At the very least, don't go posting pics of yourself half nekkid with friends, sucking a skull bong.
I'm a bit dyslexic, but when I read that, at first I thought you wrote, "sucking a bull dong." I thought, wow, no wonder cayenne8 wants some privacy. I wouldn't that showing up during a job interview, either.
and even if you gave them broadband for free they still wouldn't be interested.
Still, it seems like there's a leap between saying, "2/3 of people without decent Internet don't want it," and saying, "there's no problem with our Internet connections," which I'm sure will be the conclusion people try to draw from this. Here's a half-assed comparison: If I said 2/3 of people who don't own cars don't want to buy a car, does that necessarily mean we shouldn't worry about the price of oil?
Even if you accept the 2/3 number, that doesn't mean we shouldn't care about the remaining 1/3 of people who can't get broadband, and it also doesn't begin to deal with all the people who have broadband and still aren't happy with the level of service they're getting. The fastest residential Internet connection I can get in my neighborhood in NYC has a 512kbps upload rate, and I find that to be pretty damn weak.
It's like asking the population of 1930s America if they wanted highways
Interesting point. I wonder if there is any information available about how many people wanted running water back when that was a new thing, and how many people said, "Nah, I'll stick with my outhouse. It's fine." How many people said, "I don't need electricity. I get by with my lamps."
Too bad they probably didn't do lots of polling back then, and just said, "We're going to do this." We might have a much simpler life.
Praising Obama for using technology is no different than something like praising him because he likes rock music.
No, it's really not. Changes in technology have effectively changed the way the world works. If you don't see that, then either (a) you're too young to remember how it used to work; or (b) you're too old to understand how it's working now.
Technology is a tremendous economic issue, since changes in technology can drastically increase our efficiency, and failure to keep up would cause us to lag behind the rest of the world. It's a social issue in that a lack of access to technology and technology education creates another barrier to the poor working their way out of poverty. It affects issues of justice, as we've all seen with struggles over copyrights and patents, censorship, and net neutrality.
And yes, it's also a cultural issue too, like saying "he likes rock and roll". But that's not entirely superficial and irrelevant. If the chief executive of our country doesn't understand the various cultural shifts going on in our country, then how is he supposed to govern it effectively?
Your right to point out that email should be considered (as of now) inherently insecure unless you take some kind of extra precaution (e.g. PGP encryption).
On the other hand, there are levels of security. FTP is basically insecure, but if I had to put confidential information on an FTP account, I'd still want to put a password on that FTP account.
Likewise, I do think it's dangerous to have the Whitehouse's emails stored on a private company's servers. How hard is it to set up an email address? How long does that take? You should be able to buy a domain, install a mail server, and set up 50 email addresses in a day.
And given this and the story earlier about the White House using Youtube, it makes me wonder what's going on between the administration and Google? Do they have some kind of special deal going on?
Yes, I agree with you. Saying "spam is essentially a non-issue nowadays," followed directly by, "IT departments still have to do quite a bit of work," seems a little crazy. If keeping spam out of users' mailboxes requires a decent amount of time and effort from IT people, then it's not a non-issue.
Further, I still see spam coming to pretty much every mail account I see. I have a couple different Gmail accounts, and they all get spam. I know seems to think that Google's spam filtering is perfect, but I still get spam in my inbox, and occasional false-positives. And in one of my accounts (that I make no effort to keep secret) I get hundreds of emails going into my spam filter every day, so I've given up looking for false positives.
At work, I've gotten our spam filters working decently enough, but again there are occasional false positives, and some spam makes it through the filters. I checked the statistics-- roughly 85% of the email we receive on a daily basis is filtered out as spam. That's not a non-issue.
And even with all this, it's just a continuing arms race. I'm catching most spam today, but who knows what spammers will do next to get around my filters.
I agree that bittorrent is a good solution. My point is that there's a difference between "We can host it ourselves, but we decided to use bittorrent because it's more efficient," and "We can't host it ourselves."
Even ignoring cost, bittorrent is, in a lot of ways, a more robust solution than relying on a single server or even several mirrors.
