How long until HTML 5 is supported in every browser?
Not long, most likely. Once the specification draft nears completion, browser developers are going to be tripping over themselves to implement it so that they can add the bullet to their feature list. Many major browsers already support some HTML 5 features (most impressively, Opera supports all the new forms features). You have to remember, the web is a Big Thing these days and there is another browser war brewing. If Firefox continues to gain market share like it is, IE and Firefox may be an even match by the time HTML 5 is finalized.
Of course, the HTML 5 doesn't fix the biggest problem with the web: developers of different rendering engines interpret the spec differently, contain annoying bugs that go unfixed for years, or claim to be compliant with the spec while failing to implement an entire subset of it. Unfortunately there just isn't an easy way to correct this.
For them to implement adblocking, that would undercut their entire business model.
Oh, you mean in spite of the fact that they've already said that they were going to include an ad blocker?
If they did it anyway, and left their ads unblocked?, well, that would just be illegal, under antitrust laws.]
Hardly. It doesn't come anywhere near antitrust laws until Google forces you to use only Chromium if you want to view their web sites. Although I'm not much of a Google fan, I can say that I just don't see them going quite that low.
Agreed, although this is one reason why Firefox will likely still have a life -- it's unaffiliated with a company that makes money through advertising. Why would Google support a browser add-on that allows you to block their main revenue source?
Err, you're not aware that Mozilla's biggest financial sponsor is Google?
I could spend all day complaining about it, but suffice to say that in regards to reading e-books... it's not much of a long-term solution. The screen has incredible resolution for its size, but the size of the screen is still small. You either need to hold the tablet close to your face or suffer eye strain.
The Nokia Gecko browser is a joke. It's very slow, has limited options, and is very very buggy. Quite often it stops working completely until you do a reboot. I can't believe the lack of quality control on the central piece of software for a device proudly proclaimed to be an Internet Tablet. Some bloke is working on a WebKit browser right now and while the UI still needs a lot of work, it is at least several times faster than Gecko and relatively stable.
So far, my preferred use of the N800 is for podcasts. It's quite nice to be able to just download the podcasts right to the tablet over wifi and then carry it along with me wherever I go. Music streams drain the battery something fierce, otherwise it would be good for those as well.
The only reason you've heard of Cory Doctorow is because he has published (or his father has) in the traditional way.
Well, not really. I heard of Cory Doctorow because I heard him speak at a conference. He was invited to the conference because he's written some really well-received books that fit in with the theme of the con. The reason they were well-received was because he rose out of obscurity by giving his books away for free.
I'm not saying that giving content away is a sure fire way to be noticed. Far from it. Skill is still the most important asset by far, but if you have that skill, then giving the content away for free is a great marketing strategy as long as the thing you have to sell (such as a hardcopy of the book) is tangibly worth more.
Also, I found the article that I was looking for. Doctorow explains the story a lot better than I could ever hope to.
I looked at the screenshots, and this looks really cool. They've put a lot of thought into the GUI, which is not only designed for netbooks and small screens, but touch screens as well.
I've been dreaming of a multi-purpose GUI that was suitable for everything from set-top boxes, to phones, to car PCs for a solid decade now. The computing power has always been there, but practically no software or even GUI libraries are written with the assumption that the user might want to interface with the applications by means of remote control or touch screen. On a small screen. With no keyboard or mouse necessarily available.
Awhile back before the iPhone took off, I spent months designing an entire UI that would be suitable for both set-top boxes and car PCs. But I'm not really a programmer so I didn't know where to go from there and couldn't find anyone else that was interested in helping to make it a reality. I'm happy to see Moblin that seems to have the same goals but is actually implementing them.
The result is that many companies are pushed back into the warm embrace of Microsoft because at least you know where you stand with code compiled with VCPP and any other libraries you bought. It might cost more in the short term but if it means you get to keep the key IP asset of your company safe then it becomes worth it.
Except for the clause in every proprietary software license agreement that says:
"We (the company) can change the terms of this agreement whenever we want, without your consent, or even without notifying you that the license has changed. Also, we can terminate your permitted use of the software whenever we see fit, not matter how much you paid for it."
