At least with some of these Microsoft originally promised to gather (or transmit)no personally identifiable information. However they did so. There have been plenty of cases of Microsoft violating their privacy decisions. Some of them are admittedly less serious then other, but quite frankly the repeated nature of it, along with the vendor lock-in policies that they appear to be pursuing make any privacy promises highly suspect.
I have to say in general that I don't trust corporations, however I don't feel the need to bolt on my tin foil hat after this revelation.
I do think that disclosed practices (such as anonymously monitoring for viewing habits) isn't necessarily a bad thing. I'm certain that Tivo has found and created new features based on viewing the tracking information.
I also think that Tivo stands a decent chance of displacing Nielsen's as a premier rating service. And as long as it is done anonymously, it is a god send. As I think that Tivo would more accurately reflect "real" viewing habits. (And of course possibly give it a geek edge, so that our favorite programing gets better ratings).
The second Tivo transitions over to a non-anonmous tracking service, is probably the day that their company headquarters will burn down. Outraged geeks will storm the place.
I think Tivo is continuing to walk on the correct side of a very tenuous debate over usability, tracking, and privacy invasion.
The comparison to Microsoft has to be made... If this were Microsoft I wouldn't trust them to track it, as they have a history of repeated violations of their own policies, written and stated. Whereas Tivo does not have that same history, that I am aware of.
Yeah, I find the "editorializatoin" of movies to be quite frustrating. It means that I may never be able to find the original version of movie or show that I watched, due to some dementia by a studio or producer.
Though I would contend that it doesn't make us wimps, just freaky purists. If you consider all of the common intellect that has been wasted on the Star Wars universe, you'll note that a whole lot of people came up with relatively similar viewpoint of it. And for whatever reason Lucas's vision and what several hundred million other people took away from it are pretty damn divergent.
Would require re-doing 1-3, and at least in my mind 6. The ewoks were an abomination, and represented a massive sell-out to "childrens" movies.
He was right on with the first two, a G movie for all audiences, with enough plot and depth for older audiences, yet enough cool stuff to captivate children, as well as a reasonably straightforward plot arch (ala Joseph Campbell).
So many mistakes were made in the making of the first two (and I'd wager third) that it's hard to even pretend it's the same series. What makes it the most comical is that with tweaks to each of those stories they could have been grand. My favorite example is Anakin slaughtering all of the Raiders after finding his mother seconds before her dying (way out in the realm of possibility). More realistic would have been to have him sneak in, rescue her, only to have her get shot and then die in his arms and have him return with his rage to wipe them out.
I'm certain that thoughts like mine have been bouncing around Star Wars fans heads. Without copyright being what it is now, enterprising producers would be able to try and correct these wrongs inside of the fans lifetimes (at least with the founders copyright).
At this point I think I'll see Star Wars III at the dollar theater, and if it's better then a steaming pile I'll rent it and watch it on someone's surround sound setup.
And I certainly hope in your little world that it is the original letterboxed editions, before Lucas got to "re-release" to "fix" them. I own the newer editions, having bought them in fan-boy haste, only to have never watched them because of the reviews that I read. I just can't make myself watch Greedo shoot first. Or any of that other crap. Better go check ebay for the originals in LaserDisc format...
Your memory is in fact correct. Before all our hopes were crushed by George exercising control. There were slots for 7-9. It was exciting, and then he cancelled 7-9 just before starting up on production of 1. I'm sure someone could probably find the press release, and/or really old screenshots. There has to be some obsessed fanboy that took a screenshot way back when.
Ah, yes. My bad. Registered memory and ECC, both are performance hits. And from the reviews I've seen relatively significant performance hits (5-10% potentially). Didn't know the A64FX supported dualie. Wishful thinking to hope for a A64 3x00+ that supports dualie without the requirement for registered memory, or are they fixing that in the newer A64FXs?
