Did you bother to read any of the linked webpages? First of all, there are plenty of useful applications for the internet: to get accurate and timely information about crops pricing, to stay in touch with relatives scattered by poverty and war, to bid on things like construction jobs. The bare necessities are also desperately needed, but it's not completely inconceivable that one communally-owned computer could bring much more cost-effective and immediate benefit to a village than, say, literacy education, which while necessary in the long-term is expensive and doesn't pay dividends for years. Secondly, if you take what's been written about this project in good faith, this is something that the Laotian villagers asked for. It's fantastic that you seem to know better than the people themselves what they need, but unless you're going to put your money where your mouth is and pony up some housing, why deride the efforts of people who are actually trying to help?
What the poster is complaining about isn't the "SpeedStep" per se; if he had expected to get 2 hours of battery life and instead got 3 I expect he'd be delighted. Instead, he was expecting to get 2 hours of battery life at full speed because the processor used 30W of power and instead got a proc that would only get 2 hours at half speed because it used 55W of power. How hard is that to understand? When people buy a portable computer they expect the portable version of the CPU to be inside, and if it isn't then it should be listed as the demerit it is, not as a "feature".
This is even more distressing when one considers that the capacitors in these discarded cellphones are made of an element (tantalum) with an incredibly high cost of extraction in terms of human suffering. The mining of Ta has exacerbated a war in the Congo (which has over 80% of the world's Ta reserves) that has killed more than three million people. See for example What is Coltan? A google search for coltan congo cell phones turns up more.
I used the word "giver" imprecisely; let me now correct myself. "Eponymous" refers to the subject of the titled work, and thus the book "Steven Levy" would only be eponymously-named if it were about Steven Levy, regardless of who actually wrote it and decided on the title.
Huh? If Steven Levy had published an eponymous book it would have been entitled "Steven Levy".
Actually, "eponymous" refers to the giver of the title, e.g. "Romulus was the eponymous founder of Rome." So a book named "Steven Levy" would be eponymously-titled.
"Dispossessed," by Ursula Le Guin. A lot of her work could be called utopian/dystopian, but this book is the one that really changed my personal views of what our world should be like.
A site like Salon, as excellent as it is/was, simply cannot make it by charging for content.
How else were they going to generate revenue? If they didn't charge, they'd be 40,000 x $30 deeper into the hole. Exactly how would giving their content away free have made up for that $1,200,000?
If Salon was serious about surviving, it should have canned it expensive SF offices and become basically a virtual company. Web space is cheap, and writer can live anywhere.
This is just plain silly. I don't know if you're aware of how much face-to-face interaction is necessary to publish a daily newsmagazine, but I'll tell you that it's a hell of lot more than is required to, say, program software. I guess if every failing software company would just "see the obvious" and move into their employees' living rooms they'd never go out of business.
Too bad they couldn't see the obvious.
All I can say is that opinions are like assholes, and if companies had to be clueless instead of just unlucky to go out of business, we'd all be a lot richer. You can say "if they only did $foo, they'd have made it," but at a certain point that becomes a tautology. Yeah, if it had been one college kid serving up articles written by his friends from his dorm room, maybe they could have survived, but then they wouldn't have been Salon, now would they?
The issue isn't really technology. Toyota and a few other companies have had hybrids out for a couple of years. As you point out, mileage has been going down since 1986, in large part due to the popularity of SUVs. If we raised fuel economy requirements by a measly 3 m.p.g., that alone would save as much petroleum as we could get from the Alaskan Arctic Wildlife Refuge, but with Bush in office that's a non-starter.
You raise a good point, but I'd like to point out that the price of crude oil isn't determined wholly by market forces. Just as an example, in 1990 the oil industry received a nice $61 billion subsidy from the world's taxpayers. How much of our military aid to foreign countries like Colombia comes at the behest of oil companies who want to drill there, and what would be the price of oil if the industry had to pay for maintaining stability in its supply regions by itself? Or if it had to raise its own financing for oil-drilling projects in the third world instead of getting U.S. taxpayer-funded and risk-guaranteed loans from the World Bank?
In other words, the reason oil appears "cheap" is because most of the cost of its production has been shifted away from the oil companies. We've been spending most of the last century investing in an infrastructure--military, economic, legislative--that supports the use of petroleum. The cost of maintaining that infrastructure also needs to be taken into account.
