What really stinks, especially in rural areas, is that you have to buy your back-end bandwidth from a person you are competing against.
That's not just a problem in rural areas. In everyplace I've ever been in the US (including some major cities), all Internet connections go over either the cable infrastructure or Verizon's infrastructure. So any other ISP is basically paying Verizon to be able to provide DSL or a T1 or whatever else, and meanwhile they're competing against Verizon's offerings. In some cases, the ISPs are buying access from another company that's buying access from Verizon.
Finally an Open Source project with some real marketing geniuses on board! That alone deserves celebration.
I don't think this will quite work, but it's a step in the right direction.
It doesn't even really need to work in order to "work". Even if they don't make any money from this promotion, they landed themselves with a story right here on Slashdot, which has probably exposed their software to a lot of people who hadn't heard of them before.
An anti-aliased image is more correct, mathematically (and visually) speaking, regardless of the resolution, unless that resolution is infinite.
The resolution doesn't have to be infinite, however. All it has to be is "good enough that I can't really tell the difference anymore." The guy I was responding to seemed to think that, for him, he couldn't tell anymore.
Well we aren't yet to the point where a cheap card can produce completely photorealistic movies in real-time that are completely indistinguishable from real life. Until we get there, I'm sure people will keep pushing those limits.
Once we get there, I'm not sure what will happen. Maybe they'll still want faster cards so they can offload some other kinds of processing (physics? AI?).
Well I'm not an expert of any kind, but AFAIK the point of antialiasing is pretty much to compensate for low-resolutions displays. If you have a high enough DPI or a big enough display (and so you can sit far enough away) then FSAA isn't going to make a huge difference anymore.
It's really not that much, especially if you're a company that would actually use a 100 Mbps down, 15Mbps up connection. Do you have any idea what it would cost to have a commercial DS3 line running 15Mbps symmetrical?
Sure, this cable line probably doesn't offer the same level of service or uptime guarantee, but for a lot of people, it'd do the job.
When it comes to standards, the only thing that really matters is that your documents conform to the standards that everyone else is using.
Yes, and that's exactly why it's so important to push for the use of formats that can truly be called "open standards". In fact, some governments have instituted legal requirements for the use of open formats for their own documents, and that's a very good thing.
If enough governments and companies have policies requiring use of open standards, then Microsoft will be forced to support some kind of open standard in their products. That will allow real free-market competition, since the competition will be based on the quality of the products rather than the vendor lock-in of a monopolistic company.
That might work for all I know, but I see a potential problem. Relying on user bandwidth assumes the users have much in the way of bandwidth and can afford to use their own bandwidth for these issues. Of course, if the users in these third world countries had the money for great/cheap Internet infrastructure and bandwidth to spare, then they'd probably have the money to buy crap from ads, in which case none of this is a problem anyway.
For those who don't know and are too lazy to google it (if there are any out there matching that discription) the Streissand effect could also reasonably be called the "don't look over there!" effect. Imagine someone points and says, "Don't look over there!" What are you going to do? You're going to look where they're pointing.
So the Streissand Effect is when someone tries to censor material from the Internet, and it has the exact opposite effect of publicizing the availability of that information. It's named after an event when Barbara Streissand tried to get photos of her home removed from some website (or something like that, I'm too lazy to check wikipedia at this point) and the ensuing controversy lead to those photos being posted all over the place. Some people were doing it out of spite and resentment over the censorship, but an awful lot of it was simply the result of various sites covering and discussing the controversy. People posted the photos as a means of being thorough, so readers could look to see what all the hubbub was about.
Now it's true that the EFF wants publicity, but I'm sure Apple doesn't. Apple probably doesn't want to even call attention to the idea of using a non-iTunes application to load music onto your iPod. So in that sense, the Streissand effect is in play.
Unless you doubt the validity of the field of quantum mechanics, then you probably have to acknowledge that it's "involved" in all physical phenomenon. I mean, when you ask for an explanation of a specific phenomenon, you might want to know more about the larger scale interactions and forces, but still, electrons are involved and they're doing stuff. Probably all sorts of quantumy stuff that would blow your mind.
