the whole area of how you actually bring together a team and get them to successfully deliver a project on time, is one worthy of a lot of attention, if only because it is so hard to do
Not being funny, but can somebody point out the last time Microsoft actually brough a team together and managed to deliver a project on time. Every major OS release, every service pack, every single project they have ever produced seems to have been delayed. They are the antithesis of "release early, release often" but then they having paying customers as opposed to us guys...
Anyway, call my cynical, but I think I can find better sources on how to program than the Microsoft team.
It wouldn't be cool at all. You'd get spammed. Heavily. Take a web spider, an MP3 of my advert, set it off crawling over the web, and all of a sudden you're getting phone calls at 6am telling you that my Nigerian cousin really needs your assistance getting some money out of the country.
You've also got to remember VoIP != Voice over the Internet. The two networks may never meet.
This is a fairy tale dreamt up for investors, and you can expect within 2 years an announcement that it's all much harder than expected.
The UK phone network is not a simple beast, and not like any other phone network in the world. I suspect they're putting down the plan and hoping that they can start angling for some government "investment" to replace the absolute crud we have in place at the moment.
I would advise caution however, when BT announce anything at all. Remember this is the company who announced "universal" broadband 15 years ago and sat on the technology when it became available until they were effectively bullied into it.
Don't talk utter rubbish. You should be modded down for being a crank.
This is custom hardware designed for the job. MHz and GHz don't come into it. If you don't believe me, consider why the processor on so many graphics cards is slower than the CPU in the machine, yet without it, the graphics would grind to a halt. A modern PC is a general tool - Colossus wasn't, and was specifically designed and built to break crypto as quickly as possible. Now, if you were to try and run Pong on it, fair enough, you'd find it incredibly slow... but that's not what it's there for. Colossus would however easily crack Enigma codes quicker than your over-clocked P4. And it probably doesn't have as many neon lights in it.
Funny thing about slashdot - people seem to think they know all about hardware because they know the difference between a MHz and a GHz.
I live in the UK too, but up in Manchester. I can assure you, white earphones will get you into more trouble up here than it will in London. There are guys up here who can smell an iPod from half a mile and will quite happily hurt you very badly. You're carring a 400 quid walkman. In other terms, it's exchangeable for 100 quids worth of drugs. And you, my friend, are probably a soft target.
Firstly, question whether you need to carry all that stuff. Did you really need a PDA? Most phones these days have reasonable calendaring and bluetooth to synch with my desktop calendar (yes, I'm working on better integration for open source myself), so I use that instead. In the UK, stolen phones become worthless pieces of scrap as soon as you report them stolen, so there is no interest in taking them off you anymore. I don't feel the need to carry 20Gb of songs with me when going down the corner shop for a newspaper either, so don't feel the need for carrying an MP3 player - if I drove, or was commuting for hours every day, I might. If you're not carrying it, it can't be stolen from you. This is the best advice you're likely to get, trust me.
Secondly, don't make it obvious what you're carrying. I carry my laptop in a regular Reebok backpack that I think I first bought when I was still at School (10 years ago). Nobody wants to steal it. I have however stood in many train stations and sat in many coffee shops and realised that with all the bags that were screaming laptop at me, if I'd been quick off my feet I could have made away with perhaps GBP 10k of hardware in less than 30 seconds. White headphones are a giveaway, like I said, so is trying to navigate your way around on a map held on your PDA.
Thirdly, it does all come down to attitude. Act like a dick, you'll get into trouble. Act like you don't belong there, you'll get into trouble. Walk tall, confidently, and stay aware. I've lived in one of the roughest cities in Britain for years (yes, Moss Side is as bad as it sounds), and I have never, ever, ever been successfully mugged. One guy wanted my wallet once and I just laughed and walked by and he didn't come after me. I'm lucky - I'm 120Kgs, 6 foot tall, shaved head and people don't mess with me. I'm used to it. You probably don't want to look like me, and you might not look like a football hooligan. Just walk like you are, see people's body language change around you. Remember this though - if you're alone in a train carriage with a single female CHANGE THIS STANCE - responding to the environment you're in is more important than trying to act like a thug all the time.
Lastly, don't have anything on you that you can't afford to lose. Backups are of course critical. I'm terrible at this, but when I do remember, I have between 3 and 6 copies of important data, held on kit in 3 different continents. The data I value, is data I take care to protect.
How exactly has this affected our inboxes? Doesn't make the slightest bit of difference. The odd thing about spam, is that it must work - if it didn't, then people wouldn't do it. So, perhaps another form of attack against spam in the long term is to teach people not to trust unsolicited sales pitches and not to buy things from spammers.
Java is also way too slow for a HDTV codec (which is the only way the BBC will support HDTV, but even so, they want something close to DVD quality for this stuff) without some serious oomph put behind it.
Anyway, do you actually want to watch TV programs on your computer? More likely you want something that has the storage and networking functions of your PC, but also makes full use of your plasma screen or projector. In which case, you're looking at a custom media-centre PC. In which case, you can use custom hardware for the decoding and your main processor is mainly handling the UI. If you're pushing the codec processing into custom hardware, you need to make sure that the hardware is cheap enough to produce but your only other consideration is file size. So, really, codec support is not heading in the right direction at all - we want ultra-tight compression, sod the real time aspect because we can put that into custom hardware. Ho-hum.
