Apparently these people didn't finish business school. If you're trying to get away with pushing spyware, it's probably best not to put the words "con" and "spy" in your company name.
The fight against DRM cannot be won. Visions of a future where media companies and other copyright holders kowtow to consumer demand and release all of their content in an unprotected format to be infinitely copied are ludicrous. The only reason this occurs now is due to the consumer technology gap. If I buy a Britney Spears CD, it has to work in the CD player I bought in 1990. Companies can't implement any real DRM without breaking backwards compatibility.
Expect this to change, soon. Your content will be encrypted at the source and will only be decrypted by the hardware, at the last possible phase, using your personal key and with proper authorization from the license server. As long as we put copyright law on the books, technology will be developed to allow it to be enforced. Live with it.
"The kind of spacecraft we've talked about could move an asteroid 650 feet (200 meters) across provided we have decades of advanced warning,"
Neat... although, if this works, it will totally kill the Hollywood "asteroid catastrophe" genre. The concept of sitting a giant hunk of metal next to an asteroid for 20 years to gradually shift its path doesn't exactly make for fast-paced, high-tension action movie fare.
Mobile audio and mobile video are two different worlds. If you have a high quality audio file and a good pair of headphones, a mobile audio player can deliver a virtually perfect listening experience, anywhere. On top of that, you can multitask with an audio player. I can lull myself into a good coding mood listening to Garbage, load up some podcasts for the drive to work, or make a running playlist where the BPM of each song synches up with my feet hitting the ground; it's a beautiful synergy.
Video is nothing like this. I can't watch a TV show while I'm driving, exercising or working. More so, the immersion experience is relative to the size of the screen. No matter how big your TV screen is, you'd like to be watching a bigger one. If your screen is only a few inches large, I would guess that this distraction would be constant. Yes, Apple sold a million videos in no time flat, but I think this is just novelty. Apple's teeming hordes will buy any new iPod that comes out, and everyone who bought a video iPod probably purchased at least one video to try it out. We'll see if the trend continues.
Saying that mobile video is "Not Yet There" implies that the natural progression of technology will eventually make it more compelling. I disagree. Any TV screen that fits in your pocket will always be too small to be enjoyable, and it's very difficult to multitask when something requires both your eyes and ears. Mobile video will never be as ubiquitous as mobile audio is today.
For a company that has been teetering on the brink of obsolescence for some time now, this is great news. Like the iPod, TiVo's real edge over its competitors comes from their spectacular user interface design. Even the most non-technical of my friends and family are able to figure out TiVo easily, and the remote is a triumph of engineering. Generic DVRs are killing them, though. As a Comcast subscriber, I am granted the deep displeasure of occasionally having to use their remote and their menus. I pity those who have to use Comcast's DVR as well.
TiVo is not only a well-designed product, it's an undervalued entity. TiVo has a smart, net-connected box in the living room; this is where every media company wants to be. I'm surprised it's taken this long for a big company to get in on the action. My TiVo ought to be downloading trailers for every movie in theaters, displaying show times, and letting me buy the ticket. It should be aggregating my RSS feeds. It should have an embedded BitTorrent client that downloads the latest video feed of This Week In Tech. When I watch an episode of The Simpsons from Now Playing, there should be a link to buy the DVD box set from Amazon. The only way TiVo will survive is by embracing convergence concepts. Hopefully this partnership with Yahoo! is the first step in this direction.
This sounds like a flimsy excuse to ask for a private office. If your network administrator needs to work in a locked room all day, your network is not secure enough!
Passwords should not be found on post-it notes stuck to your monitor, nor should they be saved on your computer, anywhere. Don't keep them in text files, emails, IM history, cookies, etc. Passwords should be memorized or written down in your wallet, or better yet, your company should implement a security token system and do away with static passwords. Any sensitive data which has to be stored should be encrypted. Any workstations or servers at your desk should be locked when you walk away.