When did people start believing that the purpose of the government is to ensure that someone makes a profit instead of to serve the public interest? "We need the DMCA because what improves the lives of millions of electronics consumers infringes on our right to make money." "We need absurd patent laws because the free exchange of ideas among the people impedes our ability to make money." "Giving everyone cheap broadband makes us less money!"
All these corporations need to remember that the reason we happen to have a free market economy is that we've determined that incentivized competition is the best way to serve the public good, not as an endin and of itself. It's the job of the government to serve the people, and the responsibility of private enterprise to figure out how to make money anyway. I mean, if a magical fairy flew down tomorrow and promised to turn the earth into a paradise, giving everyone as much material comfort as they wanted, all the corporations would be screaming about how it's unfair and going to cost them money.
And yes, I do realize that the "public" is comprised partly by exactly those corporations and people who have a stake in them, but tell that to me again when 1% of the population stops owning 50% of the stocks and bonds.
Usage Note: The words ironic, irony, and ironically are sometimes used of events and circumstances that might better be described as simply "coincidental" or "improbable," in that they suggest no particular lessons about human vanity or folly. Thus 78 percent of the Usage Panel rejects the use of ironically in the sentence "In 1969 Susie moved from Ithaca to California where she met her husband-to-be, who, ironically, also came from upstate New York." Some Panelists noted that this particular usage might be acceptable if Susie had in fact moved to California in order to find a husband, in which case the story could be taken as exemplifying the folly of supposing that we can know what fate has in store for us. By contrast, 73 percent accepted the sentence "Ironically, even as the government was fulminating against American policy, American jeans and videocassettes were the hottest items in the stalls of the market," where the incongruity can be seen as an example of human inconsistency.
A cursory reading of the article suggests that passwords aren't limited to permutations of 25 elements; 25 is just the number of images against which you have to verify. It's like being shown a list of 128 binary numbers and asked to choose the one that's yours; the numbers themselves can be more then 7 digits long. Of course, that still means that some mechanism is necessary to prevent brute-forcing, but that's a relatively trivial problem (especially in contexts like ATMs, where they already do that).
That we as a culture are so shallow to think that adding a paltry 50MHz to our gigahertz+ processors... will somehow make us happy is the tragedy of the modern age.
I completely agree... if Santa doesn't bring me something that's at least 200MHz faster, I'm going to be pissed!
I agree with the Alpha PAL8045 recommendation, but be careful with comparing CPU temps. Since the Athlons don't have an internal temperature diode, the reported temperature is heavily dependant on the motherboard. I strongly doubt that your CPU is actually 30 degrees cooler under equivalent conditions.
iTunes 2 comes with the device, as you would have seen if you had bothered to read Apple's description of the device. Adding FireWire to a PC is a $15 PCI card; every recent Mac has come with them standard. And while $400 is a lot of money, it's only $170 more than the Nomad thinger; would I pay $170 more for a device with half the weight, a quarter of the size, many many many times the transfer speed, and much better engineering and user design? Hell yes.
That said, I'm not going to buy one, but I think plenty will.
Compromises like this won't work long-term.
on
RIAA to DoS Pirates?
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
All that sounds good, but in the long term there is nothing the music industry can do to solve the problem of piracy without fundamentally changing their business model. Right now it looks like this: 1) Manufacture flashy new act 2) Market the product like it's going out of style 3) Milk it, milk it, milk it 4) When it goes out of style, go to step 1.
The problem is that a model that is so driven by marketing is especially vulnerable to piracy. Why?
Marketing is good at creating desire, but poor at creating support.
The music labels have pretty much stopped telling people to buy their stuff because it's good, but because it's popular, and at some level their customers realize this. People will buy a product because it's the hot thing, but if that is its sole source of appeal, at the end of the day the buyers won't feel obligated to support the people behind it.
Marketing-driven products have no value apart from their marketing.
If you have an act that's good but undermarketed, MP3-trading will function like free marketing, resulting in increased sales. But if you have an act that's well-marketed but crappy, MP3-trading will function like lost sales, as people say, "Okay, I've been told by Mr. Television that I should have this; well, now I have it."
