I'm fascinated by your comments because my views are similar to the grand parent.
So you have killer OTA HDTV.
But I don't see what's so *great* about having more when it generally means a plethora of re-runs, mundane cooking shows, and an automatic nipple of crap for kids to suck on.
Is it the whole watercooler, "Did you see show XYZ last night?" thing?
I pay $40/month for vaguely improved internet connection. If you put the difference between my 40/month bill and your total cable bill in the bank at the end of a few years, the savings look pretty good.
-Maybe they have trademarked the word and process for databases? -HR would never speak "they who must not be named" word. -Corporation has a policy specifically forbidding the use of the word. -Sales thinks they are a customer, but HR has forbidden the word be spoken, so they use the phrase "negotiation organization" instead.
Is setting up comcast customer accounts and then placing a number of calls to others a good enough test?
If fellow/.er's come up with a well designed test that can definitively confirm/deny the claim, then I'll provide a small number of SIP (not vonage) accounts to the test pool.
I have an opeser server that I'm still working out basic service issues on. It turns out that different firewalls/routers/whatever impact sip service differently.
The same problem experienced by many different users, (My SIP phone doesn't work) has many different solutions depending on their network set up. This would very easily be way outside the usual scripted tech support.
Now, there's some skype magic that resolves all of this, but I just wonder if their magic doesn't work in every instance.
The encryption for sip is already moving forward using Transport Layer Security over port 5061.
I imagine there are already commercial sip servers that can implement an encrypted call. I don't know how many clients beside maybe shtoom can do the call.
It's very easy to slam Microsoft but the sad truth is:
-The marketing dollars spent to promote this new case study in mediocrity will far outweigh any objective assessment of the product. -Every magazine that can possibly figure out a way to cover the launch will and Microsoft will reward them handsomely with ad revenue, "fact finding" trips to Microsoft events in holiday places. -Many people and corporations will go out and get a new pc with Vista. They'll do it for no reason other than "it's new." -I for one, welcome the new OS. My desktop support queue will remain steady.
I'll say it again. Microsoft positioning itself to be the one that captures the wealth (dollars) from the rise of Linux. One way is to borrow nifty *nix features and make the consumer pay for them. Guess what? One less Linux convert.
Someone at Terry Semel's office is going to rat the poor bastard out for speaking his mind. The guy should start looking now because *if* he makes it to another review, it won't be pretty.
There goes those damn computer nerds spoiling the Industry. Well, it ain't gonna happen at Yahoo. That's for sure.
Is retailers have their biggest quarter in the fall. This works to Sony's advantage by maintaining the dominant negotiation position.
I'd guess the retailers are getting the entire PS3 show in June/July. If there is an enterprising individual willing to incur the wrath of Sony and probably jeapordize a career, your opportunity at a "scoop" would be around that time.
but as the telcos lose their traditional phone customers to VoIP, a normal phone line will just get more and more expensive.
Last time I looked, it was telcos owning the wire to your, and millions of other homes.
Even if telcos have to invent reasons for you to keep your phone wires (and they will) they most certainly will not go quietly into the night.
As someone that moonlights tech support for home users I had an especially bad experience in one home with two computers on AOL dsl. They called me because one machine was slow for a while then stopped getting on the Internet. After a wipe and reinstall the PC refused to get on AOL. Tech support hung up on me. I ended up using a miserable hack to get it all to work.
On the other end of the spectrum is my Dad who likes AOL(!) Thank god for penggy. I'm sure there are very many users like my Dad who find AOL quite satisfactory.
What I'd love to know: Are the infrastructure costs of dialup higher than DSL for an ISP? I don't see the wisdom of driving everyone onto broadband.
Why is DHS the one that is playing enforcer here? How does policing corporations in private fit into their responsibilities of providing homeland security?
With computer crimes there's some kind of investigation from local and federal law enforcement (FBI maybe?) and maybe a public hearing or two to give the appearance to voters that something is going to be done.
Please point out the obvious here because I'm missing it.
Let's break it down into smaller parts to see where this post goes wrong in so many ways. The only question of any real importance is "Did the government create this monopoly?"
Monopolies appear in all markets without any interference from gov't. In fact, Gov't has wisely decided that they are bad and frown on overt unfair practices.