Shoulder-surfing for passwords is extremely hard. Try it sometime: at 80 WPM or more, it's virtually impossible to follow and remember every keystroke, especially while trying to be inconspicuous. As for keyloggers, server theft and more serious security breaches, these should be dealt with proactively at a lower level. Screen potential employees carefully, and keep security cameras rolling throughout the office to discourage suspicious behavior.
Games like Shadow of the Colossus are what really make me excited about next-generation consoles.
Yes, it's a work of art. Yes, the landscapes and the colossi are absolutely stunning. But the choppy framerate detracts from the great view. Terrain renders moments before you're walking on it, and characters are noticeably pixelated. When Resident Evil 4 was ported from the Gamecube to the PS2, the main character's polygon count had to be cut from 10,000 to 5,000 to support the hardware. Can you imagine if these Colossi had 10,000 polygons, or 20,000, or 50,000?
I'm not complaining; I love this game. But I can't help feeling that the creators' artist vision was constrained by the technical limitations of the hardware. Xbox 360 and PS3 games will not be better than their predecessors by simple virtue of the fact that there's more power under the hood. However, for great, ambitious games like this one, the less game designers have to worry about what the hardware is capable of, the closer we will get to the kind of epic, cinematic experiences they envisioned.
Two features make the iPod a killer app for me: the scroll wheel, and smart playlists.
Simple as it may seem, the scroll wheel is possibly the most ingenious user interface mechanism of the past 10 years. I can pull up a list of 500 artists on my iPod and navigate to any one in a matter of seconds. Apple's patent on this design virtually ensures that every "iPod killer" will end up as "roadkill".
iTunes, on the other hand, can be copied. Apple's player is great at managing very large music libraries (10,000+ songs). Apple's Smart Playlists are as close as any software gets to letting me run SQL queries on my music library to generate playlists. I form playlists based on the play count and rating. So far, I haven't found any other music library manager that lets me get this specific, this granular with my collection.
New York businesses that rely on telecommuters will pay for this, one way or another. They will either lose prospective employees due to the double-taxation, or they will have to offer higher salaries to compensate, which means more money flowing out of New York into other states. From an economic perspective, enforcing this is not going to benefit New York.
If we're arguing that MXS didn't write the VX30 codec, but rather lifted it from an open-source project, the first step is figuring out the orgin. How many mature, open-source codecs are out there? XviD is the only one that comes to mind...
Personally, I can't get into indie podcasts due to the typically poor production values. There are a lot of insightful podcasters that could be developing a real audience if they would just buy a high quality mic.
One more company trying to charge you for downloading pirated content. How is this newsworthy? Google excludes binaries from Groups because most binaries are porn and warez. They're clearly capable of the video indexing as well. This is just old technology put to illicit use.
I have no doubt that hardcore PC gamers will shell out the cash for these, regardless of the cost/performance ratio. Once you start paying $500+ for a graphics card, all rational decision making skills are lost.
As entrepreneurs go, Richter is scummy and opportunistic, but spammers come a lot worse. Richter at least made an attempt to operate openly and within a feasible interpretation of the law, instead of setting up shop in China and exploiting zombie networks distribute his spam.
From a legal standpoint, this is a nice victory for Microsoft. I hope they achieve their deterrent effect by making the financial incentives to spam more dubious. I'm afraid, though, that they will only succeed in driving hardcore spammers deeper underground, with Richter serving as an example of the dangers of treating your spam operation like a legitimate business.
What's the harm in competition here? The wireless spectrum is finite; it's in our interest to kick around technologies until we can agree on one that's the cleanest, most efficient use of the space available.
A good first step would be to shut off analog TV and radio. That bandwidth is too valuable for us to just sit on.
I was a NetFlix subscriber for about two years, because they were the best of what was around. Recently, I switched to Blockbuster's in-store unlimited rentals, because it could give me something that NetFlix couldn't: instant gratification.
I am fickle. With NetFlix, I too frequently found a DVD in my mailbox that I felt like watching 3 days ago. Being able to pick out a movie and be watching it 20 minutes later really makes a world of difference.
Perhaps NetFlix will go one better. With movie downloads just around the bend, it appears that they're taking innovation and competition in their industry very seriously. Amazon may have the inventory and distribution architecture to easily catapult themselves into the market, but if they don't have anything more interesting than DVDs-by-mail on the horizon, they may quickly find themselves left behind.