No one is going to "discover" Limp Bizkit by hearing an MP3. The product is the marketing and vice versa. Similarly, in tend years, that Limp Bizkit CD isn't going to be on the shelves waiting for the next generation of music fans; if you want to make money off it, you have to make money now.
Take a look at the publishing industry. The book world is also driven by marketing, but to a much lesser extent. If you publish a book, you can expect that it will provide revenue independent of the amount of money you spend to hype it. That's because the book industry is actually about selling the content instead of the hype.
Furthermore, the publishing houses have stayed alive by acting as finders and screeners of content. Instead of riding one or two major cash cows, they cast their nets wide, trying to get everything that has some quality. There are tons of great music albums that never get major label release, but there aren't that many great novels out there haven't been published in one form or another. Conversely, I know that anything published by a major house will be better in quality than 90% of what I could get for free.
So why don't the record companies adopt a model like the publishing industry, where they nurture a variety of intrinsically good acts that will provide more modest but longer-lasting and more stable cash flows? Simple: the quality-based model doesn't make nearly as much cash as the marketing-based model.
The fact is that there is no way for the record companies to make a "fair" profit doing what they do now. Nothing less that the survival of their way of doing business is at stake; it's no surprise that they're going down swinging.
No, that's not what they're claiming. The 1999 $29.2 million figure obviously reflects the same supposed 80% loss of sales to piracy. In other words they calculate, pro rata, that total sales in 1999 would have been $143 million if it weren't for piracy.
I agree that the figures are bullshit, but swinging at straw men doesn't do anything for our credibility. It's obvious that the elimination of file-trading wouldn't translate into a 400% jump in sales, but the intellectual property situation in Korea is very different from that in the U.S. When I was there not long ago, pirated software could be purchased over-the-counter, and it's not at all difficult to believe that there are four ripped copies of a song extant for every copy sold legally.
Why on earth was this moderated up? "Maybe for you" is neither insightful nor informative. You have to wonder whether any post that's 95% sarcasm can make a wortwhile contribution to a discussion.
A lot of Bezos's argument seems to be, "we're really the little guys." Well, sorry Jeff, but Microsoft was once a garage operation too. I'm not in the practice of supporting small businesses because they're small, I support them because they hold themselves to higher ethical standards than that evil big companies. So if Amazon wants to keep my patronage once they do become as big as BN, they've got to establish now that they're going to play nice. So far, they're failing miserably.
This page has a reverse engineering of Binary Boy, part of the Aureate network, that shows what the function of advert.dll is. Of course, it might have other malicious functionality as well, but I dunno...
Guess what alert I get when I click on the story link? 'An ActiveX control on this page is not safe. Your current security settings prohibit running unsafe controls on this page. As a result, this page may not display as intended.'
Anyway, Aureal says that the rumors are false, and I for one am inclined to believe them. From what I can see, the programs that install the.dll are ones that display a banner ad in the software itself (I know CuteFTP and GetRight do this). So it seems legit that what they're doing is just targetting those banner ads.
On the other hand, I couldn't delete advert.dll (access denied) until I closed IE, so I wouldn't be surprised if it was tracking some kind of surfing info. Also, I was none too pleased about finding the.dll on my HD and Aureate keys all over my registry even after uninstalling the offending programs.
Is that what you think the GPL is? A way to get more control? Glad to see that you GPL advocates are finally getting honest.
You're missing the point: what matters is who controls the code. There's nothing wrong with having someone control a public resource. The great thing about the GPL is that it places control of the use of the code in the hands of the law and on the public record, instead of at the whim of the creator. In other words, it uses the court system to ensure that the code is being used in the community interest. If you think that kind of control is a bad thing, so be it.
If you want an analogy, say that I have a plot of land that I want other people to be able to use as a park. Now I could just throw open the gates and let people use it, but what happens if in a few years, after the community has spent a lot of volunteer time and effort to landscape the park and plant grass and build a swingset, I decide to take the land back? Moreover, someone needs to make sure that some greedy individuals don't build condos and highrises on land that's meant for public use.
In the the analogy, the GPL is the Public Parks Office at City Hall to whom I could donate the land. Since it would be on the public record, I couldn't take the land back if I change my mind. Furthermore, the Parks Office would administer the park and use the law to make sure that the park is being used for the public good.