However, it does seem like quantum mechanics would turn up as much more relevant when you're talking about the conversion of light into some kind of energy a living organism can use. When you get down to the level of trying to analyze what happens to an individual photon in the process, I don't know how anyone expected to avoid talking about quantum mechanics.
Different types of media have different pros and cons. Hard drives are relatively cheap these days, but they're still pretty heavy, making them a little bit of a nuisance to store, move, or ship. Plus there are lots of moving parts and such in a hard drive, meaning they're more prone to break and harder to recover than some other options.
That's just off the top of my head, but I'm sure someone very clever and technical could come up with more. My point is just that, even though hard drive storage is cheap, there are still roles for which tape and optical media are a better choice.
Well it depends on whether you can afford the possibility of being held hostage by the proprietary vendor. It's a sort of risk/cost/benefit analysis. And then part of what needs to be figured into the equation is, if you release your program under a free license, you may get free development from other developers. Or it's possible that someone else has already done that, so at least your programmers won't be starting from scratch.
And yes, there are trade-offs. Sometimes a proprietary application is cheap and high-quality, there's no open source alternative, and it would be expensive to match that quality by hiring programmers and developing from scratch. You have to be practical about these things, but going the open source route is often a practical choice.
And why not? The only reason I ever bothered to learn how to make patch cables was because I had bosses who didn't want to spend the extra money to buy commercially produced stuff. If your boss is giving you the OK for the money, then place an order online and have a whole bunch delivered straight to your door. Nothing could be easier.
I can produce cables all day long and something like 99% of them will be easily good enough for my needs. Still, I wouldn't doubt that a company like Belkin, running an ethernet cable factory or whatever, has better equipment to create and test the cable than I do, and they create better quality cables with greater efficiency than I would. Fewer problem cables, and they catch a greater percentage of the bad ones in their QA.
Yeah, and there are still people stuck on dial-up. 2Mbps to every home wouldn't be nothing.
Still, it seems like 2Mbps in 2012 should be a bit behind the times. In the near future, being stuck on DSL should be like being stuck on dial-up now. Most of us should have 10Mbps symmetrical connections (or better). I know, someone is going to say that's ridiculous, but I don't think it is.
I wasn't saying that Bioshock was a bad game. I bought it, I played it, and I enjoyed it. But whether it deserved all the hype it got was another issue. It was a well-designed and solid FPS, and the design was respectably fun and pretty. I just think it was overhyped as though it was more than that.
I think-- and admittedly, this is just my guess-- that part of the hype was due to younger console players who'd never played games like System Shock or Fallout, and maybe haven't really played many FPS outside of Halo.
If you've been playing computer FPSs and RPGs for the past decade or two, Bioshock doesn't seem like it's all that Interesting. Portal, for example, was much more interesting and innovative (short as it was). But I think I might have been wowed by the aesthetic and some of the gameplay if I hadn't played the games that Bioshock is rehashing.
But, there would be other considerations. Does the battery swap location have sufficient batteries to handle peak demand? Like, on a holiday weekend, when everyone's driving electric cars, and they're all going out of town, a swap/recharge facility may be swamped, and not be able to have charged batteries fast enough.
How do gas stations make sure they have enough gas to handle peak demand? Is there a real reason why having enough batteries on hand should be so much more difficult? In one sense, it seems like it could be easier. They have to continually transport gas to each station, but a battery station would only really require the transport of electricity to charge the batteries onsite (barring defective/damaged batteries that need to be replaced).
Yes, what you're saying is sensible. If cable is degraded/damaged to the point where it's not working well enough, or if it's too low grade for the speed you need (i.e. wanting to do gigabit ethernet with something less than CAT5e), then it makes sense to upgrade.
But I don't think it's usually the case where you have to say, "Well, this cable is 5 years old. It's still working fine, but we'd better replace it soon."
I'm not sure what would "get old" exactly. It's insulated copper, so I think it should be good so long as they aren't damaged. If anyone knows better, feel free to correct me.
If you want to be sure, though, test them. Transfer files over your network. If the connection is bad, you can try replacing the cable and see if that works. But the fact that Cat6 is out doesn't mean you have to rush out and replace all your CAT5e cables, especially if you're only dealing with normal 100mbps connections. But I use CAT5e for 1gbps connections, and that seems to work fine.
