the laws of supply and demand suggest that the value of each IP address will approach zero.
Except that the "laws" aren't laws at all and are in fact closer to myth. The supply of an item does not determine its price. The price people are willing to pay determines its price.
It's not really a myth, it's a valid model of economics. The question you're bringing up is more about who is providing the supply, and how freely they make it available. If everyone could just give themselves an IP address, then yeah, each address would be worth very little. But when your ISP controls the addresses you get, you have to have one to use the Internet, and they can market each additional address as a feature, then there is still a demand, and they are aritficially limiting the supply. It's like the diamond industry: DeBeers owns most of the supply, and there's lot of diamonds, but they don't let more on the market than the market demands to make sure that people will have to pay a lot for diamonds.
IPv6 is intended to address the concern of IPv4 address exhaustion.... IPv6 addresses this problem by supporting 340 undecillion (655368 3.4 × 1038) addresses.
And as we all know, 340 undecillion addresses ought to be enough for anyone!
I don't know whether or not there is a huge need to jump to IPv6 or not, but hasn't history shown us that even the seemingly "good enough" possible ranges aren't usually good enough forever (640k, Y2K, etc.)? Not that I have any idea how we could ever use up "430 quintillion (4.3 × 1020) unique addresses per square inch" (again, thanks to wikipedia), but who knows what novel ideas will come up in the future? Plus having so many unused addresses has its advantages, too, since it makes it harder (it would seem almost impossible) for hackers to randomly guess a valid address out of that big of a space, even with an automated script that could test millions of addresses in a short time.
From a senior project I did in a few years ago, we dimmed an array of 300 high-powered LEDs (Lumileds)with no flicker at any level. They definitely didn't run totally cool, though they did have a fair amount of heat.
As far as dimmers go, most standard dimmers use SCRs or triacs for dimming instead ofa rheostat anyhow, and that should work just fine for LEDs. Whatever supporting circuitry is used can easily provide dimming capabilities already built-in.
The one main advantage is the end of ac-dc adapters aka wall warts.
That would be nice, definitely... but do manufacturers want to get rid of proprietary wall warts? If they did, then why hasn't anyone come up with a universal wall wart connector specification that says that all wall wart connectors will be the same size and polarity? (I can understand defferent needs as far as voltages go.) A lot of devices tell you specifically not to use another wall wart, maybe because the average customer (non-slashdotter) doesn't know how to read the voltage, current and polarity specs. But it does seem like they don't want it that easy to use a 3rd party power adapter. Maybe they think that if your power adapter breaks, you'll just buy a new phone/PDA/MP3 player.
In any case, if this does become popular, this one Splashpower manufacturer will have to swing deals with all of the electroncis companies to get their equipment built into every device, or make adapters for each device that they're not built into, which is fine, but what if a competitor releases a similar product? Would a cell phone with a SpalshPower adapter built-in work with a chargin pad from another company? Would an external iPod adapter from another manufacturer work with a SplashPower pad?
I'm just thinking this might not quite solve the multiple wall wart problem
How about this then? You go to the bank and deposit your money. Some customers are getting extra money free from the bank, you don't. You both used the same service but others got better treatment.
Money's not the same thing. If they've got extra money for some, it can be evenly redivided for all. Electronics aren't quite the same. Of course, if a bank did do something like this anyway, and distributed money nonrandomly using criteria such as age, gender, race, or something like that, then it really would be a problem. Not if they discriminated based on the money you already have in your account, though, since it already works that way.
In TFA, Schneier wrote that phishing isn't the problem. It's just one tactic. The problem is people using fraudulent information to access accounts. If someone comes up with a good way to stop phishing, it probably won't help fraud that much, because phishers will find another way to get account numbers and PINs and passwords.
What Schneier says the financial institutions need to do, is find a way to prevent unauthorized account access, which they will have to do if they are forced to bear the entire burdens of identity theft. He doesn't give any hints on how to accomplish that, but he was clear in saying that the answer isn't about any simple solution to stop phishing, it's got to be on the heads of the banks to stop identity theft.
To add to what I just said, so that it's more in-line with the grandparent post... The content is protected from the get-go, not just in the OS.