This is one of the basic functions of government: to make sure that public resources are being used for the public good, and to enforce licenses that stipulate a given resource as public. Even libertarians acknowledge that in this respect, having the law control GPLed software isn't a bad thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Did you bother to read any of the linked webpages? First of all, there are plenty of useful applications for the internet: to get accurate and timely information about crops pricing, to stay in touch with relatives scattered by poverty and war, to bid on things like construction jobs. The bare necessities are also desperately needed, but it's not completely inconceivable that one communally-owned computer could bring much more cost-effective and immediate benefit to a village than, say, literacy education, which while necessary in the long-term is expensive and doesn't pay dividends for years. Secondly, if you take what's been written about this project in good faith, this is something that the Laotian villagers asked for. It's fantastic that you seem to know better than the people themselves what they need, but unless you're going to put your money where your mouth is and pony up some housing, why deride the efforts of people who are actually trying to help?
What the poster is complaining about isn't the "SpeedStep" per se; if he had expected to get 2 hours of battery life and instead got 3 I expect he'd be delighted. Instead, he was expecting to get 2 hours of battery life at full speed because the processor used 30W of power and instead got a proc that would only get 2 hours at half speed because it used 55W of power. How hard is that to understand? When people buy a portable computer they expect the portable version of the CPU to be inside, and if it isn't then it should be listed as the demerit it is, not as a "feature".
This is even more distressing when one considers that the capacitors in these discarded cellphones are made of an element (tantalum) with an incredibly high cost of extraction in terms of human suffering. The mining of Ta has exacerbated a war in the Congo (which has over 80% of the world's Ta reserves) that has killed more than three million people. See for example What is Coltan? A google search for coltan congo cell phones turns up more.
I used the word "giver" imprecisely; let me now correct myself. "Eponymous" refers to the subject of the titled work, and thus the book "Steven Levy" would only be eponymously-named if it were about Steven Levy, regardless of who actually wrote it and decided on the title.
Actually, "eponymous" refers to the giver of the title, e.g. "Romulus was the eponymous founder of Rome." So a book named "Steven Levy" would be eponymously-titled.
"Dispossessed," by Ursula Le Guin. A lot of her work could be called utopian/dystopian, but this book is the one that really changed my personal views of what our world should be like.
How else were they going to generate revenue? If they didn't charge, they'd be 40,000 x $30 deeper into the hole. Exactly how would giving their content away free have made up for that $1,200,000?
This is just plain silly. I don't know if you're aware of how much face-to-face interaction is necessary to publish a daily newsmagazine, but I'll tell you that it's a hell of lot more than is required to, say, program software. I guess if every failing software company would just "see the obvious" and move into their employees' living rooms they'd never go out of business.
All I can say is that opinions are like assholes, and if companies had to be clueless instead of just unlucky to go out of business, we'd all be a lot richer. You can say "if they only did $foo, they'd have made it," but at a certain point that becomes a tautology. Yeah, if it had been one college kid serving up articles written by his friends from his dorm room, maybe they could have survived, but then they wouldn't have been Salon, now would they?
The issue isn't really technology. Toyota and a few other companies have had hybrids out for a couple of years. As you point out, mileage has been going down since 1986, in large part due to the popularity of SUVs. If we raised fuel economy requirements by a measly 3 m.p.g., that alone would save as much petroleum as we could get from the Alaskan Arctic Wildlife Refuge, but with Bush in office that's a non-starter.
You raise a good point, but I'd like to point out that the price of crude oil isn't determined wholly by market forces. Just as an example, in 1990 the oil industry received a nice $61 billion subsidy from the world's taxpayers. How much of our military aid to foreign countries like Colombia comes at the behest of oil companies who want to drill there, and what would be the price of oil if the industry had to pay for maintaining stability in its supply regions by itself? Or if it had to raise its own financing for oil-drilling projects in the third world instead of getting U.S. taxpayer-funded and risk-guaranteed loans from the World Bank?
In other words, the reason oil appears "cheap" is because most of the cost of its production has been shifted away from the oil companies. We've been spending most of the last century investing in an infrastructure--military, economic, legislative--that supports the use of petroleum. The cost of maintaining that infrastructure also needs to be taken into account.
The spirit of violation is built into the video game; so is a demand for submission.
That should have been the caption for the Britney Spears screencap.
