Well, right, but it sounds like their actual complaint was about violating copyright. Have they actually come up with a legal theory claiming that companies have no right to help consumers block ads, tested that theory in court, and won?
Is there actually a precedent for successful legal action over stuff like that? Have advertisers sued VCR manufacturers, Tivo, etc? What about the old adware junk that would look at ads and let users see competing offers? I know advertisers complained, but did anything ever come of it? I don't think there's a specific law against it, and there aren't contracts between any of the parties involved.
You can't store connectivity in a little box and carry it off with you (you can download a specific thing you want to read or listen to, but you can't download all the conversations you will have). You can store energy in a battery.
The parking brake? Please. My dad once accidentally took a 10-mile trip on the freeway with his parking brake engaged. Only noticed once he was getting off the freeway because his brakes were burnt out.
Now this was a manual transmission. Maybe automatics work differently. But I'm pretty sure that unless engaging the parking brake on an automatic also takes the car out of gear the engine could defeat the parking brake easily.
To me, given the portion of today's games' work that's graphical, half the running power going to graphics doesn't seem unreasonable. The bigger question is what the power consumption is at idle, and what it averages during average desktop tasks, which is where you really spend most of your time. I know idle/low-use consumption has generally been improving quite a lot over the last few generations of GPUs, so it would be a nice point of comparison.
Yay, virtualization! Virtualization in every important way has been around for years. Memory and CPU are virtualized to isolate processes from eachother. Plan 9, though not very popular, has been influential in virtualizing the filesystem per process (the/proc filesystem on Linux). BSD Jails let you isolate processes' and users' resources further, simplifying configuration in many cases. Yay!
What I don't get is what everyone calls virtualization: the recent trend of running multiple copies of the entire OS on one box at a time, plus virtualization software and hardware. It's a waste of CPU, memory, and disk. That's not green at all. If your hardware can handle both servers, just run them both on the same copy of the OS. That's what the OS is there for!
The things he was right about were fields where the path forward was pretty certain. We had a pretty good idea then how we'd make microchips smaller and faster, a clear path forward. Only now is that path getting clouded by physical limits. Where he was wrong was in predicting steady, linear progress in areas where there isn't a clear path forward. This includes AI, interface design, economics, and general welfare (I just love his dismissal of the underclass; they're a pretty big portion of humanity, you know, and I don't think the human story can be truly told without theirs as well).
I don't think there's anything unreasonable about asking Slashdot posters, many of whom had Linux boxes running across the year rollover, whether they had any problems, just to get an idea of whether it was 10 servers crashing in those 20 seconds or a thousand.
So this individual crash probably has nothing to do with timing software. We'd have said the same of the individual Zune crashes. Fortunately for our collective knowledge and understanding plenty of people thought to ask the question.
It's amusing that these guys seem to count slick mouse software as a plus. I bet most of us would rather have a mouse that doesn't need any additional software. Wireless devices don't make any sense to me either, unless you're talking about a media PC. Isn't a mouse/KB that can run out of batteries just additional complication with no benefit? And isn't a charging pad a waste of desk space?
It's not evil that matters. It's indifference. They're ad brokers. That means you're the product, not the customer. That means they're not accountantable to you. It doesn't matter if they satisfy you as long as they satisfy enough people in their target markets. Don't trust Google for anything that matters.
Disclamer: IANA Expert on Communism... but I did sleep in a Holiday Inn Express last night (err... I mean, I have read the Communist Manifesto)
In the Communist Manifesto Marx calls freedom of the press a "bourgeois freedom". Although I don't think he called outright for censorship as necessary for Communism, he certainly didn't think press freedom was an important concern.
I also don't buy the idea that Communism is just an economic model. Again, I've only read the Manifesto and a couple other excerpts from Marx and Engels, but they wrote about a lot more than economics. They wrote about history, social movements and revolutions, and the implications their economic ideas would have on Communist society. They also agitated for Communist revolutions. It's easier to claim capitalism is just about economics, but I don't think this is true in practice either. It's long been held that markets can only have rational outcomes when their participants are accurately informed, for one thing, and that implies a social program facilitating free flow of information and transparency on the part of the holders of capital.
