The physical limitations on cable are far far less than the limitations on putting up bookstores.
Whooptee-freaking-do. Your understanding of physical limitations clearly does not involve property rights. If you can't figure out how right of way easements affect the laying of cable, you are not qualified to even comment on the topic of public utilities.
It *is* feasible today...this tech is not commercially available
Your definition of `is' is obviously different from the rest of the world's.
Seems like your points of contention completely miss his point.
Acerage - ever hear of "right of way" the amount of potential storefronts in a town is orders of magnitude greater than the amount of available right-of-way space for secondary cable plants. So yeah, he's right, bookstores EFFECTIVELY unlimited, cables strung across town, LIMITED.
do you know how much data fiber can move?
Yeah, exactly 0bps if you can't lay the fibre in the first place. How many cablecos do you know of that SHARE the bandwidth of their fibre? ZERO, and the phone companies are lobbying for exactly the same thing for the fibre they are laying - see Verizon's recent activities regarding their FIOS service.
the right technologies to open spectrum up wide exist, they just have yet to hit commercial production.
Yadda, yadda, yadda. What does that have to do with what is feasible TODAY or the next six months? Nothing.
It's from a song by Jefferson Airplane called "White Rabbit".
Which is doubly-relevant because not only was Jefferson Airplane an icon of the 60's "protest culture," it was formed in San Francisco too, circa 1965.
Man, just reading those lyrics I can still hear Grace Slick wailing out those lines, what an awesome song it was.
IMO this is the right, hacker friendly way to allow overclockers to have their fun and also curb illicit remarking.
Except that the high pricing on the FX line makes the whole point of overclocking - getting more power for your money - moot. Instead, you spend more money just for the chance to maybe get more power.
Don't forget, Blockbuster has been known for censoring movies -- editing them to make them more palatable for family viewing. Try renting a movie like 'Y Tu Mama Tambien' from Blockbuster or Walmart. You will end up seeing a version that has been edited for content.
You are so completely off-base, even your example is wrong. There are two releases of Y Tu Mama Tambien - R-rated and unrated and the version that corporate Blockbuster stores carry? The UNRATED version. I know this specifically because I purchased one of about 20 previously-viewed copies they had at my local store. Another example is "The Dreamers" which has been released on DVD in both R-rated and NC-17-rated versions, Blockbuster carried both (although only some corporate stores got the NC-17 version), I bought my previously-viewed NC-17 version there too.
For the REAL story, lets go straight the horse's mouth:
We do not edit or otherwise alter movies ourselves. We leave the methodology as to how ratings are applied specifically and completely to the studios involved. We are retailers and not members of the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America), so we take no position on individual scenes or the overall artistic merits of a film. We are not in the content business. We are in the business of exceeding the expectations of our members and customers, and thus our goal is to offer the widest possible selection.
BLOCKBUSTER has always tried to provide our customers with a variety of choices while maintaining our family orientation. As you know, we will not generally carry "X" rated or "NC-17" rated films. However, there are unrated film titles we feel may contain content unsuitable for children, and we designate these titles with a "YRV" designation, for "Youth Restricted Viewing". Although not pornographic, only members older than 17 are allowed to select these films.
Cutting back hours? I don't know about that. I know of a couple Blockbusters around here and they are open the same hours they have been for years.
I don't think he is referring to the cutting back of operating hours, but of employee hours. Such cutbacks are an inevitable result due to the way employees are "provisioned" - it is based on the store's revenue, not on the number of rentals.
Blockbuster has both an online netflix clone and a B&M version too. Based on my personal discussions with a couple of store managers, the B&M version has hit stores hard - their heavy renters, the people who might rent 20+ movies a month, have all converted to the new B&M program for around $20 per month. Thus, their most lucrative customers are now their most expensive customers because all the overhead remains the same - cashier, shelving, etc - but the revenue for them is about one fifth of it once was.
So, revenue goes down and because employees are only allocated based on store revenue, a lot of them have to either be let go, or have their hours cut. Since the workload remains about the same, but there are less employee resources to do the work, the people who remain are now overworked and stressed, which leads to the good employees, the pro-active, customer-focused and just all around mentally engaged (yes such people do work at blockbuster!) being the first to quit because they have a better chance of finding other work.