There is no way to uniquely define "monopoly prices" or "monopoly behavior" Yes, there most certainly is. Among other things, monopoly is not a "price taker" but a "price maker." So, a "monopoly price" is the price the monopoly tells everyone they must pay. And "monopoly behavior" can also be defined but I won't because this isn't a community college.
they become less efficient, a competitor will eventually arise Wrong again. There is NO competitor in a monopolized market. If you mean something else, then you are not talking about a monopoly market.
The rest of what you are saying doesn't make any sense.
I urge you to review the basics of Economics and use the knowledge with more precision and an awareness of the responsibility you have to influence others.
An ID card has nothing in common with a credit card
Absolutely untrue. They would both share very similar infrastructure to make and manage. There's no way a nation-state would start from scratch. There is too much risk and no card manufacturers to build something brand-new and "better." Different rules will be in place as far as handling data, but they'll make the software "fit" the public entitiy need in those cases.
don't give a damn about what you look like, your finger prints or the colour of your eyes. A nation-state doesn't care either. Your biometric identification is far better than the primitive hair/eyes descriptions. Again, what's so different than what they are already doing? Give me a clue here.
The CCCs don't have vast amounts of tax information and criminal records. In both instances if an entity with the authority to review both will do so if they deem it necessary. And they've done this for as long as the records have been generated/kept. What's different about giving everyone a shiny new card? It doesn't change anything they have already been doing.
I'm not sure what anyone gets out of the "oh no!" posts that are generated with these articles.
Information about your private activities is already for sale to most public agencies. Now they want to give you a shiny card with biometric authentication. What's changed?
You are missing the opportunity to buy new SIP compatible network hardware that so many hardware companies want to sell to you!
Of course, the software vendors want you to use their STUN and probably their 2006 version "SIP compatible" firewall.
Port 5060 appears to be the standard port to open. It's not clear to me if you open it for tcp/ip and udp or one instead of the other. I would prefer it to open dynamically, but haven't looked into it enough on my setup.
Can someone tell me if skype is generating profits?
1. I'm not sure why this is an issue. It's been happening for quite a while in one form or another. Doesn't anyone wonder where these personal data companies get their largest customers?
2. Articles like this assume the gov't entities are super-functional and actually do something with this data. They'll catch a few more of the dumbest criminals and that's about it. It's flushing money down a toilet building giant datacenters storing petabytes+ of information.
3. All the "oh no's!" from/.'ers and absolutely nothing will change. No one will take any action. Americans could (and do) change rules and regulations when the will is there. No will = no change.
There is at least one viable alternative to windows.
Apple Macs (many people don't feel comfortable unless they pay for it) Multiple Linux Distros(suse's commercial desktop OS version is my preferred) Multiple BSDs (freebsd is nice, a little feedback on pcbsd would be welcome)
There are three right there.
I'm not sure why anyone -needs- windows any more. If you tell me your enterprise application needs IE for XYorZ, then that's a specialized legacy problem. For the 80% of desktop users, I'd say they would do just fine in an alternative desktop.
It implies that the rich would want to keep *everyone* who isn't already rich down, regardless of race or sex.
Correct. I would say that race/gender biases are a kind of collateral damage to more powerful class issues.
Despite the painfully obvious, Americans are taught to view their society as classless and reinforce that by selling the "land of opportunity through your own hard work."
Try going here [opensource.org] sometime and looking through all of the licenses which Stallman not only had no part in authoring, but which he also would actually say are not "GPL compatible."
This is exactly the kind of confusion that will weaken the definition of OSS without an RMS enforcing the ideal. "Surviving on it's own" generates additional confusion.
Your comments regarding the U.S. are a perfect example of how OSS can be distorted into something else, contrary to the original intention. You aren't giving RMS enough credit for understanding and reinforcing the psychology.
then they'd only hire the most effective, efficient people possible This is some kind of philisophical ideal that has no analog in the real world. In the real world, the task definition (work) can be reasonably performed by children at the lowest possible dollar per hour. (MCSE?)
and based on demographics, that would disporportionately result in the hiring of minorities and recent immigrants. The social implications of what you advocate results in a slave-labor class. Below managerial staff, my Walmart store is the picture of diversity. Once across some salaried threshold though, the ethnic composition changes radically. This is intentional. In the real world, the owners of any amount of wealth discourage competition and social mobility.