You seem to have a weirdly limited view of innovation. Facebook didn't invent any new Internet protocols but it changed the way that people interact socially, starting an entirely new type of business while at it (for the record, I don't like Facebook very much, but its impact has been huge). Compare to your example of HDTV: people watch the same crap, just with more pixels.
Or hybrid cars. Toyota (following Honda's less successful attempt) synthesized some existing tech with stuff they came up with themselves and built a commercially-viable hybrid. Neat. But not life-changing -- people still drive the same places they always did and the improvements in fuel efficiency and operation cost are incremental, not revolutionary. The invention and popularization of the auto in the first place, however, was revolutionary. It was mostly done by private inventors and newly-founded companies. They became giants because of their early innovation. Aviation was also largely pioneered by small businesses, private inventors, and scientists inventing the study of aerodynamics, though it took longer for the impact to reach even the middle class of rich countries.
I absolutely acknowledge that in mature fields you can't do much innovation without lots of capital. The founders of Facebook couldn't have made HDTVs, hybrid cars, or Windows Vista. That didn't stop them from doing something more important.
What he's talking about with "HTTP Request" is (IANA Ajax Whiz, so apologies if I'm spelling/capitalizing this wrong) XmlHttpRequest, which is, as I understand it, the final piece that made AJAX possible.
To address the bigger point, we seem to be talking about different types of innovation. Basic science research, and building (or incrementally improving) very expensive but low-volume devices like MRI machines and space stations, is dominated by large corporations and governments. They're the only ones that can pull it off. At the risk of sounding buzzwordy, I was thinking more about "disruptive" technologies. Things that change the way people think about an industry or some aspect of their lives. What really makes this type of innovation happen isn't raw technical genius, but great vision in finding something to apply technology to. Once someone comes up with the idea it might be easy to copy, but only a rare mind will come up with the idea.
Toyota didn't invent hybrid drivetrain technology (which has been around for ages) or even the hybrid car; they didn't really invent much, just applied lots of existing technology and used their size and market presence to bring it to market.
Cell phone history seems to include lots of big names like Bell Labs and Motorola, so one point to the big guys there.
HDTV doesn't count as much innovation in my book. It's... TV, just more pixels. Image processing circuitry had been driving computer monitors with higher resolutions for years -- the ball was on the tee for them, all they had to do was not pull a Charlie Brown.
I think you're acknowledging that Google wasn't even a company yet when its founders came up with PageRank, right? Ever since Google got big we've seen them buy more neat stuff than they've written. And generally take on projects that require big size more than big ideas.
I don't know what the law has to say about this, or if it's decided yet (or ever will). It seems to me, though, that if the terms aren't directly presented before payment, and if the transaction is in every way presented like a sale, then it ought to be a sale. It walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck. Posting terms on a web site doesn't change that.
I agree to a point. That is, I think psychologically manipulative marketing is one of the most evil things that people do. As long as it isn't manipulative or misleading I don't have a big problem with it.
All I was trying to say is that the reason we have to watch out for marketers isn't that they're incompetent, but that they're competent and usually working against our interests.
I'm sure you meant this as a joke, but sales and marketing people are no fools. Just because most sales pitches and advertisements are silly and useless to knowledgeable and rational people doesn't mean that they're not generally effective, or that marketers don't work pretty hard to learn what sort of sales pitches work.
My understanding of botnets is that all their activity is centrally coordinated: the bots sit in an IRC channel waiting for orders and do what they're ordered to do. It doesn't seem likely to me that the listeners are doing anything very sophisticated here. As it's always been with brute-force attacks, There are lots of target hosts, lots of usernames and passwords to try, and lots of bots to try them. Assuming every attempt gives you about the same odds of success it doesn't matter much what order you try them in. So some people changed the order, and changed the way they divide up work, to avoid detection.
I won't deny that it's a clever adaption, or claim I definitely would have thought of it in their situation. But as far as adaptivity goes, the major tactical advance came from an explicit change in behavior by the botnet masters themselves. The parts of the software that might be adaptive, slowing down attempts on hosts where they are repeatedly unsuccessful and avoiding OpenBSD boxes, were probably specifically programmed to adapt in these ways. They're no more advanced than, say, TCP flow control behavior, or P2P programs.
I basically agree with you here. But there are some costs to the phone companies associated with making those calls as well, and it's not fair to stick the company with them when it was the user's equipment getting hacked.