This is a warm embrace to you? I'm not aware of any free software coming with a clause like this. Once the code is licensed, it's licensed, and anyone can use it however they like for as long as they like. They are simply bound to a couple of restrictions in the course of that use or distribution. Nobody (including the copyright holder) can retroactively change the terms of a free software license.
You might argue that one should just read the licenses but with dozens of developers potentially including libraries that may themselves include other libraries with their own licenses you can't easily be 100% sure.
Oh lord. I hope you don't really mean to imply that proprietary licenses are somehow simpler to comprehend, with fewer gotchas, limitations, restrictions, and loopholes than free software licenses. If so, then I seriously doubt you have ever read a single proprietary license in its entirety in your life.
(1) If you treat Cory Doctorow like he's relevant, then he will believe he is.
Did somebody have some Cheeky Flakes for breakfast this morning?
(2) Yes, it is important to preserve NetNeutrality, but I'm surprised anyone is writing up an article so late in the game.
It's important because it's still an issue. Last I heard, there was still a Telcoms Package going through the EU which either has the power to enforce the concept net neutrality among union member states, or abolish it forever. In the U.S. and Canada, providers are still trying to push legislation that would give them a legal green light to start engaging in what otherwise would be considered chilling and obvious anti-competitive practices.
(3) "Finally, there's the question of metered billing for ISP customers." This has nothing to do with net neutrality.
I used to think this too. That net neutrality was only about ISPs selling preferential service to content providers while deliberately degrading service for competitors. But net neutrality is (or should) be about much more than that. Doctorow is square-on that innovation on the Internet will come to a screeching halt if every user has to be careful not to surf for too long or download much data for fear of going over their alloted amount and running up a massive bill. If this ever comes to pass, net neutrality won't even matter because no one will have any interest in high-bandwidth applications at all. The Internet will devolve to where it was 10 years ago where email, IM, and the occasional graphics-barren web site were pretty much all you had.
He's arguing that people don't know how much internet they're going to use. But, please don't try to fool us into thinking that we have *no idea* how much internet we use. The only way you're going to end up in the top 2% is if you're downloading massive quantities of information (not webpages!)
You're confusing his point. He was making that argument in reference to metered bandwidth, not punishing the top 2%. And most people really do have no idea how much bandwidth they use. I know I certainly don't and I consider myself a pretty savvy user, a sysadmin by trade. His argument was that if you meter everyone's bandwidth, users will scrutinize every link. They'll consciously or subconsciously budget their bandwidth and be forced to make decisions about their online activities based on how much each link costs rather than how useful or informative it is.
Metered access to the internet isn't much different than cell-phone minutes. (Oh! We have NO IDEA if we're going to use 10,000 minutes a month, or 50 minutes a month - therefore telecoms can't charge us by the minute!) How absurd.
No offense, but this has always been a really piss-poor analogy. On a telephone, you have direct and consistent control over how much you are billed. You can choose whether or not to make a call, you can choose how long a call lasts, and you can choose to not answer an incoming call. Additionally, you are billed based on units of time that are easy to track and calculate.
But if you have to pay for metered bandwidth, you generally have no idea whether that link on Slashdot is going to bring up a page that's 10K in size or 1MB. You don't know what kind of compression a particular video stream is using. You might think you're just going to read short little news blurb (read: a cheap one) until you see that the newspaper has seen fit to add a gigantic animated flash advertisement to the right-hand side of the page.
With metered bandwidth, control over your exact bill amount is orders of magnitude harder as compared to a telephone bill even if you have a good understanding of kilobytes, megabytes, and gigabytes and rudimentary knowledge of TCP/IP. Joe Q. Public does not. All he knows is that last evening he went to a hunting website, played a
It's a shame that he's turning into a loudmouthed pundit rather than an author I'd care to read.
What, he can't be both?
I drove down the highway today and was stuck in traffic for a long while. There were lots of cars zipping in and out, but the main problem was a group of long-haul trucks taking up a mile of roadway. The amount of road we have is finite, so the addition of these large trucks is fine for a few, but once you start getting more than a handful of trucks on the road, all traffic is affect.