I personally find getting almost anything done on Linux much more time consuming than either OS X or Windows...
It depends greatly on what you're doing. If all you need is a web browser, and office suite (and OpenOffice meets your needs), and access to email via POP/IMAP, then it really doesn't matter which OS you're using. If you absolutely must use certain apps, then you're stuck using a platform that supports those apps. Otherwise, some tasks may be easier on one system or another, and otherwise it depends greatly on what you're used to and what you prefer.
It's valid of Microsoft to point out that people should concern themselves with value vs. TCO. I'm not sure that's a comparison that will leave Windows on top, though.
Maybe I'm wrong here, but is that even particularly unusual? I thought all digital TV networks (cable, FiOS, whatever) hooked into what are essentially small computers running Java on Linux (or something similar) with fancy audio and video decoding chips. That's what cable boxes are now, right? They just aren't necessarily using TCP/IP to deliver the data, but otherwise it's the same thing.
I think the three questions are:
How fully-featured do you want the computer to be?
What kind of interface do you want?
Do you want it built into the TV, or in a separate box?
That explains why their movie catalog isn't bigger than their music catalog, but not really why their movie catalog isn't bigger than it is. I'm not sure why there are so many modern movies readily available on DVD that aren't available on iTunes.
Maybe they just haven't gotten around to them all. Maybe Apple is trying to keep their catalog small for some reason. Maybe movie studios are purposefully trying to limit the scope of online sales. But there's some kind of reason.
My point was more that, as far as I know, you can't buy stuff from the iTunes store without iTunes, and that the file format itself is a secondary concern if you're not able to buy it anyway. But then that beyond that, the problem is DRM more than "proprietary file formats".
I don't think it's about having the "right". You think the RIAA and MPAA are interested in consumer rights and the rights of society to eventually take works into the public domain? They're interested in the realities of business and what will make money.
So one of the things they have to deal with is the reality that infringing copies are being made all the time and distributed online, putting them in a position where they have to compete with a free alternative that delivers any work that anyone wants directly to them right now. Not 6 months or a year after the movie has left theaters or years after the season ends. Right now.
That's the reality. If they aren't taking that fact into account already, then they should start.
Slashdot Mirror
What really stinks, especially in rural areas, is that you have to buy your back-end bandwidth from a person you are competing against.
That's not just a problem in rural areas. In everyplace I've ever been in the US (including some major cities), all Internet connections go over either the cable infrastructure or Verizon's infrastructure. So any other ISP is basically paying Verizon to be able to provide DSL or a T1 or whatever else, and meanwhile they're competing against Verizon's offerings. In some cases, the ISPs are buying access from another company that's buying access from Verizon.
Finally an Open Source project with some real marketing geniuses on board! That alone deserves celebration.
I don't think this will quite work, but it's a step in the right direction.
It doesn't even really need to work in order to "work". Even if they don't make any money from this promotion, they landed themselves with a story right here on Slashdot, which has probably exposed their software to a lot of people who hadn't heard of them before.
An anti-aliased image is more correct, mathematically (and visually) speaking, regardless of the resolution, unless that resolution is infinite.
The resolution doesn't have to be infinite, however. All it has to be is "good enough that I can't really tell the difference anymore." The guy I was responding to seemed to think that, for him, he couldn't tell anymore.
Well we aren't yet to the point where a cheap card can produce completely photorealistic movies in real-time that are completely indistinguishable from real life. Until we get there, I'm sure people will keep pushing those limits.
Once we get there, I'm not sure what will happen. Maybe they'll still want faster cards so they can offload some other kinds of processing (physics? AI?).
Well I'm not an expert of any kind, but AFAIK the point of antialiasing is pretty much to compensate for low-resolutions displays. If you have a high enough DPI or a big enough display (and so you can sit far enough away) then FSAA isn't going to make a huge difference anymore.
It's really not that much, especially if you're a company that would actually use a 100 Mbps down, 15Mbps up connection. Do you have any idea what it would cost to have a commercial DS3 line running 15Mbps symmetrical?
Sure, this cable line probably doesn't offer the same level of service or uptime guarantee, but for a lot of people, it'd do the job.
When it comes to standards, the only thing that really matters is that your documents conform to the standards that everyone else is using.