What the article does not cover, is when we will be able to purchase non-Opteron Dual processors. Since they are inherently capable, it would be nice to know when we'll be able to build a performance (non-ECC) dual desktop.
I don't suspect that the $7/GB will last long. I don't think it will get to below $3.5/GB quickly though. Regardless it allows you to have multiple 1GB disks around that are re-writeable, smaller then your average CD. They're pocket sized (shirt pocket and pants pocket). They have a hard cover that protects them, which keeps you from scratching it other then intentionally.
I always wondered (like a previous poster) why MD didn't manage to displace the floppy. Especially since the movies kept using them as floppies for years. It was always amusing to see a MD disk being used as the "mega-storage" disk.
Egads this would be wonderful. 64-bit laptops. While I suspect we'll get that from the Opteron, I suspect if Apple follows through with the PPC 970, it will be available and useable much sooner.
Strangely I'm actually considering going back to broadcast. I'm extremely sick of the "quality" of the digital cable signal I'm getting. It's significant worse visually (artifacting, and the occasionally complete loss of picture when the signal hiccups). Re-allocating the broadcast spectrum is a interesting idea, but it's also a fairly bad idea to get rid of it completely. The new HD specs should let them combine everything into a single HDTV band with several SDTV channels, which might be an acceptable compromise.
I think you've managed to encapsulate why philosophy can be a real pain sometimes. The older styles of writing, which by the way are typically better formal english (with some philosophers) then we churn out today, are harder to read.
Yet it is possible to read them and sometimes there are in fact brilliant insights. On the other hand sometimes you sit around wondering why they put some much thought into trying to prove what and who is real.
Which is why it is that much better when you run into easily readable philosophy. I love the ease with which I can read the Tao of Pooh or other interesting modern re-hashes of older ideas. Strangely translations are often a good way to read philosophy. I know many Germans who prefer to read German philosophers in the English translations, because it breaks simplifies the arguments (or so I would assume).
Why 3D? Frequently it can come nowhere near the beauty of a 2D game. Look at all the beautiful art and scenery in old games, then consider the screen sizes they had to work with. It is amazing that many looked as good as they did.
A game with a story and good 2D artwork will eclipse the vast majority of 3D games.
Some of my favorite examples of failures (in my eyes at least). Railroad Tycoon, classic game... ultimate time waster. Railroad Tycoon II had much needed improvements, except for the fact that they adopted a 3D viewpoint, which made it nearly impossible to lay track well. In that case a psuedo 3D from overhead would have worked well, but due to the 3D craze...
Damn. Guess I'll just have to start my own game company.;)
I've been doing network security for a while now, but I still have yet to find a nice single sentence summary for why security is necessary, that is easily understood by everyone who hears it from the techie to the manager.
There are IT jobs that can never be outsourced. Why? Because they require security clearances and those can only be given to US citizens. While they may not pay you top commercial dollar, they will certainly pay you well. However you usually must already have a security clearance, but you can't get a clearance without sponsorship. Chicken and Egg.
However I believe if you are willing to move, you can find a secure job. Possibly even companies that will sponsor you for clearance. Most likely this will mean that you are working for the government or military, and will have to put up with background checks.
I get thousands of emails a day. By choice. I'm actively involved in many online communities. This requires the ability to send a lot of email. This email also is not spam. Charging per email is a horrific idea and will decimate the Internet. The reason why it works so well is the easy free flow of information. To fundamentally alter that infrastructure would allow, among other things, the Internet to be turned into that wonderful pay per view per occurence system that commercial organizations want.
This really is the last thing I would have expected from Lessig.
I came to my current ISP because their terms could be summarized as "Don't do anything bad, mkay?"
Unfortunately that appears to have changed a little. Though it is still definitely much better then others, I can still run my server and be happy about it.
> Intel is a company that time and time again proves > it knows how to make money. It may not always > support the crowds it should (like/. readers and > superusers) but they are still making money.
Because the i960, which is a VLIW processor that Intel was trying to make was *so* successful.