I almost hate to point this out, but you're really living up to your nickname with this one.:)
If it weren't for some users flooding the network with massive filesharing packets, this would all be a non-issue. Actually, for most users it still is since most users are not affected at all by bandwidth strangling.
Doctorow addresses this very point in the article, so I question whether you actually the whole thing. The ISPs claim exactly what you said, that their top 2% (or whatever) of users consume a disproportionate amount of bandwidth compared to the bottom 98%. But guess what? Even if you cut off those top 2%, the next ones in line will become the top 2% of users consuming bandwidth disproportionate to the rest. It's an exponential graph, so your top 2% will always consume a disproportionate amount of bandwidth compared to all other customers. It's like the war on drugs, only with numbers. It's a claim that they can trot out to justify meters, caps, throttling, and other fun ways to screw their customers without actually lying. The problem is, continually chopping off (or capping) the top 2% is guaranteed to never actually help because the demand for bandwidth will always keep rising.
The only way to ethically serve their customers is to actually upgrade their infrastructure as demand goes up. But they don't want to do that because it costs money. They seem to be desperate to cling to their old business models where all you had was routine support and maintenance costs once your infrastructure was built out, everything else was basically profit. Like all gigantic companies, they are loathe to adapt to a changing market, and there is perhaps no more rapidly changing markets than those tied to computers and the Internet. This would be fine if consumers could choose their Internet providers, but the vast majority cannot because the telcos and cablecos were handed monopoly status by local governments and now they think they can get away with acting like monopolies.
If we stand firm enough, the fear of being charged billions to use their own lines
Well, that's the thing. You're perfectly right of course but it shouldn't have been "their lines" to begin with. No company should be able to actually own them. I can't imagine what kind of drugs local leaders in the U.S. were on when telco and cable companies barged into town and said, "Hi there, we want string up wires on every single piece of private property and get the whole operation subsidized too. And then when it's done, we'll own it all and do whatever we like with both the lines and the services. Sound good?"
In my perfect little imaginary universe, the local governments would own the loops and rent them out to whoever wanted to use them. Use the proceeds to hire a company (who is not a carrier) to maintain the infrastructure. If carriers wanted upgrades, they could pay for them. Sure, there would still be some problems to work out since it adds a layer of bureaucracy but I can guarantee it would be much better than allowing one company to have monopolistic control over an entire city and its citizens.
According to Microsoft, this solves a 'problem inherent in open architecture systems,' i.e., 'they are generally licensed with complete use rights and/or functionality that may be beyond the need or desire of the system purchaser.'
Software sometimes ships with features that go unused? Horrors!
An additional problem with open architecture systems, Microsoft explains, is that 'virtually anyone can write an application that can be executed on the system.'
Silly me, for decades I've been foolishly believing that that this was a feature of open architecture systems rather than a problem. Thank gods Microsoft is around to help save us from such crazy thoughts.
I don't know about you, but I didn't spend 6 years on a novel to piss it away on a free site. Anybody can do that. The standard of excellence will still remain publication by a major.
Dude. I hardly think getting published is any kind of suitable benchmark for excellence. Have you not been to a bookstore? An author's biggest hurdle in achieving financial success from his/her work isn't dealing with piracy, it's dealing with obscurity.
I can't find an article to link to right now, but Cory Doctorow has had much to say over the years on how giving his books away for free on his website allowed him to reach a much wider audience than he ever could have otherwise. (And he says it also made him a shit-ton more money because many of the people who liked the first book actually bought the second. And third. And so on.)
I think the fundamental problem here is that they're not serving one of the traditional purposes of a publisher, which is to act as a filter.
They're not filling one of the traditional purposes of a website either, which is to present content in a highly-portable markup language that is readable in all web browsers.
Instead, they used Flash to embed PDFs into a little window on a website.
With YouTube, Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, and now this, I really feel like the Internet is just getting stupider by the month. It's almost enough to make me pine for the days of AOL and GeoCities.