Yes, and that's exactly why it's so important to push for the use of formats that can truly be called "open standards". In fact, some governments have instituted legal requirements for the use of open formats for their own documents, and that's a very good thing.
If enough governments and companies have policies requiring use of open standards, then Microsoft will be forced to support some kind of open standard in their products. That will allow real free-market competition, since the competition will be based on the quality of the products rather than the vendor lock-in of a monopolistic company.
That might work for all I know, but I see a potential problem. Relying on user bandwidth assumes the users have much in the way of bandwidth and can afford to use their own bandwidth for these issues. Of course, if the users in these third world countries had the money for great/cheap Internet infrastructure and bandwidth to spare, then they'd probably have the money to buy crap from ads, in which case none of this is a problem anyway.
For those who don't know and are too lazy to google it (if there are any out there matching that discription) the Streissand effect could also reasonably be called the "don't look over there!" effect. Imagine someone points and says, "Don't look over there!" What are you going to do? You're going to look where they're pointing.
So the Streissand Effect is when someone tries to censor material from the Internet, and it has the exact opposite effect of publicizing the availability of that information. It's named after an event when Barbara Streissand tried to get photos of her home removed from some website (or something like that, I'm too lazy to check wikipedia at this point) and the ensuing controversy lead to those photos being posted all over the place. Some people were doing it out of spite and resentment over the censorship, but an awful lot of it was simply the result of various sites covering and discussing the controversy. People posted the photos as a means of being thorough, so readers could look to see what all the hubbub was about.
Now it's true that the EFF wants publicity, but I'm sure Apple doesn't. Apple probably doesn't want to even call attention to the idea of using a non-iTunes application to load music onto your iPod. So in that sense, the Streissand effect is in play.
Unless you doubt the validity of the field of quantum mechanics, then you probably have to acknowledge that it's "involved" in all physical phenomenon. I mean, when you ask for an explanation of a specific phenomenon, you might want to know more about the larger scale interactions and forces, but still, electrons are involved and they're doing stuff. Probably all sorts of quantumy stuff that would blow your mind.
However, it does seem like quantum mechanics would turn up as much more relevant when you're talking about the conversion of light into some kind of energy a living organism can use. When you get down to the level of trying to analyze what happens to an individual photon in the process, I don't know how anyone expected to avoid talking about quantum mechanics.
Different types of media have different pros and cons. Hard drives are relatively cheap these days, but they're still pretty heavy, making them a little bit of a nuisance to store, move, or ship. Plus there are lots of moving parts and such in a hard drive, meaning they're more prone to break and harder to recover than some other options.
That's just off the top of my head, but I'm sure someone very clever and technical could come up with more. My point is just that, even though hard drive storage is cheap, there are still roles for which tape and optical media are a better choice.
Well it depends on whether you can afford the possibility of being held hostage by the proprietary vendor. It's a sort of risk/cost/benefit analysis. And then part of what needs to be figured into the equation is, if you release your program under a free license, you may get free development from other developers. Or it's possible that someone else has already done that, so at least your programmers won't be starting from scratch.
And yes, there are trade-offs. Sometimes a proprietary application is cheap and high-quality, there's no open source alternative, and it would be expensive to match that quality by hiring programmers and developing from scratch. You have to be practical about these things, but going the open source route is often a practical choice.
And why not? The only reason I ever bothered to learn how to make patch cables was because I had bosses who didn't want to spend the extra money to buy commercially produced stuff. If your boss is giving you the OK for the money, then place an order online and have a whole bunch delivered straight to your door. Nothing could be easier.
I can produce cables all day long and something like 99% of them will be easily good enough for my needs. Still, I wouldn't doubt that a company like Belkin, running an ethernet cable factory or whatever, has better equipment to create and test the cable than I do, and they create better quality cables with greater efficiency than I would. Fewer problem cables, and they catch a greater percentage of the bad ones in their QA.
Yeah, and there are still people stuck on dial-up. 2Mbps to every home wouldn't be nothing.
Still, it seems like 2Mbps in 2012 should be a bit behind the times. In the near future, being stuck on DSL should be like being stuck on dial-up now. Most of us should have 10Mbps symmetrical connections (or better). I know, someone is going to say that's ridiculous, but I don't think it is.