Right now there's only two ways you are watching HD content legally[...] you're either grabbing it from over-the-air (OTA) signals, or your cable/satellite provider is sending it to you, guarded by their set-top boxes. Let me point out the takeaway: the content is supposed to be secured. Video from the cable/satellite providers is encrypted and protected. The OTA content is not encrypted, but let's not forget that the broadcast flag was designed in order to add DRM controls to OTA transmissions.
So the content is protected to begin with, the OS won't be able to play it back without the appropriate drivers for the appropriate monitors in question. This is all assuming that the broadcast flag actually means anything real, but then, I haven't heard anything in the last month or two about whether the broadcast flag is truly dead or truly enforceable
If you could crack the DRM in Linux, you'd be able to crack it just as easily in Windows. It's not a question of not being able to play HD content at all, it's about not being able to play protected HD content. Not all HD content will necessarily be licensed. Anything unprotected could still be easily made to playback in any OS, while protected content would have to be either cracked or played with an approved player, in any OS. Using Linux just means you're more likely to not have an approved player available, so you wouldn't have a choice but to crack it.
I want an old-school tombstone
on
Video Tombstones
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
The nice thing about a classic tombstone is that it will last for a long, long time... who would put in a video screen that will last for just a few years, then succumb to damage from sun, rain, dust, and vandalism, all while turning the cemetery into a mini Las Vegas? Those close to the deceased can remember them with their own videos and photographs in their homes.
It would probably be at least this easy to set up vi highlighting like this, and that would allow the highlighting to actually be a dynamic part of display of the numbers, and not part of the document itself. Just make a list of keywords -- there's really not even that many words to put in the list: Zero, One through Twenty, Thirty, Forty, Fity, Sixty, Seventy, Eighty, Ninety, Hundred, Thousand, Million, Billion, Trillion, etc.
The whole thing could handle pretty much any number you need to deal with includuing decimals and negative numbers with forty keywords. This is a lame and useless patent.
I guess this comment applies more to open source OS's than to open source software in general, but the thing that always kept me from using Linux at home back I only had dial-up was my winmodem. Granted, I could have gone out and bought a $40 hardware modem that would have solved the problem, but I couldn't ever justify that for myself or (more importantly) for my wife. Has there been much progress in the last few years in supporting winmodems under Linux?
Now that I have cable internet, I'd put Linux on my home computer, but the hard drive in my 6 year-old PC has too much crud stored on it to make room for Linux... Now I just have to justify a new computer. (A new hard drive would work, but it would be nice to have a new PC.)
42.1 percent of American households now own a computer...
In 2003 about 13 percent of American households are actually using broadband...
Even if you double broadband to 26%, you have 74% still using dial-up.
Do you mean 13% of households are using broadband, or 13% of household computer owners are using braodband... because if only 42% of households have a computer, I'm pretty sure that 74% of households aren't using dial-up. So if it's 13% of total households using broadband (as your link states), that's 31% of computer owners, or if you use your high-end estimate of 26%, that's more than 62% household computer users with broadband. In any case, you don't have 74% of computer users using dial-up.
Or did you mean 13%/26% of computer users using broadband? You should be more clear when labeling your statistics and using statistics from totally different sources.
The FCC gave cell phone providers over 10 years to figure out 911 services. Now they want VoIP companies to do the same thing in 10 months?
It's probably because it took a long time before people starting using cell phones to completely replace their landline phone service... If you didn't have 911 while you're out and about, it's not much different than before you had the cell phone. Not providing 911 didn't take anything away from you. But when you lose the ability to call 911 from your own house, that's a step backwards, and it's dangerous to not only the person who pays the phone bill, but to friends, family, babysitters and people who get in car accidents in the street out in front of your house.
Making the phone service provider hold the customer's hand in setting up 911 service might be a valuable thing for the customer. After all, noone has ever sat down and explained my POTS 911 service. I should know at the least whether or not there are any limitations to how the service works, but I don't, because like most phone customers, I've never taken the time to look up that information.
From what I understand (I just spoke to a Vonage customer service lady last night, to see if I want service or not) E911 is the service that they will be rolling out by the end of the year which makes it so you don't have to provide your address. What they have right now isn't the E911 (E for Enhanced) it's just non-enhanced 911.