How, in your view, does discrimination help a large corporation actually make a buck? Hire women because I can consistently pay them less for similar work. Keep my workers poor so they can't ejudicate my labor wrong-doings. Better still, outsource labor (and indemnify the company!) to the lowest bidder and let the lowest bidder be the one who is prosecuted for labor regs infractions. There's millions of ways to exploit the system to improve a profit scenario.
Child labor and slavery are active global markets (with people buying and selling other people) with many consumers for this reason. While this is easy an easy example that provokes outrage, the mechanism is the same. Implement some policy backed up by some legislation to encourage "better" practices.
What you fail to see is a near-term future where the good intentions of the GPL are exploited and morphed into something that closely resembles non-free software.
Let me give you an example: In the past, a national standard for labeling products "organic" was passed. It was a pretty strict definition and it got the FDA to codify organic.
The same idea applies 1-to-1 to OSS. Tivo's software is one example of how the OSS ideal was distorted. If RMS is not out there as an idealogical enforcer, then OSS becomes meaningless as soon as clever people exploit it some more.
If you don't agree with me on that point, I think it is easy to agree with this statement: Every cause needs a controversial figure to generate "buzz."
find and destroy RFID's inside the paper I believe it's a pretty simple. I will leave it up to fellow/.'ers to fill it in.
or worse yet, duplicate its data This is much harder to do. Normally the tags are pretty dumb, they have a hard-coded serial number and that's about it. My understanding is changing it after manufacture is not feasible. Is it possible? Probably. I think there are easier weaknesses to attack though. Social engineering comes to mind.
If they do a little more than just store a number, then it will only be a matter of time before those security methods are defeated.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm fascinated by your comments because my views are similar to the grand parent.
So you have killer OTA HDTV.
But I don't see what's so *great* about having more when it generally means a plethora of re-runs, mundane cooking shows, and an automatic nipple of crap for kids to suck on.
Is it the whole watercooler, "Did you see show XYZ last night?" thing?
I pay $40/month for vaguely improved internet connection. If you put the difference between my 40/month bill and your total cable bill in the bank at the end of a few years, the savings look pretty good.
Where's the value for you?
I could see how this could happen:
-Maybe they have trademarked the word and process for databases?
-HR would never speak "they who must not be named" word.
-Corporation has a policy specifically forbidding the use of the word.
-Sales thinks they are a customer, but HR has forbidden the word be spoken, so they use the phrase "negotiation organization" instead.
It seems quite logical now....
I would like to test the claim.
/.er's come up with a well designed test that can definitively confirm/deny the claim, then I'll provide a small number of SIP (not vonage) accounts to the test pool.
Is setting up comcast customer accounts and then placing a number of calls to others a good enough test?
If fellow
I have an opeser server that I'm still working out basic service issues on. It turns out that different firewalls/routers/whatever impact sip service differently.
The same problem experienced by many different users, (My SIP phone doesn't work) has many different solutions depending on their network set up. This would very easily be way outside the usual scripted tech support.
Now, there's some skype magic that resolves all of this, but I just wonder if their magic doesn't work in every instance.
The encryption for sip is already moving forward using Transport Layer Security over port 5061.
I imagine there are already commercial sip servers that can implement an encrypted call. I don't know how many clients beside maybe shtoom can do the call.
It's very easy to slam Microsoft but the sad truth is:
-The marketing dollars spent to promote this new case study in mediocrity will far outweigh any objective assessment of the product.
-Every magazine that can possibly figure out a way to cover the launch will and Microsoft will reward them handsomely with ad revenue, "fact finding" trips to Microsoft events in holiday places.
-Many people and corporations will go out and get a new pc with Vista. They'll do it for no reason other than "it's new."
-I for one, welcome the new OS. My desktop support queue will remain steady.
I'll say it again. Microsoft positioning itself to be the one that captures the wealth (dollars) from the rise of Linux. One way is to borrow nifty *nix features and make the consumer pay for them. Guess what? One less Linux convert.
Someone at Terry Semel's office is going to rat the poor bastard out for speaking his mind. The guy should start looking now because *if* he makes it to another review, it won't be pretty.
There goes those damn computer nerds spoiling the Industry. Well, it ain't gonna happen at Yahoo. That's for sure.
Is retailers have their biggest quarter in the fall. This works to Sony's advantage by maintaining the dominant negotiation position.