It is kind of a vicious circle and may end up being a death spiral for blockbuster unless they are able to greatly increase efficiency in their stores - god knows there is plenty of opportunity, their computer systems suck, their inventory control and pricing is terrible, their training of employees is notoriously bad, etc, etc. But, they've been coasting for so long with such little competition that their corporate culture may not be able to make the necessary changes because they would be just too drastic.
Ecclesiastes 11:1 Cast your bread on the waters; for you shall find it after many days.
Since it says it will take "many days" the scripture obviously refers to a very low-bandwidth bread connection. Nevertheless it is quite clear that file sharing is a good christian family value and only liberal scum in league with the UN and the forces of evil would ever say otherwise.
The cost of gas is shooting up to sky-high levels for many reasons:
Don't forget - the devaluation of the American dollar.
Even though oil is officially priced in US dollars, that does not make its pricing tied to the value of the dollar. Since oil has intrinsic value, if the value of the US dollar goes down, the price of oil must go up so as to roughly maintain value parity.
Why should teachers be motivated to switch? Because it is a moral obligation for non-profit organizations to use product that are more suitable for the common good and not just profitable for a monopoly.
Hah! Good one!
Teachers are just as lazy as every one else, they don't want extra work, especially extra work that doesn't buy them anything in return.
The idea that there is anything to balance is just a made up rationalization by the likes of the copyright cartel. "IP law" is meant solely:
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;"
In some cases, rewarding creators serves that original interest, but if that were to change, perhaps as the result of the development of some new kind of communications technology, there would be no justification for continuing to support a failing system just because it used to work under former conditions.
At least that's what the constitution says about it in the USA.
SPARC register windows suck in practice, they have all kinds of ugly side-effects like making longjmp hard, making super-scalar hard, etc, etc. Sun has managed to maintain compability, but it was expensive and register windows are primarily just legacy cruft now.
A process calling into the kernel *is* a context switch, because the "context" is defined by the combination of the processor state (registers) and activation record (the stack)
Well then, a function call is a context switch because the stack pointer changes and so do some of the registers.
What matters in the context of this thread is the performance (I did say, "not a context switch, at least not in the same way."), and a switch into the kernel is a lot less expensive than a switch to another process. Not saving FP (which is a unix convention, not a linux convention) as well as the segment and other misc registers makes kernel calls cheaper than scheduling a new process.
However, the Internet gives - not removes - my power as a creator to control *who* distributes. I can blacklist certain users, domains, IP ranges and user agents. It's all about control.
No, it does not give you any more control than you have in the real world. All those mechanisms you list are about limiting access to your ORIGINAL, but have zero effect on copies. Once someone has a copy in their posession none of those mechanisms means squat. If they did, we would not even be having this dicussion because your original complaint was about wholesale cut-n-paste into a new web page. If any "internet" mechanism could prevent that, don't you think it would already be in some sort of regular use? If the such a mechanism existed, don't you think the RIAA and MPAA would be all over it? After all, their entire existence is predicated on control of distribution.
1) You will pay for the bandwidth 2) Anyone else can do the same, thus reducing the price "paid" (either via adverts or a subscription service) for the DISTRIBUTION to near marginal cost
I know it is hard for people to wrap their head around the concept but distribution and creation are two entirely seperate kinds of work - the current copyright cartel grew to power by conflating the two which was easy to do when every "virtual" copy required a corresponding physical copy with a non-zero cost.
Now that distribution is almost zero-cost, any method of compensation that is based on distribution is a failing proposition. Instead compensation needs to be directly linked to the work of creation, for example a commission based system.
How about - since the movie studios get a defined percentage of the ticket sales, simply upping the ticket price by any reasonable amount will not direct enough revenue to the theater to make it worthwhile?
For example, the typical take for a first-week showing is only 20% for the theater - 80% goes to the distributor. So a 50% increase in ticket pricing from $10 to $15 will only net the theater an additional 40 cents.
It gets a little better after the movie has been shown for a few weeks, eventually working its way down to arond 50/50, I think, maybe even better. But by then the crowds have thinned, to the point where the movie is often replaced with a brand new movie with brand new high margins too.
Copyright is the right to distribute. Commercialization is something completely separate.
That is false, "commercilization" or rather the effect on the market is one of the factors used in determining the validity of a fair use defense as well as the amount of damages due if a defendent loses a case of copyright infringement.
Don't forget battlestar galactica (shown in the UK almost 6 months before the USA) and a whole host of programs that will never make it like ReGenesis, show in Canada last year.