I was responding to a very minor thing, really, which was: "so they don't have to have servers that are that good..." Regardless of whether they're using bittorrent, I don't particularly like the idea of the whitehouse using servers that are somehow sub-par or crappy. It might just be a language thing, and by "good" you just mean that they shouldn't need to build Google-level infrastructure just for sharing a couple videos, and I'd agree with that. But for heaven's sake, the whitehouse shouldn't be hamstrung technologically in order to save a few thousand dollars, given the size of the budget.
A few things come to mind immediately when you talk about a suddenly-slow Windows machine. First is check task manager and see how much memory and CPU are being used. If it looks like you're using more memory than you have (in terms of physical RAM), then buy more RAM. If an application is using a lot of RAM and/or CPU, try killing it. I'll skip talking about malware since the OP says he checked for that.
If none of that helps, look to the hard drive. A simple "chkdsk/f c:", reboot, and then "defrag c:" can occasionally work wonders. Also, I highly recommend defragmenting your pagefile every now and then. This has to be done separately from a normal defrag, at boot time.
There's more that you can do, of course, but using PageDefrag seems to be one of those things that people don't know to do, usually isn't that helpful, but every now and then makes a huge difference.
While I think offering them as torrents is a good idea, I would hope that it wouldn't be strictly necessary. If the federal government can't manage the infrastructure necessary to host some public videos, it seems like we're in some trouble.
Yeah, I don't see why they should use Youtube at all. If it's just an issue of getting the video up on their site, they should be able to do that on their own (including using Flash to embed them). Or is there some other benefit that posting on Youtube gives them?
It seems like it should be enough to make them public domain, so that people can post them to Youtube if they want. The government should even be able to post them both on their own site and Youtube. I just don't understand why they should use Youtube as their primary means of dissemination.
Notice I didn't say I was going to run out and buy a Zune. I'm just saying it's good for Zune owners that iTunes music doesn't use DRM, since it means that Zunes are now compatible with the largest music retailer in the US.
Sorry if I wasn't being very clear, but I wasn't trying to suggest that 12-18 months actually was too short. I was saying that whether or not that's how often people buy new phones is irrelevant. Even if they kept phones for much longer than that, it still doesn't justify forcing people to re-buy their music library every time they get a new phone.
Are you serious? That would be like if I was introduced to my friend's new girlfriend and I said "Hey, Al, I see Peter and you have moved to dating girls that don't have herpes!"
Maybe more like saying "eldavojohn, I hear you've moved to dating girls who don't have herpes!" and you replying, "I never dated women with herpes before! I've only dated men with herpes!" You'd have a valid objection there, but one could argue that my statement wasn't "misleading" so much as "ambiguous".
Yeah, sorry about the bitchy rant but you asked me about it.
Well... actually I didn't ask you whether you liked iTunes. I really only asked whether you might be touchy about Apple. But you know, it's fine. I can appreciate that you don't like iTunes. I wouldn't ask you to use it.
But I'll say it seems to me like some people are just very angry that people like Apple products, and will rant and rage, virtually unprompted, against Apple and all Apple products.
Yeah, I don't know the numbers, but consoles often sell at a loss for several years in the hopes of making money in the long run. Any hopes of turning profitable must have been set off a while by the extremely high defective-rate for 360s (at one point, I heard the number 16%), which has caused them to spend buttloads of money replacing defective units.
He definately didn't defend as much as say "Yeah, we don't care" to most of the questions.
To my ears it sounded a little different. It was more like, "We don't know what we're doing, we're semi-incompetent, and I'm generally unprepared for your questions, but maybe we'll figure this out before the project gets abandoned."
You don't really have to provide a "mechanism" if you just left the system open. If the files were non-DRM and the phone had an open interface (e.g. you plug in a USB cable and can browse/transfer files on it), then the transferring step is trivial.
Not only that, but you're talking about Microsoft-- the company that makes the desktop OS on most PCs as well as the OS on a good percentage of smartphones. If they can't make a mechanism work on to sync between their own desktop OS and their own phone OS, they're pretty well f*#$ed.
Wow. Just... wow. That's impressive market research on their part. They are not sure how long people keep their cellphones. And they see no issue with requiring digital files to expire whenever the hardware does.