This project is an excellent example of how having a little theoretical knowledge is a bad thing.
They have just enough knowledge to get into complicated and pointless gain calculations, but they miss most of the really important things.
[snip]
In summary these designers should wait until they get past the first chapter of their transistor class before going out and trying to design anything. Good design requires more than slavish focusing on one small area. An engineer has to have a broad view.
Holy shit. Really? This is your actual response to a group of kids who are trying to learn the basics of analog/digital design theory and set out to do something fun and interesting with it?
Constructive criticism is one thing, but telling someone that they shouldn't even attempt a project when they don't already grasp 100% of the details involved just reeks of condescending elitism. That is far more dangerous to science and the exploration of technology than some novice jumping into a trivial audio-visual project without having mastered all of the details first. They're just trying to learn something and pass their experiences along to others. No, the project may not be professional-level electronics engineering, but it wasn't meant to be. It was meant to be fun, cheap, and educational, and it succeeded on all of those.
If this is how you really feel about people trying to learn something for themselves, please remove the word "hacker" from your nickname and just leave the "ancient" part.
Probably it was the lack of food that contributed to the feeling of sickness more than anything else.
I did this at a geek/sci-fi con once. They had free snacks in the consuite throughout the weekend and I thought I would survive just fine on those. Got plenty of sleep. But by Sunday, I was ready to keel over. Though I had some bad lunchmeat or something from the consuite, but after I finally ate a full meal that afternoon I felt just fine.
Maybe not eating much for that long a period of time drops your blood sugar down to rock-bottom levels or something, but I'm not wise in the ways of nutrition so maybe someone more qualified can answer.
But you know what? That "stereotype" effectively describes 4 out my 5 last girlfriends, my mother, all my aunts, and a solid majority of female friends I've had over the years.
And it's people like you that are the reason gender typing is alive and going strong.
Sure, there are a few general differences between males and females that go beyond the physical level, but all the "boys like trucks" and "girls like shopping" crap is 100% culturally originated and reinforced. The danger with gender typing is that it coerces people into behaving in certain ways purely based on whether they happen to have a penis or a vagina between their legs. It's the reason that the ratio of men and women in math and science careers is so strongly unbalanced despite the fact that there's zero evidence that men have a greater ability for the subjects that women do.
My wife and I are expecting our first child. We deliberately made the decision not to find out the sex of the baby before it is born. Not because we didn't want to know, but more because we didn't want our families stereotyping the poor child and writing its future before it has even been born. A newborn is a blank slate, a new person, who should be granted the freedom to grow up into whoever he or she want to be, not what society tells them they should be.
There are very few things that the sociology crowd and I both agree on, but gender typing is a real problem because it's potentially damaging to individuals for the sole sake of making the ignorant masses a little more comfortable with themselves.
Re:built-in virtualization
on
Phoenix BIOSOS?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Oh, never mind. Apparently they did. I should really RTFA before commenting.
Ok, I was going to see if you have metadata tags for search engines but.... I can't find your book on your publishers site even. When I search for it nothing matching your description comes up. How can you expect Google and Yahoo! to index your pages when your publisher can't? I'm not attacking you but I just spent five minutes trying to find your book by going to your publisher and going to Amazon but since you're not the main author, I'm having a really really hard time!
This was essentially going to be my answer to the OP. If you're Googling the title of your work and find that most of the links are warez, then obviously you're not doing a good enough job making the book available.
Notice how the once-prominent P2P filesharing applications pretty much cease to be relevant to the public at large once iTunes came along? Its because the market finally came up with a consumer-friendly way of distributing digital music. I predict that Bittorrent will probably do the same once there's a cheap (and more importantly, easy) way to legally download watch movies on demand.(1)
The OP used the phrase "path of least resistance" in one of his comments in this thread, so I suspect he already knows what the problem is but just doesn't want to face the answer that either he or his publisher (or both) are doing a dreadfully awful job at promoting and making his book available to consumers.