I wasn't saying that Bioshock was a bad game. I bought it, I played it, and I enjoyed it. But whether it deserved all the hype it got was another issue. It was a well-designed and solid FPS, and the design was respectably fun and pretty. I just think it was overhyped as though it was more than that.
I think-- and admittedly, this is just my guess-- that part of the hype was due to younger console players who'd never played games like System Shock or Fallout, and maybe haven't really played many FPS outside of Halo.
If you've been playing computer FPSs and RPGs for the past decade or two, Bioshock doesn't seem like it's all that Interesting. Portal, for example, was much more interesting and innovative (short as it was). But I think I might have been wowed by the aesthetic and some of the gameplay if I hadn't played the games that Bioshock is rehashing.
But, there would be other considerations. Does the battery swap location have sufficient batteries to handle peak demand? Like, on a holiday weekend, when everyone's driving electric cars, and they're all going out of town, a swap/recharge facility may be swamped, and not be able to have charged batteries fast enough.
How do gas stations make sure they have enough gas to handle peak demand? Is there a real reason why having enough batteries on hand should be so much more difficult? In one sense, it seems like it could be easier. They have to continually transport gas to each station, but a battery station would only really require the transport of electricity to charge the batteries onsite (barring defective/damaged batteries that need to be replaced).
Yes, what you're saying is sensible. If cable is degraded/damaged to the point where it's not working well enough, or if it's too low grade for the speed you need (i.e. wanting to do gigabit ethernet with something less than CAT5e), then it makes sense to upgrade.
But I don't think it's usually the case where you have to say, "Well, this cable is 5 years old. It's still working fine, but we'd better replace it soon."
I'm not sure what would "get old" exactly. It's insulated copper, so I think it should be good so long as they aren't damaged. If anyone knows better, feel free to correct me.
If you want to be sure, though, test them. Transfer files over your network. If the connection is bad, you can try replacing the cable and see if that works. But the fact that Cat6 is out doesn't mean you have to rush out and replace all your CAT5e cables, especially if you're only dealing with normal 100mbps connections. But I use CAT5e for 1gbps connections, and that seems to work fine.
I remember seeing a TV show that described the smell of space. Highly interesting stuff.
I personally find getting almost anything done on Linux much more time consuming than either OS X or Windows...
It depends greatly on what you're doing. If all you need is a web browser, and office suite (and OpenOffice meets your needs), and access to email via POP/IMAP, then it really doesn't matter which OS you're using. If you absolutely must use certain apps, then you're stuck using a platform that supports those apps. Otherwise, some tasks may be easier on one system or another, and otherwise it depends greatly on what you're used to and what you prefer.
It's valid of Microsoft to point out that people should concern themselves with value vs. TCO. I'm not sure that's a comparison that will leave Windows on top, though.
Maybe I'm wrong here, but is that even particularly unusual? I thought all digital TV networks (cable, FiOS, whatever) hooked into what are essentially small computers running Java on Linux (or something similar) with fancy audio and video decoding chips. That's what cable boxes are now, right? They just aren't necessarily using TCP/IP to deliver the data, but otherwise it's the same thing.
I think the three questions are:
That explains why their movie catalog isn't bigger than their music catalog, but not really why their movie catalog isn't bigger than it is. I'm not sure why there are so many modern movies readily available on DVD that aren't available on iTunes.
Maybe they just haven't gotten around to them all. Maybe Apple is trying to keep their catalog small for some reason. Maybe movie studios are purposefully trying to limit the scope of online sales. But there's some kind of reason.
My point was more that, as far as I know, you can't buy stuff from the iTunes store without iTunes, and that the file format itself is a secondary concern if you're not able to buy it anyway. But then that beyond that, the problem is DRM more than "proprietary file formats".
I don't think it's about having the "right". You think the RIAA and MPAA are interested in consumer rights and the rights of society to eventually take works into the public domain? They're interested in the realities of business and what will make money.
So one of the things they have to deal with is the reality that infringing copies are being made all the time and distributed online, putting them in a position where they have to compete with a free alternative that delivers any work that anyone wants directly to them right now. Not 6 months or a year after the movie has left theaters or years after the season ends. Right now.
That's the reality. If they aren't taking that fact into account already, then they should start.