That's they don't know that people sometimes replace their phone within a year isn't the part that bothers me about that question. Hell, let's suppose that 12-18 months is too short an estimate of how long people hold onto their phones. Let's say, instead, that it's 5 years, which is a pretty high number. Still, let's go with that for the sake of argument. It still doesn't address the question-- "Can you really expect people to buy music that's locked to a device they upgrade every 5 years?"
Apple and Amazon have finally moved to music download services free of copy protection
I'm sorry, I was under the impression that Amazon's music service has always been DRM free.
Well if you want to pick nits, nobody explicitly said Amazon ever had DRM on their music download store. You could argue that Amazon has "moved to music download services free of copy protection" in that they moved into music download services, and those services don't use DRM.
I don't know why everyone got excited when Apple went DRM-free, I've been buying DRM free MP3 singles from Amazon for over a year.
Is it possible that you're just a bit touchy about people hyping Apple? I mean, we could debate the importance of iTunes dropping DRM on all songs, but they are the biggest music retailer in the US (including brick&mortar stores). That alone seems enough to make the transition noteworthy.
Anyway, you're right that DRM isn't dead yet. Amazon, Apple, and Netflix are still using DRM on video, AFAIK. Also, Microsoft *needs* DRM to stay alive in order to keep WMA alive. Ignoring issues related to DRM, what's the point of using WMA when you have the option of AAC or MP3?
There's not really anything that inherently makes PDF slow, either. Adobe Acrobat and Acrobat Reader happen to be pretty boated, but the format can be rendered fairly quickly.
its a mark of worse writing, because it's very easy not to answer questions.
Sometimes it's even easier *to* answer questions. I don't feel the need to answer "yes" to the question, "Do we have a right to kill off the indigenous population so that we can mine the materials we need?" On the other hand, if you're just going to say, "Of course we don't have the right! There's no debate, because it's clearly a horrible thing to do!" then neither the question or answer is very interesting.
What's far more interesting (and better writing) is to take an issue where it's patently obvious what the "right thing to do" is, and then make the audience reconsider, or else to take an action that is obviously horrible and yet still make the audience feel sympathy/empathy for the perpetrator without diminishing the horribleness of the act.
It's really easy, obvious, and boring to say, "We should all be nice to each other and do the right thing all the time." It's much harder to write a story that accurately captures some of the various reasons why we aren't nice to each other all the time and why we don't do the right thing.
In fact, if you listen to the episode commentary, quite a bit of things were done "because it seemed cool." Boomer being a Cylon? "Because it seemed cool." The whole thing with the second Sharon and Helo on Caprica? "Because it seemed cool."
Well in fairness, we don't know what that response means. Just because they chose plot twists that they thought would be "cool" doesn't mean that they were less thought-through than other plot points in other works of writing.
Clearly, someone had some kind of plan that involved placing the Cylons in human society, and then herding both Cylons and humans toward Earth. It doesn't seem to have worked out, but then again it's not clear what the hell is going on, so everything might still be going according to plan.
I think it's open to debate. Trying to think of someone growing a backbone, it took me approximately 2 seconds to come up with Lee Adama's defense of Baltar. It wasn't exactly the path of least resistance, but he seemed to think it was "the right thing to do." I didn't even understand why he was doing it until he actually explained it at the trial, and after his explanation, I agreed that it was probably the right thing for him to do.
I think part of the problem is that they display everything as being multi-sided and multi-faceted, and so for any example that I come up with of a character "growing a backbone and doing the right thing," you might say, "That wasn't the right thing to do."
And I don't know... but that seems more like my experience of life. I don't think I've ever seen a decision so "right" that it's beyond debate, beyond questioning from another perspective, or at least beyond some kind of improvement. I don't think I've ever found the "right" answer to any of my problems, but rather I hope that the answers are things that I can be happy enough with, or at least that I can live with.
Slashdot Mirror
At the very least, don't go posting pics of yourself half nekkid with friends, sucking a skull bong.
I'm a bit dyslexic, but when I read that, at first I thought you wrote, "sucking a bull dong." I thought, wow, no wonder cayenne8 wants some privacy. I wouldn't that showing up during a job interview, either.
and even if you gave them broadband for free they still wouldn't be interested.