Intel has made a lot of money, and frequently knows what to do, but also makes lots of blunders.
Witness the consecutive screwups with Rambus, the i820 chipset, and problems ramping the PIII in relatively recent history.
It is very likely that Intel has made a mistep with the Itanium, however their cash stockpile may just allow them to foist the Itanium on us anyways.
I curious why they don't exist. OpenSSH is available to all, and I'm certain that scp could be adapted to the methods they're using now. With encypted traffic the playing field would suddenly change as it would make most of the network sniffing useless. Plus using SSH would give at least some marginal compression to the data stream, potentially speeding transfers.
So is this already implemented in one of the P2P networks or is someone working on it?
Mind you this doesn't solve the universities problems, though I would think that bandwidth throttling to each of the student dorms would be useful. By limiting the download speeds to the student to something like 15k/s it would still allow for a reasonably fast browsing experience, but would slow P2P. Combine that with Squid and you could make limit most of the bandwidth requirements.
It's rather sad. I used to buy the complete Quicken Deluxe and Turbotax Deluxe bundle each year, because Intuit made a good product and it was easy to use. Then in 2001 Quicken Deluxe started requiring a Quicken.com to logon to download stock prices, which you could accomplish with previous versions without a Quicken.com account. So I quit buying Quicken. Now they have product activation on Turbotax. Now I won't buy Quicken.
Product Activation is forced obsolesence. At some point they can quit activating the software, at which point you can no longer re-install said software. This is especially important with tax software due to the IRS 7 year audit period. So if in three years Intuit decides that it no longer needs to allow you to activate the software again so that you can... you know *print* your tax forms again... you're screwed and by Intuit and the IRS.
For those that love to break out their software is licensed arguments. Software is a product, just like many others. The right to re-use, re-install the software and use it as you see fit is a legal right. The fact that everyone buys these arguments simply because there is a *non-negotiable* EULA at installation, is proof that sufficient marketing can *prove* to people that they don't have fair-use and first sale rights.
But I digress, product activation is a bad thing... and until Intuit changes its business pratices it has lost my business, which BTW it previously had *every single* year for at least two of their products.
I was gratified the other day when I saw that a company that I almost got DSL service with went under (Directv DSL), and the cable company whose Acceptable Use Policy was unpalatable has serious problems with their Cable Modems (Adelphia), confirming the fact that competition is a good thing. As I was able to find a DSL provider with a good AUP without having to go with some major market player, which you just don't see with cable. All I wanted was to be able to run my own server, a small non-commericial hobby site and my own email. Now if I can just get faster service. I'm a long ways from the CO... and the wireless provider in my area is still using shoddy equipment and can't quite reach my house (too many trees).
The worst part is that I double checked. I really thought that I had typed Connect Four. I think I was having one of those wonderful mental blocks... where I knew that it was Connect Four, but my brain kept saying... nah, that's checkers.
Bah. At least it got posted... the browser wars site ate too much of my time.
Ah, but you didn't tell them why. Though you did provide a link.
OpenBSD severely audited their BIND 4 code-base and it is very secure. This can be ascertained by looking at their errata pages and looking for patches to BIND. There aren't very many at all in the more recent versions.
Sure it's BIND 4, but it's solid and stable, like DNS is supposed to be.
Wave of the future. Get all the music you want, without copy protection, and without those obnoxious high prices. What a concept. Quite frankly I've always been more interested in their music catalogs, only the very occasional band makes me want to go out and buy a new CD.
Also of note is that this is going to be a European experiment. So at least for the moment the US will be copy protection free. But it is probably worth boycotting BMG anyways, if their record sales completely erode, maybe they'll consider different policies.
I guess I'll also have to cancel my BMG music club account too.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.anu.edu.au/mail-archives/link/link0108/ 0007.html0 1/08/16.asp n t2 .pdf
http://www.techlawjournal.com/alert/20
http://www.epic.org/privacy/consumer/MS_complai
XP registration, Passport, etc.