College is quite different. Dorm room space is at a premium, and there's an expectation that you will be toting your laptop on campus.
Middle-schoolers carrying laptops around would be a nightmare. If a kid's laptop isn't broken when hurled to the ground underneath a bag of books, it will be stolen, or accidentally left behind somewhere.
While the effort is admirable, getting too bent out of shape over the space shuttle's emissions is a little myopic. Weighed against all of the benefits and advancements we've gleaned from the space program, I'd say the environmental impact is pretty negligible. The article itself suggests that the damage to wildlife from hydrochloric acid deposits is "minimal and manageable".
I can't imagine that the costs of upgrading a $1.7 billion shuttle to make NASA's once-in-a-blue-moon launches more earth-friendly will be reasonable for taxpayers. Environmentalists looking for something to complain about should have no trouble finding a better outlet for their ire in corporate America than at NASA.
Personally, I think a "per employee" method makes more sense than a "percentage of revenue" method. Ask yourself what technology each user needs in order to do their jobs. If you put everyone on old, crappy hardware, it'll cost you in terms of productivity, maintenance and replacement. OTOH, giving everyone flat-panel monitors will probably cost you more in hardware than you will gain in productivity. Find the balance.
Also, be sure you're considering the total cost of ownership when you turn in your budget. Workstation support, maintenance, repair, network installation and maintenance, connectivity costs, consumables (toner & ink, etc.).
If the human race has any sense of responsibility, we'll blow up the earth before letting our kudzu escape to other planets. That stuff's worse than the Flood!
Slashdot Mirror
Non-alphanumeric characters in domain names, so we can finally get it over with and start typing http:///..org
Shake's 12 minute commercial for Boost Mobile!
OK, so they were taking a shot at product placement in TV shows, but still, damn. I hope everyone at Williams Street got some free phones.
Apparently these people didn't finish business school. If you're trying to get away with pushing spyware, it's probably best not to put the words "con" and "spy" in your company name.
The fight against DRM cannot be won. Visions of a future where media companies and other copyright holders kowtow to consumer demand and release all of their content in an unprotected format to be infinitely copied are ludicrous. The only reason this occurs now is due to the consumer technology gap. If I buy a Britney Spears CD, it has to work in the CD player I bought in 1990. Companies can't implement any real DRM without breaking backwards compatibility.
Expect this to change, soon. Your content will be encrypted at the source and will only be decrypted by the hardware, at the last possible phase, using your personal key and with proper authorization from the license server. As long as we put copyright law on the books, technology will be developed to allow it to be enforced. Live with it.
"The kind of spacecraft we've talked about could move an asteroid 650 feet (200 meters) across provided we have decades of advanced warning,"
Neat... although, if this works, it will totally kill the Hollywood "asteroid catastrophe" genre. The concept of sitting a giant hunk of metal next to an asteroid for 20 years to gradually shift its path doesn't exactly make for fast-paced, high-tension action movie fare.
Mobile audio and mobile video are two different worlds. If you have a high quality audio file and a good pair of headphones, a mobile audio player can deliver a virtually perfect listening experience, anywhere. On top of that, you can multitask with an audio player. I can lull myself into a good coding mood listening to Garbage, load up some podcasts for the drive to work, or make a running playlist where the BPM of each song synches up with my feet hitting the ground; it's a beautiful synergy.
Video is nothing like this. I can't watch a TV show while I'm driving, exercising or working. More so, the immersion experience is relative to the size of the screen. No matter how big your TV screen is, you'd like to be watching a bigger one. If your screen is only a few inches large, I would guess that this distraction would be constant. Yes, Apple sold a million videos in no time flat, but I think this is just novelty. Apple's teeming hordes will buy any new iPod that comes out, and everyone who bought a video iPod probably purchased at least one video to try it out. We'll see if the trend continues.