1. And to anyone who wants to ask, yes, I realize that bittorrent is good for far more than pirating movies which is why it will probably never die off completely. It will just move back underground once the major consumer content markets are all better served by legit distribution mechanisms.
and it leads to a question: has the flash drive become an undifferentiated commodity, just like any other cheap plastic tsotschke that you might find at an office supply store checkout counter?"
I'm guessing no, or they wouldn't have written an entire article about it.
If the small local ISP is screwing up, and refuses to respond in any useful way despite your best repeated efforts, it sounds like its time to take your business elsewhere, maybe to one of those large ISPs you mentioned.
The only problem is that more large ISPs are doing this than small ones. Large ISPs have teams of executives with nothing better to do than sit around and figure out how else to further screw their customers. Small ISPs are generally too busy trying to keep their infrastructure online for an extended period of time.
By forcing Craigslist to shut down their ads, it's really sent all of those providers off to other means of advertising, which means law enforcement will have to go hunting again. It was a stupid logistics idea. Law enforcement will never stop prostitution, but it looks good to the public to have a decent number of busts. Why kill your easy method of facilitating busts. It's a freakin' list of "we can arrest these people tonight", rather than really hunting them down.
You've hit on a point that's rarely brought up in discussions like this: law enforcement could almost completely wipe out drugs and prostitution in their jurisdictions if they really wanted to. But the unspoken objective is to always keep the "threat" looming, so that the politicians continue to look like they're doing an important job in the eyes of the public, the money keeps flowing in, government employees get to keep their jobs.
Instead of eradicating those behaviors that are prohibited by law, they strive to strike a balance: make enough busts to get your name in the paper every once in awhile. But don't make so many that your "market" for busts dries up completely, or that you start arresting well-connected members of society.
There's never been a problem with people and companies taking a few photos (or even a lot of photos for a specific reason) of public areas either legally or socially. There is, however, a problem with a company roaming every back alley and subdivision for the sole purpose of "we just wanna put it all online". It violates the spirit of privacy, if not the letter of the law currently.
I love street view and have used it many times, but I think areas zoned as residential shouldn't be filmed en masse and placed online.
Slashdot Mirror
The link to buy it was right there in the summary and has a big magenta button on the first page that says "BUY NOW $99".
And I also couldn't help but notice that Marvell's page for the device has a big clickable image on it that says "VISIT PARTNER PAGE TO BUY."
Not long, most likely. Once the specification draft nears completion, browser developers are going to be tripping over themselves to implement it so that they can add the bullet to their feature list. Many major browsers already support some HTML 5 features (most impressively, Opera supports all the new forms features). You have to remember, the web is a Big Thing these days and there is another browser war brewing. If Firefox continues to gain market share like it is, IE and Firefox may be an even match by the time HTML 5 is finalized.
Of course, the HTML 5 doesn't fix the biggest problem with the web: developers of different rendering engines interpret the spec differently, contain annoying bugs that go unfixed for years, or claim to be compliant with the spec while failing to implement an entire subset of it. Unfortunately there just isn't an easy way to correct this.
Oh, you mean in spite of the fact that they've already said that they were going to include an ad blocker?
Hardly. It doesn't come anywhere near antitrust laws until Google forces you to use only Chromium if you want to view their web sites. Although I'm not much of a Google fan, I can say that I just don't see them going quite that low.
Err, you're not aware that Mozilla's biggest financial sponsor is Google?
I have an N800 and I only sorta like it.
I could spend all day complaining about it, but suffice to say that in regards to reading e-books... it's not much of a long-term solution. The screen has incredible resolution for its size, but the size of the screen is still small. You either need to hold the tablet close to your face or suffer eye strain.
The Nokia Gecko browser is a joke. It's very slow, has limited options, and is very very buggy. Quite often it stops working completely until you do a reboot. I can't believe the lack of quality control on the central piece of software for a device proudly proclaimed to be an Internet Tablet. Some bloke is working on a WebKit browser right now and while the UI still needs a lot of work, it is at least several times faster than Gecko and relatively stable.