If you can play DRM-ed music videos, I'm sure you would be able to play homemade.mov files as well, which includes a lot of video clips available on the internet, and those created at home using $30 QuickTime Pro. With an iPod Video that could play those videos, home users would actually have a reason to buy QT Pro, so that's a benefit for Apple.
As far as the power of the processor goes, someone posted a comment claiming that the current iPods could handle mpeg4. I don't know anything about the current iPod processor. Maybe they're making stuff up, maybe they really know something I don't. But I don't know that we really know what processor they would be using for an iPod video... Maybe they have something pretty strong lined up.
I think that if Apple is going to make a move like this, they will make it big, with something uesful that people are going to want, in the style of the original iPod/iTMS. Simple music videos at $2 a pop aren't much more interesting or useful than cell phone ringtones, and I just don't buy that Apple would get into video just for that. I'm not expecting feature films any time in the next couple of years, but I think there's more use to this than just music videos.
Of course, if you're talking about about "the product" as in the service for buying the video, then see "Bill Gates Swears Vow Against 'Son of iPod'" on the main page.
There's been a few comments on/. lately about how portable video devices won't take off because noone wants to watch video on a small screen. But I've been thinking about this, and the regular iPod line has been inspiring high-end custom electronics manufacturers to integrate the iPod into nice home audio systems. The more I think about it, the purpose of the Video iPod wouldn't necessarily be to watch video wherever you go, although that would be an extra bonus, but to bring video wherever you want to, and easily watch it on whatever decent-size display you want. I'm sure it wouldn't have DVI or component out, so it wouldn't be a source for super-awesome hi-def video, but it would be great for home movies, music videos, funny videos downloaded from the Internet, and a lot of other things.
are the pretty pictures on the left-hand column of keys configurable?
They'd have to be... the picture shows iTunes and QuickTime keys, and not every user has those installed. Maybe you can tell a config utility which programs you want the buttons to use and it automatically takes the programs' icons and loads them in. Looks pretty cool.
This isn't entirely on-topic, but I'd be interested to find out how well the MovieBeam service is doing... I haven't heard much about it for a while. It's really not the same thing other than movies being gradually downloaded into your home... If I understand their service correctly, their player is more or less constantly receiving movies from an RF broadcast, which is probably usually a slow process, except that it's constantly running, so after a few days you'd have several movies.
The big difference here would be that MovieBeam gives you a bunch of movies (or maybe just several) that you don't choose, then you pay for each of those that you actually want to watch. After a few days of being stored, movies are replaced with newly downloaded ones, so the selection is always rotating. Has anyone here used MovieBeam, or ever really heard about how well it works?
What will end up in my Start Menu? We all know the answer: a "Bar Corp." folder with a "Foo" sub-folder which will contain "Foo," "Uninstall Foo" (in spite of the uninstaller being in the Control Panel!!!!!!), and "Foo ReadMe" (in spite of the existence of a Help file). Ugh!
With XP (and maybe Win2000), the Add/Remove programs box takes forever to come up. It makes me wish every program could have an uninstall shortcut in the start menu... as much of a pain as it is to go through the whole start menu process, it's more of a pain to sit and wait for the Add/Remove Programs box to populate. I actually like to see items related to a program to show up in the program's start menu entry, but when there's 5 different help files, and links to the developer's website, and all that, that's when I really think the start menu has been abused. If I want the help file, I've probably already got the program open, I'll just hit F1.
And while I'm complaining about Add/Remove Programs... who has ever used it to Add programs (other than Windows components)?!?!?
they surely can't be far behind with a 1-meter wide high resolution flat screen monitor ... No more lugging around bulky "compact" LCD projectors to do presentations, just unroll a several-meter-wide screen and hang it on a wall.
I've always understood these e-Ink technologies to be just black and white, and I don't know how fast they're supposed to be able to switch each "pixel". I think what you're looking for is the flexible OLED (http://www.universaldisplay.com/tech.htm), which I agree, will be pretty awesome... those actually have been produced as prototypes in large, high-resolution screens.
Slashdot Mirror
the laws of supply and demand suggest that the value of each IP address will approach zero.
Except that the "laws" aren't laws at all and are in fact closer to myth. The supply of an item does not determine its price. The price people are willing to pay determines its price.