These aren't necessarily opposing opinions: the graphics system is different than a kernel. But in a GUI environment, both are going to be responsible for a *lot* of communication
The problem is that within a kernel everybody runs at the same privilege level, although micro-kernels do have the concept of different subsystems running with different privileges, it usually ends up not being a valuable feature.
But the X server does require privileged access to hardware, often the privilege is enough to do bad things to the system if misused. Thus you can not (safely) just have the user making procedure calls into the gui because they would, by definition, need to run at a high privilege level which means the rest of the user process could also do bad things to the system too.
In theory, with either special hardware and/or a fancy compositing manager, regular user processes could each draw in their own shared memory buffer (either in system memory or on the card) and just about all the gui calls could be implemented via (safe) procedure calls that just scribbled on the private buffer and relied on the compositing manager to (safely) composite them all together on the actual display. But, AFAIK, today's hardwware does not support that kind of use and so the software isn't there either.
Re:Why isn't this already out?
on
Next Generation X11
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· Score: 3, Informative
If you're communicating by sockets, you have to make two context switches, right? One to call the kernel, and one from the kernel to the X server. Whereas if there was a system API, then it would be just one context switch: you call the kernel, end of story.
That is an argument for putting the GUI in the kernel, not for getting rid of network transparency,
If we count entire paths, it would be: you-kernel-x-kernel-you, vs. you-kernel-you.
No, a "context switch" is from one process to another, a process into the kernel is not a context switch, at least not in the same way.
For example:
1) FP - process 2 process requires save & restore of floating point registers, but process to kernel does not because the kernel does not do FP
2) General registers - process 2 process requires save & restore of all general registers because each process has its own state, when you make a system call, you bring all of your general registers in with you since the "state" of the system is your currently running process. Somem will be saved off in case the kernel clobbers them, to be restored on the way back out to the user process but worst case, that's only one save & restore and if you go back to a different process (which is usually the case, even in your example) then the number of saves & restores is the same either way.
3) There's more, but I'm too sleepy to type any of the rest.
The Internet wasn't designed to copy works without limit
That is not what I said, I said it makes copying an almost zero cost operation. From that basis, a number of "new" ideas naturally follow, including that it is natural to make a copy if doing so increases convenience.
In fact, I'd argue that the Internet makes copying not needed as redundancy should allow my originals to be accessed from any location.
Each time it is accessed, it is copied. Just because some copies are more permanent than others isn't really that important when they all cost next to nothing to make and use.
Slashdot Mirror
The physical limitations on cable are far far less than the limitations on putting up bookstores.
Whooptee-freaking-do. Your understanding of physical limitations clearly does not involve property rights. If you can't figure out how right of way easements affect the laying of cable, you are not qualified to even comment on the topic of public utilities.
It *is* feasible today...this tech is not commercially available
Your definition of `is' is obviously different from the rest of the world's.
Are you being deliberately ignorant?
Seems like your points of contention completely miss his point.
Acerage - ever hear of "right of way" the amount of potential storefronts in a town is orders of magnitude greater than the amount of available right-of-way space for secondary cable plants. So yeah, he's right, bookstores EFFECTIVELY unlimited, cables strung across town, LIMITED.
do you know how much data fiber can move?
Yeah, exactly 0bps if you can't lay the fibre in the first place. How many cablecos do you know of that SHARE the bandwidth of their fibre? ZERO, and the phone companies are lobbying for exactly the same thing for the fibre they are laying - see Verizon's recent activities regarding their FIOS service.
the right technologies to open spectrum up wide exist, they just have yet to hit commercial production.
Yadda, yadda, yadda. What does that have to do with what is feasible TODAY or the next six months? Nothing.
It's from a song by Jefferson Airplane called "White Rabbit".
Which is doubly-relevant because not only was Jefferson Airplane an icon of the 60's "protest culture," it was formed in San Francisco too, circa 1965.
Man, just reading those lyrics I can still hear Grace Slick wailing out those lines, what an awesome song it was.
IMO this is the right, hacker friendly way to allow overclockers to have their fun and also curb illicit remarking.
Except that the high pricing on the FX line makes the whole point of overclocking - getting more power for your money - moot. Instead, you spend more money just for the chance to maybe get more power.