Saying that mobile video is "Not Yet There" implies that the natural progression of technology will eventually make it more compelling. I disagree. Any TV screen that fits in your pocket will always be too small to be enjoyable, and it's very difficult to multitask when something requires both your eyes and ears. Mobile video will never be as ubiquitous as mobile audio is today.
For a company that has been teetering on the brink of obsolescence for some time now, this is great news. Like the iPod, TiVo's real edge over its competitors comes from their spectacular user interface design. Even the most non-technical of my friends and family are able to figure out TiVo easily, and the remote is a triumph of engineering. Generic DVRs are killing them, though. As a Comcast subscriber, I am granted the deep displeasure of occasionally having to use their remote and their menus. I pity those who have to use Comcast's DVR as well.
TiVo is not only a well-designed product, it's an undervalued entity. TiVo has a smart, net-connected box in the living room; this is where every media company wants to be. I'm surprised it's taken this long for a big company to get in on the action. My TiVo ought to be downloading trailers for every movie in theaters, displaying show times, and letting me buy the ticket. It should be aggregating my RSS feeds. It should have an embedded BitTorrent client that downloads the latest video feed of This Week In Tech. When I watch an episode of The Simpsons from Now Playing, there should be a link to buy the DVD box set from Amazon. The only way TiVo will survive is by embracing convergence concepts. Hopefully this partnership with Yahoo! is the first step in this direction.
This sounds like a flimsy excuse to ask for a private office. If your network administrator needs to work in a locked room all day, your network is not secure enough!
Passwords should not be found on post-it notes stuck to your monitor, nor should they be saved on your computer, anywhere. Don't keep them in text files, emails, IM history, cookies, etc. Passwords should be memorized or written down in your wallet, or better yet, your company should implement a security token system and do away with static passwords. Any sensitive data which has to be stored should be encrypted. Any workstations or servers at your desk should be locked when you walk away.
Shoulder-surfing for passwords is extremely hard. Try it sometime: at 80 WPM or more, it's virtually impossible to follow and remember every keystroke, especially while trying to be inconspicuous. As for keyloggers, server theft and more serious security breaches, these should be dealt with proactively at a lower level. Screen potential employees carefully, and keep security cameras rolling throughout the office to discourage suspicious behavior.
Games like Shadow of the Colossus are what really make me excited about next-generation consoles.
Yes, it's a work of art. Yes, the landscapes and the colossi are absolutely stunning. But the choppy framerate detracts from the great view. Terrain renders moments before you're walking on it, and characters are noticeably pixelated. When Resident Evil 4 was ported from the Gamecube to the PS2, the main character's polygon count had to be cut from 10,000 to 5,000 to support the hardware. Can you imagine if these Colossi had 10,000 polygons, or 20,000, or 50,000?
I'm not complaining; I love this game. But I can't help feeling that the creators' artist vision was constrained by the technical limitations of the hardware. Xbox 360 and PS3 games will not be better than their predecessors by simple virtue of the fact that there's more power under the hood. However, for great, ambitious games like this one, the less game designers have to worry about what the hardware is capable of, the closer we will get to the kind of epic, cinematic experiences they envisioned.
Time to don the full body tinfoil armor!
Two features make the iPod a killer app for me: the scroll wheel, and smart playlists.
Simple as it may seem, the scroll wheel is possibly the most ingenious user interface mechanism of the past 10 years. I can pull up a list of 500 artists on my iPod and navigate to any one in a matter of seconds. Apple's patent on this design virtually ensures that every "iPod killer" will end up as "roadkill".
iTunes, on the other hand, can be copied. Apple's player is great at managing very large music libraries (10,000+ songs). Apple's Smart Playlists are as close as any software gets to letting me run SQL queries on my music library to generate playlists. I form playlists based on the play count and rating. So far, I haven't found any other music library manager that lets me get this specific, this granular with my collection.
New York businesses that rely on telecommuters will pay for this, one way or another. They will either lose prospective employees due to the double-taxation, or they will have to offer higher salaries to compensate, which means more money flowing out of New York into other states. From an economic perspective, enforcing this is not going to benefit New York.