Still, it seems like there's a leap between saying, "2/3 of people without decent Internet don't want it," and saying, "there's no problem with our Internet connections," which I'm sure will be the conclusion people try to draw from this. Here's a half-assed comparison: If I said 2/3 of people who don't own cars don't want to buy a car, does that necessarily mean we shouldn't worry about the price of oil?
Even if you accept the 2/3 number, that doesn't mean we shouldn't care about the remaining 1/3 of people who can't get broadband, and it also doesn't begin to deal with all the people who have broadband and still aren't happy with the level of service they're getting. The fastest residential Internet connection I can get in my neighborhood in NYC has a 512kbps upload rate, and I find that to be pretty damn weak.
It's like asking the population of 1930s America if they wanted highways
Interesting point. I wonder if there is any information available about how many people wanted running water back when that was a new thing, and how many people said, "Nah, I'll stick with my outhouse. It's fine." How many people said, "I don't need electricity. I get by with my lamps."
Too bad they probably didn't do lots of polling back then, and just said, "We're going to do this." We might have a much simpler life.
Praising Obama for using technology is no different than something like praising him because he likes rock music.
No, it's really not. Changes in technology have effectively changed the way the world works. If you don't see that, then either (a) you're too young to remember how it used to work; or (b) you're too old to understand how it's working now.
Technology is a tremendous economic issue, since changes in technology can drastically increase our efficiency, and failure to keep up would cause us to lag behind the rest of the world. It's a social issue in that a lack of access to technology and technology education creates another barrier to the poor working their way out of poverty. It affects issues of justice, as we've all seen with struggles over copyrights and patents, censorship, and net neutrality.
And yes, it's also a cultural issue too, like saying "he likes rock and roll". But that's not entirely superficial and irrelevant. If the chief executive of our country doesn't understand the various cultural shifts going on in our country, then how is he supposed to govern it effectively?
Your right to point out that email should be considered (as of now) inherently insecure unless you take some kind of extra precaution (e.g. PGP encryption).
On the other hand, there are levels of security. FTP is basically insecure, but if I had to put confidential information on an FTP account, I'd still want to put a password on that FTP account.
Likewise, I do think it's dangerous to have the Whitehouse's emails stored on a private company's servers. How hard is it to set up an email address? How long does that take? You should be able to buy a domain, install a mail server, and set up 50 email addresses in a day.
And given this and the story earlier about the White House using Youtube, it makes me wonder what's going on between the administration and Google? Do they have some kind of special deal going on?
Yes, I agree with you. Saying "spam is essentially a non-issue nowadays," followed directly by, "IT departments still have to do quite a bit of work," seems a little crazy. If keeping spam out of users' mailboxes requires a decent amount of time and effort from IT people, then it's not a non-issue.
Further, I still see spam coming to pretty much every mail account I see. I have a couple different Gmail accounts, and they all get spam. I know seems to think that Google's spam filtering is perfect, but I still get spam in my inbox, and occasional false-positives. And in one of my accounts (that I make no effort to keep secret) I get hundreds of emails going into my spam filter every day, so I've given up looking for false positives.
At work, I've gotten our spam filters working decently enough, but again there are occasional false positives, and some spam makes it through the filters. I checked the statistics-- roughly 85% of the email we receive on a daily basis is filtered out as spam. That's not a non-issue.
And even with all this, it's just a continuing arms race. I'm catching most spam today, but who knows what spammers will do next to get around my filters.
I agree that bittorrent is a good solution. My point is that there's a difference between "We can host it ourselves, but we decided to use bittorrent because it's more efficient," and "We can't host it ourselves."
Even ignoring cost, bittorrent is, in a lot of ways, a more robust solution than relying on a single server or even several mirrors.
I was responding to a very minor thing, really, which was: "so they don't have to have servers that are that good..." Regardless of whether they're using bittorrent, I don't particularly like the idea of the whitehouse using servers that are somehow sub-par or crappy. It might just be a language thing, and by "good" you just mean that they shouldn't need to build Google-level infrastructure just for sharing a couple videos, and I'd agree with that. But for heaven's sake, the whitehouse shouldn't be hamstrung technologically in order to save a few thousand dollars, given the size of the budget.