So far, my preferred use of the N800 is for podcasts. It's quite nice to be able to just download the podcasts right to the tablet over wifi and then carry it along with me wherever I go. Music streams drain the battery something fierce, otherwise it would be good for those as well.
Well, not really. I heard of Cory Doctorow because I heard him speak at a conference. He was invited to the conference because he's written some really well-received books that fit in with the theme of the con. The reason they were well-received was because he rose out of obscurity by giving his books away for free.
I'm not saying that giving content away is a sure fire way to be noticed. Far from it. Skill is still the most important asset by far, but if you have that skill, then giving the content away for free is a great marketing strategy as long as the thing you have to sell (such as a hardcopy of the book) is tangibly worth more.
Also, I found the article that I was looking for. Doctorow explains the story a lot better than I could ever hope to.
I've been dreaming of a multi-purpose GUI that was suitable for everything from set-top boxes, to phones, to car PCs for a solid decade now. The computing power has always been there, but practically no software or even GUI libraries are written with the assumption that the user might want to interface with the applications by means of remote control or touch screen. On a small screen. With no keyboard or mouse necessarily available.
Awhile back before the iPhone took off, I spent months designing an entire UI that would be suitable for both set-top boxes and car PCs. But I'm not really a programmer so I didn't know where to go from there and couldn't find anyone else that was interested in helping to make it a reality. I'm happy to see Moblin that seems to have the same goals but is actually implementing them.
Except for the clause in every proprietary software license agreement that says:
"We (the company) can change the terms of this agreement whenever we want, without your consent, or even without notifying you that the license has changed. Also, we can terminate your permitted use of the software whenever we see fit, not matter how much you paid for it."
This is a warm embrace to you? I'm not aware of any free software coming with a clause like this. Once the code is licensed, it's licensed, and anyone can use it however they like for as long as they like. They are simply bound to a couple of restrictions in the course of that use or distribution. Nobody (including the copyright holder) can retroactively change the terms of a free software license.
Oh lord. I hope you don't really mean to imply that proprietary licenses are somehow simpler to comprehend, with fewer gotchas, limitations, restrictions, and loopholes than free software licenses. If so, then I seriously doubt you have ever read a single proprietary license in its entirety in your life.
Did somebody have some Cheeky Flakes for breakfast this morning?
It's important because it's still an issue. Last I heard, there was still a Telcoms Package going through the EU which either has the power to enforce the concept net neutrality among union member states, or abolish it forever. In the U.S. and Canada, providers are still trying to push legislation that would give them a legal green light to start engaging in what otherwise would be considered chilling and obvious anti-competitive practices.
I used to think this too. That net neutrality was only about ISPs selling preferential service to content providers while deliberately degrading service for competitors. But net neutrality is (or should) be about much more than that. Doctorow is square-on that innovation on the Internet will come to a screeching halt if every user has to be careful not to surf for too long or download much data for fear of going over their alloted amount and running up a massive bill. If this ever comes to pass, net neutrality won't even matter because no one will have any interest in high-bandwidth applications at all. The Internet will devolve to where it was 10 years ago where email, IM, and the occasional graphics-barren web site were pretty much all you had.
You're confusing his point. He was making that argument in reference to metered bandwidth, not punishing the top 2%. And most people really do have no idea how much bandwidth they use. I know I certainly don't and I consider myself a pretty savvy user, a sysadmin by trade. His argument was that if you meter everyone's bandwidth, users will scrutinize every link. They'll consciously or subconsciously budget their bandwidth and be forced to make decisions about their online activities based on how much each link costs rather than how useful or informative it is.
No offense, but this has always been a really piss-poor analogy. On a telephone, you have direct and consistent control over how much you are billed. You can choose whether or not to make a call, you can choose how long a call lasts, and you can choose to not answer an incoming call. Additionally, you are billed based on units of time that are easy to track and calculate.
But if you have to pay for metered bandwidth, you generally have no idea whether that link on Slashdot is going to bring up a page that's 10K in size or 1MB. You don't know what kind of compression a particular video stream is using. You might think you're just going to read short little news blurb (read: a cheap one) until you see that the newspaper has seen fit to add a gigantic animated flash advertisement to the right-hand side of the page.
