolous suits do a lot of damage to people hasn't really sunk in.
It's amazing, when you think about it, that there haven't been more lawsuits. Not because there are grounds for them, but because it's a convenient way to harass people.
The community needs to come up with a way to respond to this incident, and to other things like it.
If SCO ignores the German suit, how long will it take for them to be fined, and how big will the fine be?
If they produce documents in the German suit, will they be available in the US suit against IBM? Or can they stick to their original timetable for releasing docs here in the states?
It's amazing -- I didn't think it would be possible to dislike SCO any more than I did after I had to work on their OS a few years ago, but here we are. They pulled it off.
It sounds like you know a lot more about this than I do, but your point about the DB cache is exactly what I thought about when I read the article.
I used MS-SQL server for a web project. Our database wasn't huge, but it was bigger than the RAM on the server. Even so, it managed to cache most of what was important. We just threw RAM at the server, and let the cache take care of the rest. It worked pretty well.
In that case, the whole business was pretty much contained in the database -- losing the data would have probably put the company under. So we had to put a lot of thought into backups, and things like offsite replication. We worried more about making sure the data was protected than we did about performance.
So as an amateur DBA, that would be my main concern -- how does using a RAM based scheme impact my ability to protect the data?
Most people who study coding imagine that they'll work as a professional programmer, probably in a group of other programmers, on projects that are fairly big or well defined.
Many of the most successful small businesspeople I've known, though, have been people who knew their businesses very well, and had the ability to write code to automate what they were doing. Usually those guys are not great coders by geek standards, but their ability to just do something and make it work, without having to spec out a project, go through committees, spends tons of cash, etc., makes it possible for them to get things done.
Someone who was good at writing simple database applications, for example, could become indispensible very quickly in almost any small or medium sized business just by starting to crank out code that does useful stuff.
In general, I think that people who combine strong, but not totally elite, computer skills with real knowledge of specific industries can go a long way.
My cable company is advertising PVRs that they say start at $4.95/month, including the hardware. They're looking for pre-registration, and I'm not sure what you get, or if the price will hold once the service goes beyond the vapor stage.
I have a 20G archos jukebox, and I feel constrained by the size. 60G would be about right.
Also, I don't know about these other players, but the archos can be used as a USB 2.0 drive, so even if you didn't have enough music, you'd probably be able to use the space somehow.
As soon as my warranty expires, I'm going to see if I can replace the drive with something bigger.
What do you think about the durability of MPEG-2? I notice you said that MPEG-1 would last, and that MPEG-4 would probably turn out the same way, but you didn't say anything about MPEG-2.
.avi files instead of .mpg files, and the .avi format insisting on a certain codec.
I know (ie., I've read) that DivX5 and Xvid are both based on MPEG-4, as are some codecs that MS distributes, but I'm not sure I understand why they don't seem to interoperate, and how that affects durability. If I have Divx5 installed on a machine, it won't play Xvid encoded AVI files, and vice versa.
I don't know if the problem is that they're really incompatibile, or if it's a consequence of my creating
If you wanted to make video files that will have the best chance of being viewable in 10 or 20 years, what are the best file formats and codecs?
Are any file formats and codecs likely to be visible?
I understand your points, and I really felt the same way before 9/11. And it's a hard thing to talk about, because the government seems to keep a lot of information from us.
But I wonder: why don't we see more terrorism here than we do? Why do other countries, who are far less involved in the rest of the world, see so much more? It's especially puzzling when you think about how open our society is -- it's easy to move around, to do whatever it is that you want to do.
Part of it, I think, is that people know that we will respond with overwhelming force. That's what happened to Afghanistan.
But part of it, I think, is the surveillance. I think it's a big part of it.
On the flip side, I don't see much of that information, the stuff they get by doing surveillance, showing up in everyday life. I know people who use drugs, who do unusual things sexually, who send emails back and forth criticizing the government and the president, etc. And nothing bad ever happens to them. Whoever is listening, if anyone is listening, isn't acting on that sort of stuff.
It seems to me that we have, as a practical matter, the freedom to do just about whatever we want. I say this because I know people who do all sorts of stuff, things that society disapproves of, even things that are illegal. And the system, such as it is, tolerates this.
The fear of surveillance is that it will produce a police state. I just don't see that we're living in a police state. I went to berlin and a couple of eastern bloc countries before the iron curtain came down, and this isn't like that. You can do what you want here.
On a practical level, I don't think there's any question that what we're giving up is more than paid for by what we get by the surveillance. The problems that I see with it are either (a) philosophical, or (b) fears about what might happen in the future, when the people running the system will probably be less scrupulous than they are now. The last thing, in particular, is a real problem for me.
It is really extraordinary, though, that the US can be as hated around the world as it is, that we can be as open as we are, even going so far as to have lots of the people who hate us living here, and that things are nonetheless quite safe.
My feeling is that we have to acknowledge that, on a certain level, before we start agitating. I'm not suggesting that things couldn't be better than they are -- just that before we talk about changing things, it makes sense to acknowledge the good things in the status quo, so as to make sure we don't inadvertently toss that stuff out when we make changes.
I really love the idea of opportunistic encryption, and I used to think that I'd like to see it added to email. Once people have exhcnaged mail with each other, all further traffic would be encrypted. This could be done in the clients, and wouldn't require any changes to the email infrastructure at all.
I know that there are lots of problems with it, mostly related to key management. It wouldn't be perfect security, it might not even be good security. But it's a lot better than plaintext.
What you'd want would be a way to take control of the keys when you thought it was necessary, an opportunistic system that would get the best key that it could find, but which would allow you to override whatever the opportunistic system would do on its own.
The problem I have with this now is that I'm not sure I oppose government surveillance any more. It's a horrible thing to say for someone who spent the early nineties lurking on cypherpunks. I think that they've been able to clamp down on terrorism pretty effectively, and I don't see much evidence that the power has been misused.
I'm getting old, and turning into one of those people I had contempt for -- a guy who is willing to trade freedom for security, and who deserves neither.
But I do think that from a technlogical standpoint, opportunistic encryption is the way to go. It's a great, clean, simple idea.
The most successful use of crypto for the general public is SSL on the web. It works because it's transparent, no one has to think about it. That's why opportunistic encryption rocks.
Perhaps -- and this is a real stretch -- what we really want is a whole new email system, one that's designed to be robust in the face of things like spam, and that includes things like encryption, etc. Dual protocol clients could "opportunistically" move communications from the old system to the new one totally transparently. After a few years, we could all turn off the old email protocol.
Opportunism is a great way to look at upgrading protocols.
We've all heard and experienced horror stories with ink jet printing.
But is there anyone selling a decent printer now that lets you refill the cartridges, a printer that's reliable, at a fair price?
I'm not talking about a printer that can compete on price with the subsized prices that the ones with the expensive cartridges go for -- just a printer that's priced fairly, and cartridges that are refillable without going broke.
Even a suggestion for old models to look for on ebay would be helpful.
That's a good point -- I don't dispute what you're saying.
But it's one thing to have this feature in the machines that make up a cluster that runs a big DB, and another thing to have it in every machine. The story said that MS is talking about putting it every version of windows, to help spread the technology's adoption.
You hit the nail on the head -- the security implications of this are staggering.
And doesn't tcp/ip involve a lot of overhead for memory access?
He should form a company to sell the machine that generated the reality distortion field he used on his investors.