I'd guess the retailers are getting the entire PS3 show in June/July. If there is an enterprising individual willing to incur the wrath of Sony and probably jeapordize a career, your opportunity at a "scoop" would be around that time.
but as the telcos lose their traditional phone customers to VoIP, a normal phone line will just get more and more expensive.
Last time I looked, it was telcos owning the wire to your, and millions of other homes.
Even if telcos have to invent reasons for you to keep your phone wires (and they will) they most certainly will not go quietly into the night.
As someone that moonlights tech support for home users I had an especially bad experience in one home with two computers on AOL dsl. They called me because one machine was slow for a while then stopped getting on the Internet. After a wipe and reinstall the PC refused to get on AOL. Tech support hung up on me. I ended up using a miserable hack to get it all to work.
On the other end of the spectrum is my Dad who likes AOL(!) Thank god for penggy. I'm sure there are very many users like my Dad who find AOL quite satisfactory.
What I'd love to know:
Are the infrastructure costs of dialup higher than DSL for an ISP? I don't see the wisdom of driving everyone onto broadband.
Let's check the facts:
Microsoft has a VERY large and very well-developed office suite that connects quite elegantly to a bunch of Microsoft's back office software.
So these start-ups are going to usurp that somehow?
Also, some people love to lease cars, but when it comes to software, I don't see it happening so much.
What they may do is fill some very small gap.
Why is DHS the one that is playing enforcer here? How does policing corporations in private fit into their responsibilities of providing homeland security?
With computer crimes there's some kind of investigation from local and federal law enforcement (FBI maybe?) and maybe a public hearing or two to give the appearance to voters that something is going to be done.
Please point out the obvious here because I'm missing it.
Dvorak has to get off the halucinogens.
/.ing. Just move right along.
This article is not deserving of a
Let's break it down into smaller parts to see where this post goes wrong in so many ways.
The only question of any real importance is "Did the government create this monopoly?"
Monopolies appear in all markets without any interference from gov't. In fact, Gov't has wisely decided that they are bad and frown on overt unfair practices.
There is no way to uniquely define "monopoly prices" or "monopoly behavior"
Yes, there most certainly is. Among other things, monopoly is not a "price taker" but a "price maker." So, a "monopoly price" is the price the monopoly tells everyone they must pay. And "monopoly behavior" can also be defined but I won't because this isn't a community college.
they become less efficient, a competitor will eventually arise
Wrong again. There is NO competitor in a monopolized market. If you mean something else, then you are not talking about a monopoly market.
The rest of what you are saying doesn't make any sense.
I urge you to review the basics of Economics and use the knowledge with more precision and an awareness of the responsibility you have to influence others.
An ID card has nothing in common with a credit card
Absolutely untrue. They would both share very similar infrastructure to make and manage. There's no way a nation-state would start from scratch. There is too much risk and no card manufacturers to build something brand-new and "better." Different rules will be in place as far as handling data, but they'll make the software "fit" the public entitiy need in those cases.
Enrolling is very different.
don't give a damn about what you look like, your finger prints or the colour of your eyes.
A nation-state doesn't care either. Your biometric identification is far better than the primitive hair/eyes descriptions. Again, what's so different than what they are already doing? Give me a clue here.
The CCCs don't have vast amounts of tax information and criminal records.
In both instances if an entity with the authority to review both will do so if they deem it necessary. And they've done this for as long as the records have been generated/kept. What's different about giving everyone a shiny new card? It doesn't change anything they have already been doing.
There is already a large industry that can produce this kind of volume.
Do you own a debit/credit card? One of their worst-case-scenarios they manage well at a gigantic scale is identical cards in the field.
They've got the software to manage them all too.
Done.
Parent is right on.
I'm not sure what anyone gets out of the "oh no!" posts that are generated with these articles.
Information about your private activities is already for sale to most public agencies. Now they want to give you a shiny card with biometric authentication. What's changed?
You are missing the opportunity to buy new SIP compatible network hardware that so many hardware companies want to sell to you!
Of course, the software vendors want you to use their STUN and probably their 2006 version "SIP compatible" firewall.
Port 5060 appears to be the standard port to open. It's not clear to me if you open it for tcp/ip and udp or one instead of the other. I would prefer it to open dynamically, but haven't looked into it enough on my setup.
Can someone tell me if skype is generating profits?