With metered bandwidth, control over your exact bill amount is orders of magnitude harder as compared to a telephone bill even if you have a good understanding of kilobytes, megabytes, and gigabytes and rudimentary knowledge of TCP/IP. Joe Q. Public does not. All he knows is that last evening he went to a hunting website, played a
What, he can't be both?
I almost hate to point this out, but you're really living up to your nickname with this one. :)
Doctorow addresses this very point in the article, so I question whether you actually the whole thing. The ISPs claim exactly what you said, that their top 2% (or whatever) of users consume a disproportionate amount of bandwidth compared to the bottom 98%. But guess what? Even if you cut off those top 2%, the next ones in line will become the top 2% of users consuming bandwidth disproportionate to the rest. It's an exponential graph, so your top 2% will always consume a disproportionate amount of bandwidth compared to all other customers. It's like the war on drugs, only with numbers. It's a claim that they can trot out to justify meters, caps, throttling, and other fun ways to screw their customers without actually lying. The problem is, continually chopping off (or capping) the top 2% is guaranteed to never actually help because the demand for bandwidth will always keep rising.
The only way to ethically serve their customers is to actually upgrade their infrastructure as demand goes up. But they don't want to do that because it costs money. They seem to be desperate to cling to their old business models where all you had was routine support and maintenance costs once your infrastructure was built out, everything else was basically profit. Like all gigantic companies, they are loathe to adapt to a changing market, and there is perhaps no more rapidly changing markets than those tied to computers and the Internet. This would be fine if consumers could choose their Internet providers, but the vast majority cannot because the telcos and cablecos were handed monopoly status by local governments and now they think they can get away with acting like monopolies.
(The sad part is: they probably can.)
Well, that's the thing. You're perfectly right of course but it shouldn't have been "their lines" to begin with. No company should be able to actually own them. I can't imagine what kind of drugs local leaders in the U.S. were on when telco and cable companies barged into town and said, "Hi there, we want string up wires on every single piece of private property and get the whole operation subsidized too. And then when it's done, we'll own it all and do whatever we like with both the lines and the services. Sound good?"
In my perfect little imaginary universe, the local governments would own the loops and rent them out to whoever wanted to use them. Use the proceeds to hire a company (who is not a carrier) to maintain the infrastructure. If carriers wanted upgrades, they could pay for them. Sure, there would still be some problems to work out since it adds a layer of bureaucracy but I can guarantee it would be much better than allowing one company to have monopolistic control over an entire city and its citizens.
Software sometimes ships with features that go unused? Horrors!
Dude. I hardly think getting published is any kind of suitable benchmark for excellence. Have you not been to a bookstore? An author's biggest hurdle in achieving financial success from his/her work isn't dealing with piracy, it's dealing with obscurity.
I can't find an article to link to right now, but Cory Doctorow has had much to say over the years on how giving his books away for free on his website allowed him to reach a much wider audience than he ever could have otherwise. (And he says it also made him a shit-ton more money because many of the people who liked the first book actually bought the second. And third. And so on.)
They're not filling one of the traditional purposes of a website either, which is to present content in a highly-portable markup language that is readable in all web browsers.
Instead, they used Flash to embed PDFs into a little window on a website.
With YouTube, Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, and now this, I really feel like the Internet is just getting stupider by the month. It's almost enough to make me pine for the days of AOL and GeoCities.
Holy shit. Really? This is your actual response to a group of kids who are trying to learn the basics of analog/digital design theory and set out to do something fun and interesting with it?
Constructive criticism is one thing, but telling someone that they shouldn't even attempt a project when they don't already grasp 100% of the details involved just reeks of condescending elitism. That is far more dangerous to science and the exploration of technology than some novice jumping into a trivial audio-visual project without having mastered all of the details first. They're just trying to learn something and pass their experiences along to others. No, the project may not be professional-level electronics engineering, but it wasn't meant to be. It was meant to be fun, cheap, and educational, and it succeeded on all of those.