You are so completely off-base, even your example is wrong. There are two releases of Y Tu Mama Tambien - R-rated and unrated and the version that corporate Blockbuster stores carry? The UNRATED version. I know this specifically because I purchased one of about 20 previously-viewed copies they had at my local store. Another example is "The Dreamers" which has been released on DVD in both R-rated and NC-17-rated versions, Blockbuster carried both (although only some corporate stores got the NC-17 version), I bought my previously-viewed NC-17 version there too.
For the REAL story, lets go straight the horse's mouth:
Cutting back hours? I don't know about that. I know of a couple Blockbusters around here and they are open the same hours they have been for years.
I don't think he is referring to the cutting back of operating hours, but of employee hours. Such cutbacks are an inevitable result due to the way employees are "provisioned" - it is based on the store's revenue, not on the number of rentals.
Blockbuster has both an online netflix clone and a B&M version too. Based on my personal discussions with a couple of store managers, the B&M version has hit stores hard - their heavy renters, the people who might rent 20+ movies a month, have all converted to the new B&M program for around $20 per month. Thus, their most lucrative customers are now their most expensive customers because all the overhead remains the same - cashier, shelving, etc - but the revenue for them is about one fifth of it once was.
So, revenue goes down and because employees are only allocated based on store revenue, a lot of them have to either be let go, or have their hours cut. Since the workload remains about the same, but there are less employee resources to do the work, the people who remain are now overworked and stressed, which leads to the good employees, the pro-active, customer-focused and just all around mentally engaged (yes such people do work at blockbuster!) being the first to quit because they have a better chance of finding other work.
It is kind of a vicious circle and may end up being a death spiral for blockbuster unless they are able to greatly increase efficiency in their stores - god knows there is plenty of opportunity, their computer systems suck, their inventory control and pricing is terrible, their training of employees is notoriously bad, etc, etc. But, they've been coasting for so long with such little competition that their corporate culture may not be able to make the necessary changes because they would be just too drastic.
How about turning off raw sockets as default but letting the admen open them up if the machine needs them.
Yeah, let the marketing department decide.
Aren't they the ones who got MS into all these security problems in the first place?
"Be fruitful and multiply."
The first part sounds like endorsement of gay marriage to me. But I guess it only applies to gay mathematicians.
The cost of gas is shooting up to sky-high levels for many reasons:
Don't forget - the devaluation of the American dollar.
Even though oil is officially priced in US dollars, that does not make its pricing tied to the value of the dollar. Since oil has intrinsic value, if the value of the US dollar goes down, the price of oil must go up so as to roughly maintain value parity.
Why should teachers be motivated to switch? Because it is a moral obligation for non-profit organizations to use product that are more suitable for the common good and not just profitable for a monopoly.
Hah! Good one!
Teachers are just as lazy as every one else, they don't want extra work,
especially extra work that doesn't buy them anything in return.
There is no balance.
The idea that there is anything to balance is just a made up rationalization by the likes of the copyright cartel.
"IP law" is meant solely: In some cases, rewarding creators serves that original interest, but if that were to change, perhaps as the result of the development of some new kind of communications technology, there would be no justification for continuing to support a failing system just because it used to work under former conditions.
At least that's what the constitution says about it in the USA.
licenses ... they're written in terse legalese
I don't think you know what that word means.
Clearly our greatest enemies are the corporations. I call for Santorum to be tried as a traitor.
Yeah, and there is just as much chance of that happening as there is of the RIAA suing the president.
Just because there is an R next to his name, doesn't make him a Republican.
Sometimes it is just a smudged K, but I don't think he is a kosher candidate either.
Politicians want votes. Voters want pork.
So, clearly the solution is to convert America to an Islamic state,
because then pork will be illegal.
SPARC register windows suck in practice, they have all kinds of ugly side-effects like making longjmp hard, making super-scalar hard, etc, etc. Sun has managed to maintain compability, but it was expensive and register windows are primarily just legacy cruft now.
A process calling into the kernel *is* a context switch, because the "context" is defined by the combination of the processor state (registers) and activation record (the stack)
Well then, a function call is a context switch because the stack pointer changes and so do some of the registers.
What matters in the context of this thread is the performance (I did say, "not a context switch, at least not in the same way."), and a switch into the kernel is a lot less expensive than a switch to another process. Not saving FP (which is a unix convention, not a linux convention) as well as the segment and other misc registers makes kernel calls cheaper than scheduling a new process.
However, the Internet gives - not removes - my power as a creator to control *who* distributes. I can blacklist certain users, domains, IP ranges and user agents. It's all about control.