When did people start believing that the purpose of the government is to ensure that someone makes a profit instead of to serve the public interest? "We need the DMCA because what improves the lives of millions of electronics consumers infringes on our right to make money." "We need absurd patent laws because the free exchange of ideas among the people impedes our ability to make money." "Giving everyone cheap broadband makes us less money!"
All these corporations need to remember that the reason we happen to have a free market economy is that we've determined that incentivized competition is the best way to serve the public good, not as an endin and of itself. It's the job of the government to serve the people, and the responsibility of private enterprise to figure out how to make money anyway. I mean, if a magical fairy flew down tomorrow and promised to turn the earth into a paradise, giving everyone as much material comfort as they wanted, all the corporations would be screaming about how it's unfair and going to cost them money.
And yes, I do realize that the "public" is comprised partly by exactly those corporations and people who have a stake in them, but tell that to me again when 1% of the population stops owning 50% of the stocks and bonds.
Cf. usage note on ironic, ibid.
Usage Note: The words ironic, irony, and ironically are sometimes used of events and circumstances that might better be described as simply "coincidental" or "improbable," in that they suggest no particular lessons about human vanity or folly. Thus 78 percent of the Usage Panel rejects the use of ironically in the sentence "In 1969 Susie moved from Ithaca to California where she met her husband-to-be, who, ironically, also came from upstate New York." Some Panelists noted that this particular usage might be acceptable if Susie had in fact moved to California in order to find a husband, in which case the story could be taken as exemplifying the folly of supposing that we can know what fate has in store for us. By contrast, 73 percent accepted the sentence "Ironically, even as the government was fulminating against American policy, American jeans and videocassettes were the hottest items in the stalls of the market," where the incongruity can be seen as an example of human inconsistency.
A cursory reading of the article suggests that passwords aren't limited to permutations of 25 elements; 25 is just the number of images against which you have to verify. It's like being shown a list of 128 binary numbers and asked to choose the one that's yours; the numbers themselves can be more then 7 digits long. Of course, that still means that some mechanism is necessary to prevent brute-forcing, but that's a relatively trivial problem (especially in contexts like ATMs, where they already do that).
That we as a culture are so shallow to think that adding a paltry 50MHz to our gigahertz+ processors... will somehow make us happy is the tragedy of the modern age.
I completely agree... if Santa doesn't bring me something that's at least 200MHz faster, I'm going to be pissed!
I agree with the Alpha PAL8045 recommendation, but be careful with comparing CPU temps. Since the Athlons don't have an internal temperature diode, the reported temperature is heavily dependant on the motherboard. I strongly doubt that your CPU is actually 30 degrees cooler under equivalent conditions.
Any, if you look at the Heatsink Guide's recommendations, you'll see that 65 degrees C is still within the recommended limit.
7 Volts
iTunes 2 comes with the device, as you would have seen if you had bothered to read Apple's description of the device. Adding FireWire to a PC is a $15 PCI card; every recent Mac has come with them standard. And while $400 is a lot of money, it's only $170 more than the Nomad thinger; would I pay $170 more for a device with half the weight, a quarter of the size, many many many times the transfer speed, and much better engineering and user design? Hell yes.
That said, I'm not going to buy one, but I think plenty will.
All that sounds good, but in the long term there is nothing the music industry can do to solve the problem of piracy without fundamentally changing their business model. Right now it looks like this: 1) Manufacture flashy new act 2) Market the product like it's going out of style 3) Milk it, milk it, milk it 4) When it goes out of style, go to step 1.
The problem is that a model that is so driven by marketing is especially vulnerable to piracy. Why?
The music labels have pretty much stopped telling people to buy their stuff because it's good, but because it's popular, and at some level their customers realize this. People will buy a product because it's the hot thing, but if that is its sole source of appeal, at the end of the day the buyers won't feel obligated to support the people behind it.
If you have an act that's good but undermarketed, MP3-trading will function like free marketing, resulting in increased sales. But if you have an act that's well-marketed but crappy, MP3-trading will function like lost sales, as people say, "Okay, I've been told by Mr. Television that I should have this; well, now I have it."
No one is going to "discover" Limp Bizkit by hearing an MP3. The product is the marketing and vice versa. Similarly, in tend years, that Limp Bizkit CD isn't going to be on the shelves waiting for the next generation of music fans; if you want to make money off it, you have to make money now.