It's not really a myth, it's a valid model of economics. The question you're bringing up is more about who is providing the supply, and how freely they make it available. If everyone could just give themselves an IP address, then yeah, each address would be worth very little. But when your ISP controls the addresses you get, you have to have one to use the Internet, and they can market each additional address as a feature, then there is still a demand, and they are aritficially limiting the supply. It's like the diamond industry: DeBeers owns most of the supply, and there's lot of diamonds, but they don't let more on the market than the market demands to make sure that people will have to pay a lot for diamonds.
According to wikipedia:
IPv6 is intended to address the concern of IPv4 address exhaustion.... IPv6 addresses this problem by supporting 340 undecillion (655368 3.4 × 1038) addresses.
And as we all know, 340 undecillion addresses ought to be enough for anyone!
I don't know whether or not there is a huge need to jump to IPv6 or not, but hasn't history shown us that even the seemingly "good enough" possible ranges aren't usually good enough forever (640k, Y2K, etc.)? Not that I have any idea how we could ever use up "430 quintillion (4.3 × 1020) unique addresses per square inch" (again, thanks to wikipedia), but who knows what novel ideas will come up in the future? Plus having so many unused addresses has its advantages, too, since it makes it harder (it would seem almost impossible) for hackers to randomly guess a valid address out of that big of a space, even with an automated script that could test millions of addresses in a short time.
From a senior project I did in a few years ago, we dimmed an array of 300 high-powered LEDs (Lumileds)with no flicker at any level. They definitely didn't run totally cool, though they did have a fair amount of heat. As far as dimmers go, most standard dimmers use SCRs or triacs for dimming instead ofa rheostat anyhow, and that should work just fine for LEDs. Whatever supporting circuitry is used can easily provide dimming capabilities already built-in.
The software maker will compete 'the good old-fashioned way, with innovation
So this speech was about a big change in Redmond?
My printer's secret dots spell out:
SORRY FOR THE INCONVENIENCE
The one main advantage is the end of ac-dc adapters aka wall warts.
That would be nice, definitely... but do manufacturers want to get rid of proprietary wall warts? If they did, then why hasn't anyone come up with a universal wall wart connector specification that says that all wall wart connectors will be the same size and polarity? (I can understand defferent needs as far as voltages go.) A lot of devices tell you specifically not to use another wall wart, maybe because the average customer (non-slashdotter) doesn't know how to read the voltage, current and polarity specs. But it does seem like they don't want it that easy to use a 3rd party power adapter. Maybe they think that if your power adapter breaks, you'll just buy a new phone/PDA/MP3 player.
In any case, if this does become popular, this one Splashpower manufacturer will have to swing deals with all of the electroncis companies to get their equipment built into every device, or make adapters for each device that they're not built into, which is fine, but what if a competitor releases a similar product? Would a cell phone with a SpalshPower adapter built-in work with a chargin pad from another company? Would an external iPod adapter from another manufacturer work with a SplashPower pad?
I'm just thinking this might not quite solve the multiple wall wart problem
How about this then? You go to the bank and deposit your money. Some customers are getting extra money free from the bank, you don't. You both used the same service but others got better treatment.
Money's not the same thing. If they've got extra money for some, it can be evenly redivided for all. Electronics aren't quite the same. Of course, if a bank did do something like this anyway, and distributed money nonrandomly using criteria such as age, gender, race, or something like that, then it really would be a problem. Not if they discriminated based on the money you already have in your account, though, since it already works that way.
In TFA, Schneier wrote that phishing isn't the problem. It's just one tactic. The problem is people using fraudulent information to access accounts. If someone comes up with a good way to stop phishing, it probably won't help fraud that much, because phishers will find another way to get account numbers and PINs and passwords.
What Schneier says the financial institutions need to do, is find a way to prevent unauthorized account access, which they will have to do if they are forced to bear the entire burdens of identity theft. He doesn't give any hints on how to accomplish that, but he was clear in saying that the answer isn't about any simple solution to stop phishing, it's got to be on the heads of the banks to stop identity theft.