I don't know much about the major costs for telcos; I assume they have to pay other companies for access to their networks. If there are significant per-minute costs for calls to Bulgaria, the user in this case should at least pay those plus a small overhead. However, if most of the costs don't vary based on usage, a fair solution is less clear.
I think you have a narrow view of "real advances". The job of most devices is to be useful for their users. Often the real bottleneck for people getting things done with computers or similar devices is in the device's interface. If research and development work goes into making those interfaces better people will actually get more done. Tab completion, for example, is just polish on the old shell, but it saves me a lot more time entering many commands than a new processor would save my computer in executing them. Often a drag-and-drop GUI would save me even more.
I don't own a single Apple product, as it happens, and usually when I comment on Apple articles I get flamed for supposedly hating on Apple. I, probably like you, think that no product or company deserves love or devotion; I save those things for my friends and family. I think a lot of Apple fans misinterpret that attitude for malice. You're not wrong because you hate Apple, you're wrong because you don't appreciate the importance of user-facing design.
I know, I ad-hommed JTP for a cheap laugh. I think he himself tried to use his supposed occupation to lend his arguments legitimacy (maybe it was more McCain's campaign, I followed the whole thing at a distance), which is a similar fallacy whose name I forget. Apparently in the old USSR writers would give themselves nicknames to associate themselves with the poor... the whole JTP thing reminds me of that a bit, and as he wasn't exactly shy about seeking attention and using his identity this way, well, it's still not fair or right to respond to his questions by cutting down the identity he's tried to give himself, but it is poetic.
On the other hand, I hadn't thought about it from an elite-media-vs.-non-elite-media perspective. So thanks for making me think. And from that angle you're absolutely right. I have a hard time seeing the media coming down so hard on one of their own. And even if, as another commenter said, his question was loaded, politicians absolutely should be able to identify and answer to loaded and biased lines of questioning. It's part of the job.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, right, but it sounds like their actual complaint was about violating copyright. Have they actually come up with a legal theory claiming that companies have no right to help consumers block ads, tested that theory in court, and won?
Is there actually a precedent for successful legal action over stuff like that? Have advertisers sued VCR manufacturers, Tivo, etc? What about the old adware junk that would look at ads and let users see competing offers? I know advertisers complained, but did anything ever come of it? I don't think there's a specific law against it, and there aren't contracts between any of the parties involved.
You can't store connectivity in a little box and carry it off with you (you can download a specific thing you want to read or listen to, but you can't download all the conversations you will have). You can store energy in a battery.
The parking brake? Please. My dad once accidentally took a 10-mile trip on the freeway with his parking brake engaged. Only noticed once he was getting off the freeway because his brakes were burnt out.
Now this was a manual transmission. Maybe automatics work differently. But I'm pretty sure that unless engaging the parking brake on an automatic also takes the car out of gear the engine could defeat the parking brake easily.
Nah, this wouldn't be any different from the radio, or from the exsting nav devices.
If people actually sued for that sort of thing cell phone companies offering car-specific features would have been on the hook a long time ago.
To me, given the portion of today's games' work that's graphical, half the running power going to graphics doesn't seem unreasonable. The bigger question is what the power consumption is at idle, and what it averages during average desktop tasks, which is where you really spend most of your time. I know idle/low-use consumption has generally been improving quite a lot over the last few generations of GPUs, so it would be a nice point of comparison.
Yay, virtualization! Virtualization in every important way has been around for years. Memory and CPU are virtualized to isolate processes from eachother. Plan 9, though not very popular, has been influential in virtualizing the filesystem per process (the /proc filesystem on Linux). BSD Jails let you isolate processes' and users' resources further, simplifying configuration in many cases. Yay!
What I don't get is what everyone calls virtualization: the recent trend of running multiple copies of the entire OS on one box at a time, plus virtualization software and hardware. It's a waste of CPU, memory, and disk. That's not green at all. If your hardware can handle both servers, just run them both on the same copy of the OS. That's what the OS is there for!
The things he was right about were fields where the path forward was pretty certain. We had a pretty good idea then how we'd make microchips smaller and faster, a clear path forward. Only now is that path getting clouded by physical limits. Where he was wrong was in predicting steady, linear progress in areas where there isn't a clear path forward. This includes AI, interface design, economics, and general welfare (I just love his dismissal of the underclass; they're a pretty big portion of humanity, you know, and I don't think the human story can be truly told without theirs as well).