No, it does not give you any more control than you have in the real world. All those mechanisms you list are about limiting access to your ORIGINAL, but have zero effect on copies. Once someone has a copy in their posession none of those mechanisms means squat. If they did, we would not even be having this dicussion because your original complaint was about wholesale cut-n-paste into a new web page. If any "internet" mechanism could prevent that, don't you think it would already be in some sort of regular use? If the such a mechanism existed, don't you think the RIAA and MPAA would be all over it? After all, their entire existence is predicated on control of distribution.
Yes, absolutely ok because:
1) You will pay for the bandwidth
2) Anyone else can do the same, thus reducing the price "paid" (either via adverts or a subscription service) for the DISTRIBUTION to near marginal cost
I know it is hard for people to wrap their head around the concept but distribution and creation are two entirely seperate kinds of work - the current copyright cartel grew to power by conflating the two which was easy to do when every "virtual" copy required a corresponding physical copy with a non-zero cost.
Now that distribution is almost zero-cost, any method of compensation that is based on distribution is a failing proposition. Instead compensation needs to be directly linked to the work of creation, for example a commission based system.
How about - since the movie studios get a defined percentage of the ticket sales, simply upping the ticket price by any reasonable amount will not direct enough revenue to the theater to make it worthwhile?
For example, the typical take for a first-week showing is only 20% for the theater - 80% goes to the distributor. So a 50% increase in ticket pricing from $10 to $15 will only net the theater an additional 40 cents.
It gets a little better after the movie has been shown for a few weeks, eventually working its way down to arond 50/50, I think, maybe even better. But by then the crowds have thinned, to the point where the movie is often replaced with a brand new movie with brand new high margins too.
Copyright is the right to distribute.
Commercialization is something completely separate.
That is false, "commercilization" or rather the effect on the market is one of the factors used in determining the validity of a fair use defense as well as the amount of damages due if a defendent loses a case of copyright infringement.
Don't forget battlestar galactica (shown in the UK almost 6 months before the USA) and a whole host of programs that will never make it like ReGenesis, show in Canada last year.
These aren't necessarily opposing opinions: the graphics system is different than a kernel. But in a GUI environment, both are going to be responsible for a *lot* of communication
The problem is that within a kernel everybody runs at the same privilege level, although micro-kernels do have the concept of different subsystems running with different privileges, it usually ends up not being a valuable feature.
But the X server does require privileged access to hardware, often the privilege is enough to do bad things to the system if misused. Thus you can not (safely) just have the user making procedure calls into the gui because they would, by definition, need to run at a high privilege level which means the rest of the user process could also do bad things to the system too.
In theory, with either special hardware and/or a fancy compositing manager, regular user processes could each draw in their own shared memory buffer (either in system memory or on the card) and just about all the gui calls could be implemented via (safe) procedure calls that just scribbled on the private buffer and relied on the compositing manager to (safely) composite them all together on the actual display. But, AFAIK, today's hardwware does not support that kind of use and so the software isn't there either.
If you're communicating by sockets, you have to make two context switches, right? One to call the kernel, and one from the kernel to the X server. Whereas if there was a system API, then it would be just one context switch: you call the kernel, end of story.
That is an argument for putting the GUI in the kernel, not for getting rid of network transparency,
If we count entire paths, it would be: you-kernel-x-kernel-you, vs. you-kernel-you.
No, a "context switch" is from one process to another, a process into the kernel is not a context switch, at least not in the same way.
For example:
1) FP - process 2 process requires save & restore of floating point registers, but process to kernel does not because the kernel does not do FP
2) General registers - process 2 process requires save & restore of all general registers because each process has its own state, when you make a system call, you bring all of your general registers in with you since the "state" of the system is your currently running process. Somem will be saved off in case the kernel clobbers them, to be restored on the way back out to the user process but worst case, that's only one save & restore and if you go back to a different process (which is usually the case, even in your example) then the number of saves & restores is the same either way.
3) There's more, but I'm too sleepy to type any of the rest.
The Internet wasn't designed to copy works without limit
That is not what I said, I said it makes copying an almost zero cost operation. From that basis, a number of "new" ideas naturally follow, including that it is natural to make a copy if doing so increases convenience.
In fact, I'd argue that the Internet makes copying not needed as redundancy should allow my originals to be accessed from any location.
Each time it is accessed, it is copied. Just because some copies are more permanent than others isn't really that important when they all cost next to nothing to make and use.