All this talk about SysInternals and no love for PageDefrag? It's not going to help diagnose this problem, but it may (possibly) help fix it.
A few things come to mind immediately when you talk about a suddenly-slow Windows machine. First is check task manager and see how much memory and CPU are being used. If it looks like you're using more memory than you have (in terms of physical RAM), then buy more RAM. If an application is using a lot of RAM and/or CPU, try killing it. I'll skip talking about malware since the OP says he checked for that.
If none of that helps, look to the hard drive. A simple "chkdsk /f c:", reboot, and then "defrag c:" can occasionally work wonders. Also, I highly recommend defragmenting your pagefile every now and then. This has to be done separately from a normal defrag, at boot time.
There's more that you can do, of course, but using PageDefrag seems to be one of those things that people don't know to do, usually isn't that helpful, but every now and then makes a huge difference.
While I think offering them as torrents is a good idea, I would hope that it wouldn't be strictly necessary. If the federal government can't manage the infrastructure necessary to host some public videos, it seems like we're in some trouble.
Yeah, I don't see why they should use Youtube at all. If it's just an issue of getting the video up on their site, they should be able to do that on their own (including using Flash to embed them). Or is there some other benefit that posting on Youtube gives them?
It seems like it should be enough to make them public domain, so that people can post them to Youtube if they want. The government should even be able to post them both on their own site and Youtube. I just don't understand why they should use Youtube as their primary means of dissemination.
I don't even think you can have DRM on MP3s
Oh, and for the record, it is possible to have DRM-wrapped MP3s. They're not common or widely supported, and no, Amazon never sold them.
Notice I didn't say I was going to run out and buy a Zune. I'm just saying it's good for Zune owners that iTunes music doesn't use DRM, since it means that Zunes are now compatible with the largest music retailer in the US.
Sorry if I wasn't being very clear, but I wasn't trying to suggest that 12-18 months actually was too short. I was saying that whether or not that's how often people buy new phones is irrelevant. Even if they kept phones for much longer than that, it still doesn't justify forcing people to re-buy their music library every time they get a new phone.
Are you serious? That would be like if I was introduced to my friend's new girlfriend and I said "Hey, Al, I see Peter and you have moved to dating girls that don't have herpes!"
Maybe more like saying "eldavojohn, I hear you've moved to dating girls who don't have herpes!" and you replying, "I never dated women with herpes before! I've only dated men with herpes!" You'd have a valid objection there, but one could argue that my statement wasn't "misleading" so much as "ambiguous".
Yeah, sorry about the bitchy rant but you asked me about it.
Well... actually I didn't ask you whether you liked iTunes. I really only asked whether you might be touchy about Apple. But you know, it's fine. I can appreciate that you don't like iTunes. I wouldn't ask you to use it.
But I'll say it seems to me like some people are just very angry that people like Apple products, and will rant and rage, virtually unprompted, against Apple and all Apple products.
Yeah, I don't know the numbers, but consoles often sell at a loss for several years in the hopes of making money in the long run. Any hopes of turning profitable must have been set off a while by the extremely high defective-rate for 360s (at one point, I heard the number 16%), which has caused them to spend buttloads of money replacing defective units.
He definately didn't defend as much as say "Yeah, we don't care" to most of the questions.
To my ears it sounded a little different. It was more like, "We don't know what we're doing, we're semi-incompetent, and I'm generally unprepared for your questions, but maybe we'll figure this out before the project gets abandoned."
You don't really have to provide a "mechanism" if you just left the system open. If the files were non-DRM and the phone had an open interface (e.g. you plug in a USB cable and can browse/transfer files on it), then the transferring step is trivial.
Not only that, but you're talking about Microsoft-- the company that makes the desktop OS on most PCs as well as the OS on a good percentage of smartphones. If they can't make a mechanism work on to sync between their own desktop OS and their own phone OS, they're pretty well f*#$ed.
Wow. Just... wow. That's impressive market research on their part. They are not sure how long people keep their cellphones. And they see no issue with requiring digital files to expire whenever the hardware does.