I don't think there's anything unreasonable about asking Slashdot posters, many of whom had Linux boxes running across the year rollover, whether they had any problems, just to get an idea of whether it was 10 servers crashing in those 20 seconds or a thousand.
So this individual crash probably has nothing to do with timing software. We'd have said the same of the individual Zune crashes. Fortunately for our collective knowledge and understanding plenty of people thought to ask the question.
It's amusing that these guys seem to count slick mouse software as a plus. I bet most of us would rather have a mouse that doesn't need any additional software. Wireless devices don't make any sense to me either, unless you're talking about a media PC. Isn't a mouse/KB that can run out of batteries just additional complication with no benefit? And isn't a charging pad a waste of desk space?
It's not evil that matters. It's indifference. They're ad brokers. That means you're the product, not the customer. That means they're not accountantable to you. It doesn't matter if they satisfy you as long as they satisfy enough people in their target markets. Don't trust Google for anything that matters.
Disclamer: IANA Expert on Communism... but I did sleep in a Holiday Inn Express last night (err... I mean, I have read the Communist Manifesto)
In the Communist Manifesto Marx calls freedom of the press a "bourgeois freedom". Although I don't think he called outright for censorship as necessary for Communism, he certainly didn't think press freedom was an important concern.
I also don't buy the idea that Communism is just an economic model. Again, I've only read the Manifesto and a couple other excerpts from Marx and Engels, but they wrote about a lot more than economics. They wrote about history, social movements and revolutions, and the implications their economic ideas would have on Communist society. They also agitated for Communist revolutions. It's easier to claim capitalism is just about economics, but I don't think this is true in practice either. It's long been held that markets can only have rational outcomes when their participants are accurately informed, for one thing, and that implies a social program facilitating free flow of information and transparency on the part of the holders of capital.
You seem to have a weirdly limited view of innovation. Facebook didn't invent any new Internet protocols but it changed the way that people interact socially, starting an entirely new type of business while at it (for the record, I don't like Facebook very much, but its impact has been huge). Compare to your example of HDTV: people watch the same crap, just with more pixels.
Or hybrid cars. Toyota (following Honda's less successful attempt) synthesized some existing tech with stuff they came up with themselves and built a commercially-viable hybrid. Neat. But not life-changing -- people still drive the same places they always did and the improvements in fuel efficiency and operation cost are incremental, not revolutionary. The invention and popularization of the auto in the first place, however, was revolutionary. It was mostly done by private inventors and newly-founded companies. They became giants because of their early innovation. Aviation was also largely pioneered by small businesses, private inventors, and scientists inventing the study of aerodynamics, though it took longer for the impact to reach even the middle class of rich countries.
I absolutely acknowledge that in mature fields you can't do much innovation without lots of capital. The founders of Facebook couldn't have made HDTVs, hybrid cars, or Windows Vista. That didn't stop them from doing something more important.
What he's talking about with "HTTP Request" is (IANA Ajax Whiz, so apologies if I'm spelling/capitalizing this wrong) XmlHttpRequest, which is, as I understand it, the final piece that made AJAX possible.
To address the bigger point, we seem to be talking about different types of innovation. Basic science research, and building (or incrementally improving) very expensive but low-volume devices like MRI machines and space stations, is dominated by large corporations and governments. They're the only ones that can pull it off. At the risk of sounding buzzwordy, I was thinking more about "disruptive" technologies. Things that change the way people think about an industry or some aspect of their lives. What really makes this type of innovation happen isn't raw technical genius, but great vision in finding something to apply technology to. Once someone comes up with the idea it might be easy to copy, but only a rare mind will come up with the idea.
Toyota didn't invent hybrid drivetrain technology (which has been around for ages) or even the hybrid car; they didn't really invent much, just applied lots of existing technology and used their size and market presence to bring it to market.
Cell phone history seems to include lots of big names like Bell Labs and Motorola, so one point to the big guys there.
HDTV doesn't count as much innovation in my book. It's... TV, just more pixels. Image processing circuitry had been driving computer monitors with higher resolutions for years -- the ball was on the tee for them, all they had to do was not pull a Charlie Brown.