Firstly, the BBC is a much, much, MUCH bigger mass marketing machine in the UK than Microsoft will ever be. This codec is being paid for by every household in the UK that owns a TV set, because we're the ones who pay close to US$200/year for a license which goes directly to the BBC. The BBC are open sourcing it, but the archive project everybody is talking about will only be available to the UK audience for free, and post-Hutton might not happen at all (it was a Greg Dyke baby). So, let's see - if it does happen, the entire BBC back catalogue being made freely available in this format to the entire UK and you think this format will fail? Quite frankly, what planet are you on?
Secondly, IE "won" the browser wars because it was the best browser. It still is. The reason? Developers still code to the IE "spec", not W3C. In addition it's page loading/rendering speed and start-up is much faster than Mozilla. Simple fact, live with it. Mozilla is exactly what OSS is not supposed to be, particularly on Unix - it's 100% bloatware. Even on my 'nix boxes I have IE running under WINE because it's better.
Your last two paragraphs completely miss the point of the codec. The BBC is not releasing this for Linux users. They're creating an open format that they still control. They want us to put the time and effort into making it perfect so that everybody can share it. This has always been the way the BBC has worked from technical innovation through to it's creative stance - it gets the people who pay for it, involved in it. They do not care if the implementation makes Linux more viable - they will take any codec work and deploy it for the UK masses on windows. If they decide to release that particular build of it to you for free, be grateful.
Mark my words, within five years DIRAC will be bigger than MP3 is now.
People don't realise that it does indeed cost money to produce creative works, and those people who invested in them have a right to protect them. If it costs you $100 million to create a feature film, what incentive is there for you as an investor, a studio, whoever, to put that money in if within a week of the final edit being finished it is distributed to your entire audience for free?
Somebody else here has already pointed out that "open music" is about you going out, playing an instrument, singing, writing lyrics and tunes, putting it all together and distributing it under the terms you want.
The "file-sharing" model is to open enterprise what warezing Win XP is to downloading your favourite Linux distro.
So, instead of trying to take other people's music and distributing it without their permission, how about you actually try and create music people want and give it away under terms like the GPL, much in the same way you do with software now?
No? Why not? No, seriously, I want to know why not...
Slashdot Mirror
the whole area of how you actually bring together a team and get them to successfully deliver a project on time, is one worthy of a lot of attention, if only because it is so hard to do
Not being funny, but can somebody point out the last time Microsoft actually brough a team together and managed to deliver a project on time. Every major OS release, every service pack, every single project they have ever produced seems to have been delayed. They are the antithesis of "release early, release often" but then they having paying customers as opposed to us guys...
Anyway, call my cynical, but I think I can find better sources on how to program than the Microsoft team.
It wouldn't be cool at all. You'd get spammed. Heavily. Take a web spider, an MP3 of my advert, set it off crawling over the web, and all of a sudden you're getting phone calls at 6am telling you that my Nigerian cousin really needs your assistance getting some money out of the country.
You've also got to remember VoIP != Voice over the Internet. The two networks may never meet.
This is a fairy tale dreamt up for investors, and you can expect within 2 years an announcement that it's all much harder than expected.
The UK phone network is not a simple beast, and not like any other phone network in the world. I suspect they're putting down the plan and hoping that they can start angling for some government "investment" to replace the absolute crud we have in place at the moment.
I would advise caution however, when BT announce anything at all. Remember this is the company who announced "universal" broadband 15 years ago and sat on the technology when it became available until they were effectively bullied into it.
It's being sent to you by aliens. Oh didn't you know that? Here's something to get you started...
Don't talk utter rubbish. You should be modded down for being a crank.
This is custom hardware designed for the job. MHz and GHz don't come into it. If you don't believe me, consider why the processor on so many graphics cards is slower than the CPU in the machine, yet without it, the graphics would grind to a halt. A modern PC is a general tool - Colossus wasn't, and was specifically designed and built to break crypto as quickly as possible. Now, if you were to try and run Pong on it, fair enough, you'd find it incredibly slow... but that's not what it's there for. Colossus would however easily crack Enigma codes quicker than your over-clocked P4. And it probably doesn't have as many neon lights in it.
Funny thing about slashdot - people seem to think they know all about hardware because they know the difference between a MHz and a GHz.
I live in the UK too, but up in Manchester. I can assure you, white earphones will get you into more trouble up here than it will in London. There are guys up here who can smell an iPod from half a mile and will quite happily hurt you very badly. You're carring a 400 quid walkman. In other terms, it's exchangeable for 100 quids worth of drugs. And you, my friend, are probably a soft target.
Firstly, question whether you need to carry all that stuff. Did you really need a PDA? Most phones these days have reasonable calendaring and bluetooth to synch with my desktop calendar (yes, I'm working on better integration for open source myself), so I use that instead. In the UK, stolen phones become worthless pieces of scrap as soon as you report them stolen, so there is no interest in taking them off you anymore. I don't feel the need to carry 20Gb of songs with me when going down the corner shop for a newspaper either, so don't feel the need for carrying an MP3 player - if I drove, or was commuting for hours every day, I might. If you're not carrying it, it can't be stolen from you. This is the best advice you're likely to get, trust me.