At least with some of these Microsoft originally promised to gather (or transmit)no personally identifiable information. However they did so. There have been plenty of cases of Microsoft violating their privacy decisions. Some of them are admittedly less serious then other, but quite frankly the repeated nature of it, along with the vendor lock-in policies that they appear to be pursuing make any privacy promises highly suspect.
I have to say in general that I don't trust corporations, however I don't feel the need to bolt on my tin foil hat after this revelation.
I do think that disclosed practices (such as anonymously monitoring for viewing habits) isn't necessarily a bad thing. I'm certain that Tivo has found and created new features based on viewing the tracking information.
I also think that Tivo stands a decent chance of displacing Nielsen's as a premier rating service. And as long as it is done anonymously, it is a god send. As I think that Tivo would more accurately reflect "real" viewing habits. (And of course possibly give it a geek edge, so that our favorite programing gets better ratings).
The second Tivo transitions over to a non-anonmous tracking service, is probably the day that their company headquarters will burn down. Outraged geeks will storm the place.
I think Tivo is continuing to walk on the correct side of a very tenuous debate over usability, tracking, and privacy invasion.
The comparison to Microsoft has to be made... If this were Microsoft I wouldn't trust them to track it, as they have a history of repeated violations of their own policies, written and stated. Whereas Tivo does not have that same history, that I am aware of.
Yeah, I find the "editorializatoin" of movies to be quite frustrating. It means that I may never be able to find the original version of movie or show that I watched, due to some dementia by a studio or producer.
Though I would contend that it doesn't make us wimps, just freaky purists. If you consider all of the common intellect that has been wasted on the Star Wars universe, you'll note that a whole lot of people came up with relatively similar viewpoint of it. And for whatever reason Lucas's vision and what several hundred million other people took away from it are pretty damn divergent.
Would require re-doing 1-3, and at least in my mind 6. The ewoks were an abomination, and represented a massive sell-out to "childrens" movies.
He was right on with the first two, a G movie for all audiences, with enough plot and depth for older audiences, yet enough cool stuff to captivate children, as well as a reasonably straightforward plot arch (ala Joseph Campbell).
So many mistakes were made in the making of the first two (and I'd wager third) that it's hard to even pretend it's the same series. What makes it the most comical is that with tweaks to each of those stories they could have been grand. My favorite example is Anakin slaughtering all of the Raiders after finding his mother seconds before her dying (way out in the realm of possibility). More realistic would have been to have him sneak in, rescue her, only to have her get shot and then die in his arms and have him return with his rage to wipe them out.
I'm certain that thoughts like mine have been bouncing around Star Wars fans heads. Without copyright being what it is now, enterprising producers would be able to try and correct these wrongs inside of the fans lifetimes (at least with the founders copyright).
At this point I think I'll see Star Wars III at the dollar theater, and if it's better then a steaming pile I'll rent it and watch it on someone's surround sound setup.
And I certainly hope in your little world that it is the original letterboxed editions, before Lucas got to "re-release" to "fix" them. I own the newer editions, having bought them in fan-boy haste, only to have never watched them because of the reviews that I read. I just can't make myself watch Greedo shoot first. Or any of that other crap. Better go check ebay for the originals in LaserDisc format...
Your memory is in fact correct. Before all our hopes were crushed by George exercising control. There were slots for 7-9. It was exciting, and then he cancelled 7-9 just before starting up on production of 1. I'm sure someone could probably find the press release, and/or really old screenshots. There has to be some obsessed fanboy that took a screenshot way back when.
Ah, yes. My bad. Registered memory and ECC, both are performance hits. And from the reviews I've seen relatively significant performance hits (5-10% potentially). Didn't know the A64FX supported dualie. Wishful thinking to hope for a A64 3x00+ that supports dualie without the requirement for registered memory, or are they fixing that in the newer A64FXs?