So the content is protected to begin with, the OS won't be able to play it back without the appropriate drivers for the appropriate monitors in question. This is all assuming that the broadcast flag actually means anything real, but then, I haven't heard anything in the last month or two about whether the broadcast flag is truly dead or truly enforceable
If you could crack the DRM in Linux, you'd be able to crack it just as easily in Windows. It's not a question of not being able to play HD content at all, it's about not being able to play protected HD content. Not all HD content will necessarily be licensed. Anything unprotected could still be easily made to playback in any OS, while protected content would have to be either cracked or played with an approved player, in any OS. Using Linux just means you're more likely to not have an approved player available, so you wouldn't have a choice but to crack it.
The nice thing about a classic tombstone is that it will last for a long, long time... who would put in a video screen that will last for just a few years, then succumb to damage from sun, rain, dust, and vandalism, all while turning the cemetery into a mini Las Vegas? Those close to the deceased can remember them with their own videos and photographs in their homes.
It would probably be at least this easy to set up vi highlighting like this, and that would allow the highlighting to actually be a dynamic part of display of the numbers, and not part of the document itself. Just make a list of keywords -- there's really not even that many words to put in the list: Zero, One through Twenty, Thirty, Forty, Fity, Sixty, Seventy, Eighty, Ninety, Hundred, Thousand, Million, Billion, Trillion, etc.
The whole thing could handle pretty much any number you need to deal with includuing decimals and negative numbers with forty keywords. This is a lame and useless patent.
There's already several things similar to this out there:
j /viadj.asp
http://www.elanhomesystems.com/product/music/viad
http://www.slimdevices.com/
http://www.escient.com/products.html
http://www.request.com/us/
I guess this comment applies more to open source OS's than to open source software in general, but the thing that always kept me from using Linux at home back I only had dial-up was my winmodem. Granted, I could have gone out and bought a $40 hardware modem that would have solved the problem, but I couldn't ever justify that for myself or (more importantly) for my wife. Has there been much progress in the last few years in supporting winmodems under Linux?
Now that I have cable internet, I'd put Linux on my home computer, but the hard drive in my 6 year-old PC has too much crud stored on it to make room for Linux... Now I just have to justify a new computer. (A new hard drive would work, but it would be nice to have a new PC.)
By the way... what's "low broadband"?
42.1 percent of American households now own a computer...
In 2003 about 13 percent of American households are actually using broadband...
Even if you double broadband to 26%, you have 74% still using dial-up.
Do you mean 13% of households are using broadband, or 13% of household computer owners are using braodband... because if only 42% of households have a computer, I'm pretty sure that 74% of households aren't using dial-up. So if it's 13% of total households using broadband (as your link states), that's 31% of computer owners, or if you use your high-end estimate of 26%, that's more than 62% household computer users with broadband. In any case, you don't have 74% of computer users using dial-up.
Or did you mean 13%/26% of computer users using broadband? You should be more clear when labeling your statistics and using statistics from totally different sources.
Actually, his brain subconciously trained itself because the shocks gave it a kind of high. Pretty good book, kind of short.
More people might recognize the author (Michael Crichton) as the author of Jurassic Park, by the way.
The FCC gave cell phone providers over 10 years to figure out 911 services. Now they want VoIP companies to do the same thing in 10 months?
It's probably because it took a long time before people starting using cell phones to completely replace their landline phone service... If you didn't have 911 while you're out and about, it's not much different than before you had the cell phone. Not providing 911 didn't take anything away from you. But when you lose the ability to call 911 from your own house, that's a step backwards, and it's dangerous to not only the person who pays the phone bill, but to friends, family, babysitters and people who get in car accidents in the street out in front of your house.
Making the phone service provider hold the customer's hand in setting up 911 service might be a valuable thing for the customer. After all, noone has ever sat down and explained my POTS 911 service. I should know at the least whether or not there are any limitations to how the service works, but I don't, because like most phone customers, I've never taken the time to look up that information.
From what I understand (I just spoke to a Vonage customer service lady last night, to see if I want service or not) E911 is the service that they will be rolling out by the end of the year which makes it so you don't have to provide your address. What they have right now isn't the E911 (E for Enhanced) it's just non-enhanced 911.