If this is how you really feel about people trying to learn something for themselves, please remove the word "hacker" from your nickname and just leave the "ancient" part.
Probably it was the lack of food that contributed to the feeling of sickness more than anything else.
I did this at a geek/sci-fi con once. They had free snacks in the consuite throughout the weekend and I thought I would survive just fine on those. Got plenty of sleep. But by Sunday, I was ready to keel over. Though I had some bad lunchmeat or something from the consuite, but after I finally ate a full meal that afternoon I felt just fine.
Maybe not eating much for that long a period of time drops your blood sugar down to rock-bottom levels or something, but I'm not wise in the ways of nutrition so maybe someone more qualified can answer.
And it's people like you that are the reason gender typing is alive and going strong.
Sure, there are a few general differences between males and females that go beyond the physical level, but all the "boys like trucks" and "girls like shopping" crap is 100% culturally originated and reinforced. The danger with gender typing is that it coerces people into behaving in certain ways purely based on whether they happen to have a penis or a vagina between their legs. It's the reason that the ratio of men and women in math and science careers is so strongly unbalanced despite the fact that there's zero evidence that men have a greater ability for the subjects that women do.
My wife and I are expecting our first child. We deliberately made the decision not to find out the sex of the baby before it is born. Not because we didn't want to know, but more because we didn't want our families stereotyping the poor child and writing its future before it has even been born. A newborn is a blank slate, a new person, who should be granted the freedom to grow up into whoever he or she want to be, not what society tells them they should be.
There are very few things that the sociology crowd and I both agree on, but gender typing is a real problem because it's potentially damaging to individuals for the sole sake of making the ignorant masses a little more comfortable with themselves.
Oh, never mind. Apparently they did. I should really RTFA before commenting.
Now they should put parted and KVM in there and we can finally be done with the whole concept of dual-booting.
This was essentially going to be my answer to the OP. If you're Googling the title of your work and find that most of the links are warez, then obviously you're not doing a good enough job making the book available.
Notice how the once-prominent P2P filesharing applications pretty much cease to be relevant to the public at large once iTunes came along? Its because the market finally came up with a consumer-friendly way of distributing digital music. I predict that Bittorrent will probably do the same once there's a cheap (and more importantly, easy) way to legally download watch movies on demand.(1)
The OP used the phrase "path of least resistance" in one of his comments in this thread, so I suspect he already knows what the problem is but just doesn't want to face the answer that either he or his publisher (or both) are doing a dreadfully awful job at promoting and making his book available to consumers.
1. And to anyone who wants to ask, yes, I realize that bittorrent is good for far more than pirating movies which is why it will probably never die off completely. It will just move back underground once the major consumer content markets are all better served by legit distribution mechanisms.
Now whenever friends, family, or even complete strangers ask me what I'm doing, I can cheerfully reply that I'm playing with my Wiz.
I'm guessing no, or they wouldn't have written an entire article about it.
The only problem is that more large ISPs are doing this than small ones. Large ISPs have teams of executives with nothing better to do than sit around and figure out how else to further screw their customers. Small ISPs are generally too busy trying to keep their infrastructure online for an extended period of time.
You've hit on a point that's rarely brought up in discussions like this: law enforcement could almost completely wipe out drugs and prostitution in their jurisdictions if they really wanted to. But the unspoken objective is to always keep the "threat" looming, so that the politicians continue to look like they're doing an important job in the eyes of the public, the money keeps flowing in, government employees get to keep their jobs.
Instead of eradicating those behaviors that are prohibited by law, they strive to strike a balance: make enough busts to get your name in the paper every once in awhile. But don't make so many that your "market" for busts dries up completely, or that you start arresting well-connected members of society.
It's not nearly so black-and-white as that.
There's never been a problem with people and companies taking a few photos (or even a lot of photos for a specific reason) of public areas either legally or socially. There is, however, a problem with a company roaming every back alley and subdivision for the sole purpose of "we just wanna put it all online". It violates the spirit of privacy, if not the letter of the law currently.
I love street view and have used it many times, but I think areas zoned as residential shouldn't be filmed en masse and placed online.