What the article does not cover, is when we will be able to purchase non-Opteron Dual processors. Since they are inherently capable, it would be nice to know when we'll be able to build a performance (non-ECC) dual desktop.
I don't suspect that the $7/GB will last long. I don't think it will get to below $3.5/GB quickly though. Regardless it allows you to have multiple 1GB disks around that are re-writeable, smaller then your average CD. They're pocket sized (shirt pocket and pants pocket). They have a hard cover that protects them, which keeps you from scratching it other then intentionally.
I always wondered (like a previous poster) why MD didn't manage to displace the floppy. Especially since the movies kept using them as floppies for years. It was always amusing to see a MD disk being used as the "mega-storage" disk.
Yea they sold them both short and made a killing!
Egads this would be wonderful. 64-bit laptops. While I suspect we'll get that from the Opteron, I suspect if Apple follows through with the PPC 970, it will be available and useable much sooner.
Needless to say... drool!
Strangely I'm actually considering going back to broadcast. I'm extremely sick of the "quality" of the digital cable signal I'm getting. It's significant worse visually (artifacting, and the occasionally complete loss of picture when the signal hiccups). Re-allocating the broadcast spectrum is a interesting idea, but it's also a fairly bad idea to get rid of it completely. The new HD specs should let them combine everything into a single HDTV band with several SDTV channels, which might be an acceptable compromise.
I think you've managed to encapsulate why philosophy can be a real pain sometimes. The older styles of writing, which by the way are typically better formal english (with some philosophers) then we churn out today, are harder to read.
Yet it is possible to read them and sometimes there are in fact brilliant insights. On the other hand sometimes you sit around wondering why they put some much thought into trying to prove what and who is real.
Which is why it is that much better when you run into easily readable philosophy. I love the ease with which I can read the Tao of Pooh or other interesting modern re-hashes of older ideas. Strangely translations are often a good way to read philosophy. I know many Germans who prefer to read German philosophers in the English translations, because it breaks simplifies the arguments (or so I would assume).
As others have lamented...
;)
Why 3D? Frequently it can come nowhere near the beauty of a 2D game. Look at all the beautiful art and scenery in old games, then consider the screen sizes they had to work with. It is amazing that many looked as good as they did.
A game with a story and good 2D artwork will eclipse the vast majority of 3D games.
Some of my favorite examples of failures (in my eyes at least). Railroad Tycoon, classic game... ultimate time waster. Railroad Tycoon II had much needed improvements, except for the fact that they adopted a 3D viewpoint, which made it nearly impossible to lay track well. In that case a psuedo 3D from overhead would have worked well, but due to the 3D craze...
Damn. Guess I'll just have to start my own game company.
I've been doing network security for a while now, but I still have yet to find a nice single sentence summary for why security is necessary, that is easily understood by everyone who hears it from the techie to the manager.
Do you have any suggestions?
I'm surprised no one has mentioned it thus far.
There are IT jobs that can never be outsourced. Why? Because they require security clearances and those can only be given to US citizens. While they may not pay you top commercial dollar, they will certainly pay you well. However you usually must already have a security clearance, but you can't get a clearance without sponsorship. Chicken and Egg.
However I believe if you are willing to move, you can find a secure job. Possibly even companies that will sponsor you for clearance. Most likely this will mean that you are working for the government or military, and will have to put up with background checks.
But it keeps you employed, no?
I get thousands of emails a day. By choice. I'm actively involved in many online communities. This requires the ability to send a lot of email. This email also is not spam. Charging per email is a horrific idea and will decimate the Internet. The reason why it works so well is the easy free flow of information. To fundamentally alter that infrastructure would allow, among other things, the Internet to be turned into that wonderful pay per view per occurence system that commercial organizations want.
This really is the last thing I would have expected from Lessig.
Unfortunately that appears to have changed a little. Though it is still definitely much better then others, I can still run my server and be happy about it.