If you can play DRM-ed music videos, I'm sure you would be able to play homemade .mov files as well, which includes a lot of video clips available on the internet, and those created at home using $30 QuickTime Pro. With an iPod Video that could play those videos, home users would actually have a reason to buy QT Pro, so that's a benefit for Apple.
As far as the power of the processor goes, someone posted a comment claiming that the current iPods could handle mpeg4. I don't know anything about the current iPod processor. Maybe they're making stuff up, maybe they really know something I don't. But I don't know that we really know what processor they would be using for an iPod video... Maybe they have something pretty strong lined up.
I think that if Apple is going to make a move like this, they will make it big, with something uesful that people are going to want, in the style of the original iPod/iTMS. Simple music videos at $2 a pop aren't much more interesting or useful than cell phone ringtones, and I just don't buy that Apple would get into video just for that. I'm not expecting feature films any time in the next couple of years, but I think there's more use to this than just music videos.
does anyone know when Microsoft is supposed to release a contender to this possible product?
r tablemediacenter/overview.mspx
They don't make the product, but the software that runs on the product, and it's been around for a little while now, I believe. I first saw Creative's version at CES Jan 2004: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsmobile/devices/po
Of course, if you're talking about about "the product" as in the service for buying the video, then see "Bill Gates Swears Vow Against 'Son of iPod'" on the main page.
There's been a few comments on /. lately about how portable video devices won't take off because noone wants to watch video on a small screen. But I've been thinking about this, and the regular iPod line has been inspiring high-end custom electronics manufacturers to integrate the iPod into nice home audio systems. The more I think about it, the purpose of the Video iPod wouldn't necessarily be to watch video wherever you go, although that would be an extra bonus, but to bring video wherever you want to, and easily watch it on whatever decent-size display you want. I'm sure it wouldn't have DVI or component out, so it wouldn't be a source for super-awesome hi-def video, but it would be great for home movies, music videos, funny videos downloaded from the Internet, and a lot of other things.
are the pretty pictures on the left-hand column of keys configurable?
They'd have to be... the picture shows iTunes and QuickTime keys, and not every user has those installed. Maybe you can tell a config utility which programs you want the buttons to use and it automatically takes the programs' icons and loads them in. Looks pretty cool.
This isn't entirely on-topic, but I'd be interested to find out how well the MovieBeam service is doing... I haven't heard much about it for a while. It's really not the same thing other than movies being gradually downloaded into your home... If I understand their service correctly, their player is more or less constantly receiving movies from an RF broadcast, which is probably usually a slow process, except that it's constantly running, so after a few days you'd have several movies.
The big difference here would be that MovieBeam gives you a bunch of movies (or maybe just several) that you don't choose, then you pay for each of those that you actually want to watch. After a few days of being stored, movies are replaced with newly downloaded ones, so the selection is always rotating. Has anyone here used MovieBeam, or ever really heard about how well it works?
What will end up in my Start Menu? We all know the answer: a "Bar Corp." folder with a "Foo" sub-folder which will contain "Foo," "Uninstall Foo" (in spite of the uninstaller being in the Control Panel!!!!!!), and "Foo ReadMe" (in spite of the existence of a Help file). Ugh!
With XP (and maybe Win2000), the Add/Remove programs box takes forever to come up. It makes me wish every program could have an uninstall shortcut in the start menu... as much of a pain as it is to go through the whole start menu process, it's more of a pain to sit and wait for the Add/Remove Programs box to populate. I actually like to see items related to a program to show up in the program's start menu entry, but when there's 5 different help files, and links to the developer's website, and all that, that's when I really think the start menu has been abused. If I want the help file, I've probably already got the program open, I'll just hit F1.
And while I'm complaining about Add/Remove Programs... who has ever used it to Add programs (other than Windows components)?!?!?
they surely can't be far behind with a 1-meter wide high resolution flat screen monitor
...
No more lugging around bulky "compact" LCD projectors to do presentations, just unroll a several-meter-wide screen and hang it on a wall.
I've always understood these e-Ink technologies to be just black and white, and I don't know how fast they're supposed to be able to switch each "pixel". I think what you're looking for is the flexible OLED (http://www.universaldisplay.com/tech.htm), which I agree, will be pretty awesome... those actually have been produced as prototypes in large, high-resolution screens.