I think you're acknowledging that Google wasn't even a company yet when its founders came up with PageRank, right? Ever since Google got big we've seen them buy more neat stuff than they've written. And generally take on projects that require big size more than big ideas.
I don't know what the law has to say about this, or if it's decided yet (or ever will). It seems to me, though, that if the terms aren't directly presented before payment, and if the transaction is in every way presented like a sale, then it ought to be a sale. It walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck. Posting terms on a web site doesn't change that.
Q: Can I post this internal email on the Internet?
A: Hell yes!
I agree to a point. That is, I think psychologically manipulative marketing is one of the most evil things that people do. As long as it isn't manipulative or misleading I don't have a big problem with it.
All I was trying to say is that the reason we have to watch out for marketers isn't that they're incompetent, but that they're competent and usually working against our interests.
GP was saying, essentially, that Apple makes the trains run on time. That's not criticism, it's praise, even if it's backhanded.
I'm sure you meant this as a joke, but sales and marketing people are no fools. Just because most sales pitches and advertisements are silly and useless to knowledgeable and rational people doesn't mean that they're not generally effective, or that marketers don't work pretty hard to learn what sort of sales pitches work.
My understanding of botnets is that all their activity is centrally coordinated: the bots sit in an IRC channel waiting for orders and do what they're ordered to do. It doesn't seem likely to me that the listeners are doing anything very sophisticated here. As it's always been with brute-force attacks, There are lots of target hosts, lots of usernames and passwords to try, and lots of bots to try them. Assuming every attempt gives you about the same odds of success it doesn't matter much what order you try them in. So some people changed the order, and changed the way they divide up work, to avoid detection.
I won't deny that it's a clever adaption, or claim I definitely would have thought of it in their situation. But as far as adaptivity goes, the major tactical advance came from an explicit change in behavior by the botnet masters themselves. The parts of the software that might be adaptive, slowing down attempts on hosts where they are repeatedly unsuccessful and avoiding OpenBSD boxes, were probably specifically programmed to adapt in these ways. They're no more advanced than, say, TCP flow control behavior, or P2P programs.
I'm curious what this event was, what happened, and what was reported.
I understand that you might not want to start an off-topic discussion by posting them, but if possible I'd like to know!
I basically agree with you here. But there are some costs to the phone companies associated with making those calls as well, and it's not fair to stick the company with them when it was the user's equipment getting hacked.
I don't know much about the major costs for telcos; I assume they have to pay other companies for access to their networks. If there are significant per-minute costs for calls to Bulgaria, the user in this case should at least pay those plus a small overhead. However, if most of the costs don't vary based on usage, a fair solution is less clear.
I think you have a narrow view of "real advances". The job of most devices is to be useful for their users. Often the real bottleneck for people getting things done with computers or similar devices is in the device's interface. If research and development work goes into making those interfaces better people will actually get more done. Tab completion, for example, is just polish on the old shell, but it saves me a lot more time entering many commands than a new processor would save my computer in executing them. Often a drag-and-drop GUI would save me even more.
I don't own a single Apple product, as it happens, and usually when I comment on Apple articles I get flamed for supposedly hating on Apple. I, probably like you, think that no product or company deserves love or devotion; I save those things for my friends and family. I think a lot of Apple fans misinterpret that attitude for malice. You're not wrong because you hate Apple, you're wrong because you don't appreciate the importance of user-facing design.
I know, I ad-hommed JTP for a cheap laugh. I think he himself tried to use his supposed occupation to lend his arguments legitimacy (maybe it was more McCain's campaign, I followed the whole thing at a distance), which is a similar fallacy whose name I forget. Apparently in the old USSR writers would give themselves nicknames to associate themselves with the poor... the whole JTP thing reminds me of that a bit, and as he wasn't exactly shy about seeking attention and using his identity this way, well, it's still not fair or right to respond to his questions by cutting down the identity he's tried to give himself, but it is poetic.
On the other hand, I hadn't thought about it from an elite-media-vs.-non-elite-media perspective. So thanks for making me think. And from that angle you're absolutely right. I have a hard time seeing the media coming down so hard on one of their own. And even if, as another commenter said, his question was loaded, politicians absolutely should be able to identify and answer to loaded and biased lines of questioning. It's part of the job.