Read the terms yourself Britsys ToS
> Intel is a company that time and time again proves > it knows how to make money. It may not always /. readers and > superusers) but they are still making money.
> support the crowds it should (like
Because the i960, which is a VLIW processor that Intel was trying to make was *so* successful.
Intel has made a lot of money, and frequently knows what to do, but also makes lots of blunders.
Witness the consecutive screwups with Rambus, the i820 chipset, and problems ramping the PIII in relatively recent history.
It is very likely that Intel has made a mistep with the Itanium, however their cash stockpile may just allow them to foist the Itanium on us anyways.
I curious why they don't exist. OpenSSH is available to all, and I'm certain that scp could be adapted to the methods they're using now. With encypted traffic the playing field would suddenly change as it would make most of the network sniffing useless. Plus using SSH would give at least some marginal compression to the data stream, potentially speeding transfers.
So is this already implemented in one of the P2P networks or is someone working on it?
Mind you this doesn't solve the universities problems, though I would think that bandwidth throttling to each of the student dorms would be useful. By limiting the download speeds to the student to something like 15k/s it would still allow for a reasonably fast browsing experience, but would slow P2P. Combine that with Squid and you could make limit most of the bandwidth requirements.
It's rather sad. I used to buy the complete Quicken Deluxe and Turbotax Deluxe bundle each year, because Intuit made a good product and it was easy to use. Then in 2001 Quicken Deluxe started requiring a Quicken.com to logon to download stock prices, which you could accomplish with previous versions without a Quicken.com account. So I quit buying Quicken. Now they have product activation on Turbotax. Now I won't buy Quicken.
Product Activation is forced obsolesence. At some point they can quit activating the software, at which point you can no longer re-install said software. This is especially important with tax software due to the IRS 7 year audit period. So if in three years Intuit decides that it no longer needs to allow you to activate the software again so that you can... you know *print* your tax forms again... you're screwed and by Intuit and the IRS.
For those that love to break out their software is licensed arguments. Software is a product, just like many others. The right to re-use, re-install the software and use it as you see fit is a legal right. The fact that everyone buys these arguments simply because there is a *non-negotiable* EULA at installation, is proof that sufficient marketing can *prove* to people that they don't have fair-use and first sale rights.
But I digress, product activation is a bad thing... and until Intuit changes its business pratices it has lost my business, which BTW it previously had *every single* year for at least two of their products.
I was gratified the other day when I saw that a company that I almost got DSL service with went under (Directv DSL), and the cable company whose Acceptable Use Policy was unpalatable has serious problems with their Cable Modems (Adelphia), confirming the fact that competition is a good thing. As I was able to find a DSL provider with a good AUP without having to go with some major market player, which you just don't see with cable. All I wanted was to be able to run my own server, a small non-commericial hobby site and my own email. Now if I can just get faster service. I'm a long ways from the CO... and the wireless provider in my area is still using shoddy equipment and can't quite reach my house (too many trees).
The worst part is that I double checked. I really thought that I had typed Connect Four. I think I was having one of those wonderful mental blocks... where I knew that it was Connect Four, but my brain kept saying... nah, that's checkers.
Bah. At least it got posted... the browser wars site ate too much of my time.
OpenBSD severely audited their BIND 4 code-base and it is very secure. This can be ascertained by looking at their errata pages and looking for patches to BIND. There aren't very many at all in the more recent versions.
Sure it's BIND 4, but it's solid and stable, like DNS is supposed to be.
Wave of the future. Get all the music you want, without copy protection, and without those obnoxious high prices. What a concept. Quite frankly I've always been more interested in their music catalogs, only the very occasional band makes me want to go out and buy a new CD.
Also of note is that this is going to be a European experiment. So at least for the moment the US will be copy protection free. But it is probably worth boycotting BMG anyways, if their record sales completely erode, maybe they'll consider different policies.
I guess I'll also have to cancel my BMG music club account too.