Secondly, don't make it obvious what you're carrying. I carry my laptop in a regular Reebok backpack that I think I first bought when I was still at School (10 years ago). Nobody wants to steal it. I have however stood in many train stations and sat in many coffee shops and realised that with all the bags that were screaming laptop at me, if I'd been quick off my feet I could have made away with perhaps GBP 10k of hardware in less than 30 seconds. White headphones are a giveaway, like I said, so is trying to navigate your way around on a map held on your PDA.
Thirdly, it does all come down to attitude. Act like a dick, you'll get into trouble. Act like you don't belong there, you'll get into trouble. Walk tall, confidently, and stay aware. I've lived in one of the roughest cities in Britain for years (yes, Moss Side is as bad as it sounds), and I have never, ever, ever been successfully mugged. One guy wanted my wallet once and I just laughed and walked by and he didn't come after me. I'm lucky - I'm 120Kgs, 6 foot tall, shaved head and people don't mess with me. I'm used to it. You probably don't want to look like me, and you might not look like a football hooligan. Just walk like you are, see people's body language change around you. Remember this though - if you're alone in a train carriage with a single female CHANGE THIS STANCE - responding to the environment you're in is more important than trying to act like a thug all the time.
Lastly, don't have anything on you that you can't afford to lose. Backups are of course critical. I'm terrible at this, but when I do remember, I have between 3 and 6 copies of important data, held on kit in 3 different continents. The data I value, is data I take care to protect.
How exactly has this affected our inboxes? Doesn't make the slightest bit of difference. The odd thing about spam, is that it must work - if it didn't, then people wouldn't do it. So, perhaps another form of attack against spam in the long term is to teach people not to trust unsolicited sales pitches and not to buy things from spammers.
We're not a million miles away from seeing them put 5.3 out of the door, which will then become -STABLE I believe.
Lot of nice things being sorted out in the FreeBSD kernel. I can't wait until the conversation starts about what's going into 6.x
Java is also way too slow for a HDTV codec (which is the only way the BBC will support HDTV, but even so, they want something close to DVD quality for this stuff) without some serious oomph put behind it.
Anyway, do you actually want to watch TV programs on your computer? More likely you want something that has the storage and networking functions of your PC, but also makes full use of your plasma screen or projector. In which case, you're looking at a custom media-centre PC. In which case, you can use custom hardware for the decoding and your main processor is mainly handling the UI. If you're pushing the codec processing into custom hardware, you need to make sure that the hardware is cheap enough to produce but your only other consideration is file size. So, really, codec support is not heading in the right direction at all - we want ultra-tight compression, sod the real time aspect because we can put that into custom hardware. Ho-hum.
Firstly, the BBC is a much, much, MUCH bigger mass marketing machine in the UK than Microsoft will ever be. This codec is being paid for by every household in the UK that owns a TV set, because we're the ones who pay close to US$200/year for a license which goes directly to the BBC. The BBC are open sourcing it, but the archive project everybody is talking about will only be available to the UK audience for free, and post-Hutton might not happen at all (it was a Greg Dyke baby). So, let's see - if it does happen, the entire BBC back catalogue being made freely available in this format to the entire UK and you think this format will fail? Quite frankly, what planet are you on?
Secondly, IE "won" the browser wars because it was the best browser. It still is. The reason? Developers still code to the IE "spec", not W3C. In addition it's page loading/rendering speed and start-up is much faster than Mozilla. Simple fact, live with it. Mozilla is exactly what OSS is not supposed to be, particularly on Unix - it's 100% bloatware. Even on my 'nix boxes I have IE running under WINE because it's better.
Your last two paragraphs completely miss the point of the codec. The BBC is not releasing this for Linux users. They're creating an open format that they still control. They want us to put the time and effort into making it perfect so that everybody can share it. This has always been the way the BBC has worked from technical innovation through to it's creative stance - it gets the people who pay for it, involved in it. They do not care if the implementation makes Linux more viable - they will take any codec work and deploy it for the UK masses on windows. If they decide to release that particular build of it to you for free, be grateful.
Mark my words, within five years DIRAC will be bigger than MP3 is now.
People don't realise that it does indeed cost money to produce creative works, and those people who invested in them have a right to protect them. If it costs you $100 million to create a feature film, what incentive is there for you as an investor, a studio, whoever, to put that money in if within a week of the final edit being finished it is distributed to your entire audience for free?
Somebody else here has already pointed out that "open music" is about you going out, playing an instrument, singing, writing lyrics and tunes, putting it all together and distributing it under the terms you want.
The "file-sharing" model is to open enterprise what warezing Win XP is to downloading your favourite Linux distro.
So, instead of trying to take other people's music and distributing it without their permission, how about you actually try and create music people want and give it away under terms like the GPL, much in the same way you do with software now?
No? Why not? No, seriously, I want to know why not...