Water is wet and the sun rises in the east.
/.'ers and absolutely nothing will change. No one will take any action. Americans could (and do) change rules and regulations when the will is there. No will = no change.
1. I'm not sure why this is an issue. It's been happening for quite a while in one form or another. Doesn't anyone wonder where these personal data companies get their largest customers?
2. Articles like this assume the gov't entities are super-functional and actually do something with this data. They'll catch a few more of the dumbest criminals and that's about it. It's flushing money down a toilet building giant datacenters storing petabytes+ of information.
3. All the "oh no's!" from
There is at least one viable alternative to windows.
Apple Macs (many people don't feel comfortable unless they pay for it)
Multiple Linux Distros(suse's commercial desktop OS version is my preferred)
Multiple BSDs (freebsd is nice, a little feedback on pcbsd would be welcome)
There are three right there.
I'm not sure why anyone -needs- windows any more. If you tell me your enterprise application needs IE for XYorZ, then that's a specialized legacy problem. For the 80% of desktop users, I'd say they would do just fine in an alternative desktop.
Loosen up, change is good.
It implies that the rich would want to keep *everyone* who isn't already rich down, regardless of race or sex.
Correct. I would say that race/gender biases are a kind of collateral damage to more powerful class issues.
Despite the painfully obvious, Americans are taught to view their society as classless and reinforce that by selling the "land of opportunity through your own hard work."
Try going here [opensource.org] sometime and looking through all of the licenses which Stallman not only had no part in authoring, but which he also would actually say are not "GPL compatible."
This is exactly the kind of confusion that will weaken the definition of OSS without an RMS enforcing the ideal. "Surviving on it's own" generates additional confusion.
Your comments regarding the U.S. are a perfect example of how OSS can be distorted into something else, contrary to the original intention. You aren't giving RMS enough credit for understanding and reinforcing the psychology.
then they'd only hire the most effective, efficient people possible
This is some kind of philisophical ideal that has no analog in the real world.
In the real world, the task definition (work) can be reasonably performed by children at the lowest possible dollar per hour. (MCSE?)
and based on demographics, that would disporportionately result in the hiring of minorities and recent immigrants.
The social implications of what you advocate results in a slave-labor class. Below managerial staff, my Walmart store is the picture of diversity. Once across some salaried threshold though, the ethnic composition changes radically. This is intentional. In the real world, the owners of any amount of wealth discourage competition and social mobility.
How, in your view, does discrimination help a large corporation actually make a buck?
Hire women because I can consistently pay them less for similar work. Keep my workers poor so they can't ejudicate my labor wrong-doings. Better still, outsource labor (and indemnify the company!) to the lowest bidder and let the lowest bidder be the one who is prosecuted for labor regs infractions. There's millions of ways to exploit the system to improve a profit scenario.
Child labor and slavery are active global markets (with people buying and selling other people) with many consumers for this reason. While this is easy an easy example that provokes outrage, the mechanism is the same. Implement some policy backed up by some legislation to encourage "better" practices.
What you fail to see is a near-term future where the good intentions of the GPL are exploited and morphed into something that closely resembles non-free software.
h ronicle/archive/2004/05/22/MNGMT6QD0H1.DTL
Let me give you an example:
In the past, a national standard for labeling products "organic" was passed. It was a pretty strict definition and it got the FDA to codify organic.
Recently, nearly all of the growth in the food industry has come from "organic" products. So the non-organic industry starts modifying the rules and regulations so they can compete. Here's a very nice summary:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c
The same idea applies 1-to-1 to OSS. Tivo's software is one example of how the OSS ideal was distorted. If RMS is not out there as an idealogical enforcer, then OSS becomes meaningless as soon as clever people exploit it some more.
If you don't agree with me on that point, I think it is easy to agree with this statement: Every cause needs a controversial figure to generate "buzz."
find and destroy RFID's inside the paper /.'ers to fill it in.
I believe it's a pretty simple. I will leave it up to fellow
or worse yet, duplicate its data
This is much harder to do. Normally the tags are pretty dumb, they have a hard-coded serial number and that's about it. My understanding is changing it after manufacture is not feasible. Is it possible? Probably. I think there are easier weaknesses to attack though. Social engineering comes to mind.
If they do a little more than just store a number, then it will only be a matter of time before those security methods are defeated.