If we're arguing that MXS didn't write the VX30 codec, but rather lifted it from an open-source project, the first step is figuring out the orgin. How many mature, open-source codecs are out there? XviD is the only one that comes to mind...
The Naked Scientists:
http://www.thenakedscientists.com/
Berkeley Groks Science
http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~clgroks/
ScienceCast:
http://sciencecast.net/
Personally, I can't get into indie podcasts due to the typically poor production values. There are a lot of insightful podcasters that could be developing a real audience if they would just buy a high quality mic.
One more company trying to charge you for downloading pirated content. How is this newsworthy? Google excludes binaries from Groups because most binaries are porn and warez. They're clearly capable of the video indexing as well. This is just old technology put to illicit use.
I have no doubt that hardcore PC gamers will shell out the cash for these, regardless of the cost/performance ratio. Once you start paying $500+ for a graphics card, all rational decision making skills are lost.
As entrepreneurs go, Richter is scummy and opportunistic, but spammers come a lot worse. Richter at least made an attempt to operate openly and within a feasible interpretation of the law, instead of setting up shop in China and exploiting zombie networks distribute his spam.
From a legal standpoint, this is a nice victory for Microsoft. I hope they achieve their deterrent effect by making the financial incentives to spam more dubious. I'm afraid, though, that they will only succeed in driving hardcore spammers deeper underground, with Richter serving as an example of the dangers of treating your spam operation like a legitimate business.
What's the harm in competition here? The wireless spectrum is finite; it's in our interest to kick around technologies until we can agree on one that's the cleanest, most efficient use of the space available.
A good first step would be to shut off analog TV and radio. That bandwidth is too valuable for us to just sit on.
I was a NetFlix subscriber for about two years, because they were the best of what was around. Recently, I switched to Blockbuster's in-store unlimited rentals, because it could give me something that NetFlix couldn't: instant gratification.
I am fickle. With NetFlix, I too frequently found a DVD in my mailbox that I felt like watching 3 days ago. Being able to pick out a movie and be watching it 20 minutes later really makes a world of difference.
Perhaps NetFlix will go one better. With movie downloads just around the bend, it appears that they're taking innovation and competition in their industry very seriously. Amazon may have the inventory and distribution architecture to easily catapult themselves into the market, but if they don't have anything more interesting than DVDs-by-mail on the horizon, they may quickly find themselves left behind.
College is quite different. Dorm room space is at a premium, and there's an expectation that you will be toting your laptop on campus.
Middle-schoolers carrying laptops around would be a nightmare. If a kid's laptop isn't broken when hurled to the ground underneath a bag of books, it will be stolen, or accidentally left behind somewhere.
"Here's a good one for the Linux fans"
Does that prepositional phrase really narrow it down on Slashdot?
While the effort is admirable, getting too bent out of shape over the space shuttle's emissions is a little myopic. Weighed against all of the benefits and advancements we've gleaned from the space program, I'd say the environmental impact is pretty negligible. The article itself suggests that the damage to wildlife from hydrochloric acid deposits is "minimal and manageable".
I can't imagine that the costs of upgrading a $1.7 billion shuttle to make NASA's once-in-a-blue-moon launches more earth-friendly will be reasonable for taxpayers. Environmentalists looking for something to complain about should have no trouble finding a better outlet for their ire in corporate America than at NASA.
Personally, I think a "per employee" method makes more sense than a "percentage of revenue" method. Ask yourself what technology each user needs in order to do their jobs. If you put everyone on old, crappy hardware, it'll cost you in terms of productivity, maintenance and replacement. OTOH, giving everyone flat-panel monitors will probably cost you more in hardware than you will gain in productivity. Find the balance.
Also, be sure you're considering the total cost of ownership when you turn in your budget. Workstation support, maintenance, repair, network installation and maintenance, connectivity costs, consumables (toner & ink, etc.).
At least this will give us all an excuse to show up an hour late for work once a year.
"But look! My cell phone says it's 8:57! I'm early!"
If the human race has any sense of responsibility, we'll blow up the earth before letting our kudzu escape to other planets. That stuff's worse than the Flood!