Take a look at the publishing industry. The book world is also driven by marketing, but to a much lesser extent. If you publish a book, you can expect that it will provide revenue independent of the amount of money you spend to hype it. That's because the book industry is actually about selling the content instead of the hype.
Furthermore, the publishing houses have stayed alive by acting as finders and screeners of content. Instead of riding one or two major cash cows, they cast their nets wide, trying to get everything that has some quality. There are tons of great music albums that never get major label release, but there aren't that many great novels out there haven't been published in one form or another. Conversely, I know that anything published by a major house will be better in quality than 90% of what I could get for free.
So why don't the record companies adopt a model like the publishing industry, where they nurture a variety of intrinsically good acts that will provide more modest but longer-lasting and more stable cash flows? Simple: the quality-based model doesn't make nearly as much cash as the marketing-based model.
The fact is that there is no way for the record companies to make a "fair" profit doing what they do now. Nothing less that the survival of their way of doing business is at stake; it's no surprise that they're going down swinging.
No, that's not what they're claiming. The 1999 $29.2 million figure obviously reflects the same supposed 80% loss of sales to piracy. In other words they calculate, pro rata, that total sales in 1999 would have been $143 million if it weren't for piracy.
I agree that the figures are bullshit, but swinging at straw men doesn't do anything for our credibility. It's obvious that the elimination of file-trading wouldn't translate into a 400% jump in sales, but the intellectual property situation in Korea is very different from that in the U.S. When I was there not long ago, pirated software could be purchased over-the-counter, and it's not at all difficult to believe that there are four ripped copies of a song extant for every copy sold legally.
Why on earth was this moderated up? "Maybe for you" is neither insightful nor informative. You have to wonder whether any post that's 95% sarcasm can make a wortwhile contribution to a discussion.
Is that 2 moderators found this "interesting" rather than "funny." :)
A lot of Bezos's argument seems to be, "we're really the little guys." Well, sorry Jeff, but Microsoft was once a garage operation too. I'm not in the practice of supporting small businesses because they're small, I support them because they hold themselves to higher ethical standards than that evil big companies. So if Amazon wants to keep my patronage once they do become as big as BN, they've got to establish now that they're going to play nice. So far, they're failing miserably.
This page has a reverse engineering of Binary Boy, part of the Aureate network, that shows what the function of advert.dll is. Of course, it might have other malicious functionality as well, but I dunno...
Guess what alert I get when I click on the story link? 'An ActiveX control on this page is not safe. Your current security settings prohibit running unsafe controls on this page. As a result, this page may not display as intended.'
Anyway, Aureal says that the rumors are false, and I for one am inclined to believe them. From what I can see, the programs that install the .dll are ones that display a banner ad in the software itself (I know CuteFTP and GetRight do this). So it seems legit that what they're doing is just targetting those banner ads.
On the other hand, I couldn't delete advert.dll (access denied) until I closed IE, so I wouldn't be surprised if it was tracking some kind of surfing info. Also, I was none too pleased about finding the .dll on my HD and Aureate keys all over my registry even after uninstalling the offending programs.
Is that what you think the GPL is? A way to get more control? Glad to see that you GPL advocates are finally getting honest.
You're missing the point: what matters is who controls the code. There's nothing wrong with having someone control a public resource. The great thing about the GPL is that it places control of the use of the code in the hands of the law and on the public record, instead of at the whim of the creator. In other words, it uses the court system to ensure that the code is being used in the community interest. If you think that kind of control is a bad thing, so be it.
If you want an analogy, say that I have a plot of land that I want other people to be able to use as a park. Now I could just throw open the gates and let people use it, but what happens if in a few years, after the community has spent a lot of volunteer time and effort to landscape the park and plant grass and build a swingset, I decide to take the land back? Moreover, someone needs to make sure that some greedy individuals don't build condos and highrises on land that's meant for public use.
In the the analogy, the GPL is the Public Parks Office at City Hall to whom I could donate the land. Since it would be on the public record, I couldn't take the land back if I change my mind. Furthermore, the Parks Office would administer the park and use the law to make sure that the park is being used for the public good.
This is one of the basic functions of government: to make sure that public resources are being used for the public good, and to enforce licenses that stipulate a given resource as public. Even libertarians acknowledge that in this respect, having the law control GPLed software isn't a bad thing.