That's they don't know that people sometimes replace their phone within a year isn't the part that bothers me about that question. Hell, let's suppose that 12-18 months is too short an estimate of how long people hold onto their phones. Let's say, instead, that it's 5 years, which is a pretty high number. Still, let's go with that for the sake of argument. It still doesn't address the question-- "Can you really expect people to buy music that's locked to a device they upgrade every 5 years?"
Well now that ITunes is going DRM free the Zune is even less interesting.
Why? I think the Zune is more interesting now that iTunes is DRM-free. Now you can buy songs from iTunes and play them on your Zune.
Apple and Amazon have finally moved to music download services free of copy protection
I'm sorry, I was under the impression that Amazon's music service has always been DRM free.
Well if you want to pick nits, nobody explicitly said Amazon ever had DRM on their music download store. You could argue that Amazon has "moved to music download services free of copy protection" in that they moved into music download services, and those services don't use DRM.
I don't know why everyone got excited when Apple went DRM-free, I've been buying DRM free MP3 singles from Amazon for over a year.
Is it possible that you're just a bit touchy about people hyping Apple? I mean, we could debate the importance of iTunes dropping DRM on all songs, but they are the biggest music retailer in the US (including brick&mortar stores). That alone seems enough to make the transition noteworthy.
Anyway, you're right that DRM isn't dead yet. Amazon, Apple, and Netflix are still using DRM on video, AFAIK. Also, Microsoft *needs* DRM to stay alive in order to keep WMA alive. Ignoring issues related to DRM, what's the point of using WMA when you have the option of AAC or MP3?
There's not really anything that inherently makes PDF slow, either. Adobe Acrobat and Acrobat Reader happen to be pretty boated, but the format can be rendered fairly quickly.
You've been watching too much TV. Lee Odama is fictional.
its a mark of worse writing, because it's very easy not to answer questions.
Sometimes it's even easier *to* answer questions. I don't feel the need to answer "yes" to the question, "Do we have a right to kill off the indigenous population so that we can mine the materials we need?" On the other hand, if you're just going to say, "Of course we don't have the right! There's no debate, because it's clearly a horrible thing to do!" then neither the question or answer is very interesting.
What's far more interesting (and better writing) is to take an issue where it's patently obvious what the "right thing to do" is, and then make the audience reconsider, or else to take an action that is obviously horrible and yet still make the audience feel sympathy/empathy for the perpetrator without diminishing the horribleness of the act.
It's really easy, obvious, and boring to say, "We should all be nice to each other and do the right thing all the time." It's much harder to write a story that accurately captures some of the various reasons why we aren't nice to each other all the time and why we don't do the right thing.
In fact, if you listen to the episode commentary, quite a bit of things were done "because it seemed cool." Boomer being a Cylon? "Because it seemed cool." The whole thing with the second Sharon and Helo on Caprica? "Because it seemed cool."
Well in fairness, we don't know what that response means. Just because they chose plot twists that they thought would be "cool" doesn't mean that they were less thought-through than other plot points in other works of writing.
Clearly, someone had some kind of plan that involved placing the Cylons in human society, and then herding both Cylons and humans toward Earth. It doesn't seem to have worked out, but then again it's not clear what the hell is going on, so everything might still be going according to plan.
I think it's open to debate. Trying to think of someone growing a backbone, it took me approximately 2 seconds to come up with Lee Adama's defense of Baltar. It wasn't exactly the path of least resistance, but he seemed to think it was "the right thing to do." I didn't even understand why he was doing it until he actually explained it at the trial, and after his explanation, I agreed that it was probably the right thing for him to do.
I think part of the problem is that they display everything as being multi-sided and multi-faceted, and so for any example that I come up with of a character "growing a backbone and doing the right thing," you might say, "That wasn't the right thing to do."
And I don't know... but that seems more like my experience of life. I don't think I've ever seen a decision so "right" that it's beyond debate, beyond questioning from another perspective, or at least beyond some kind of improvement. I don't think I've ever found the "right" answer to any of my problems, but rather I hope that the answers are things that I can be happy enough with, or at least that I can live with.