Wire quality with copper is definitely an issue, particularly premises wiring. When I was installing DSL back in 1999/2000, I recall installing for a residential customer in Rogers Park in Chicago. High rise apartment building right on Sheridan. The premises wiring was circa 1910 - cloth insulated, looked like 10 gauge. Running a new wire from the demarc in the basement up to the suite many many floors up was out of the question for me, as I didn't have the tools or expertise to pull it off, and it would have taken much longer than our two hour install window. Having a third party do it would be extremely expensive, and silly to just pull a single cable for one unit.
Oddly enough, the guy's service came up at 1MB SDSL, the highest speed offered by Telocity at that time. Still, I doubt it would be sufficient to handle 100MB speed.
Point is, the wiring quality has to be good enough end to end, from the equipment in the cage to the endpoint in your house. Way way back, AT&T used to own all the wiring in the premises, but when they found out that they would be responsible to replace all that wiring, they generously "gave" it all to the property owners. And some of that very old wiring is still in use today.
Copper POTS lines are broken up into several segments. There's a bundle from the telco to the neighborhood box. There's bundles from the neighborhood box to the pedestal or pole behind your house. There are runs from the pedestal to each customer premises. There are crossconnects at each junction.
The telco is obliged to connect a pair of wire from the telco office to your premises for voice service. They can use any pair to the neighborhood, any pair to the pedestal and any pair to your house. Some of that wiring is older, some of that wiring is damaged, some of that wiring has other equipment attached. It's not uncommon for bad crossconnects to be made. The telco can change what pairs are providing the loop to your house at any time, perhaps to pairs that are of lower quality than you previously had, and subject again to the possibility of bad crossconnects. All of those things have an effect on internet service over POTS lines, and hence, VoIP over DSL.
Cable, on the other hand, has far fewer "moving parts." Fewer pieces of physical equipment and cabling lowers the likelihood that there will be breakage in the normal course of operations. And when there is breakage, it's not just the one phone line to one place has a little extra noise on it - the symptom is more widespread, meaning the company is (should be) more motivated to fix it. "Noise on the line that effects DSL speed" isn't usually cause enough for the telco to make repairs, since they only really have to give you phone service. If it's not affecting phone service, tough luck.
Au contraire - banks are not experts at technology whatsoever. Small banks usually don't have their own IT staff. Most banking applications (provided by third parties) are built on very old technology.
No, banks are good with money and accounting, not the administration of the technology they use to do those tasks.
Credit cards are most likely to be ripped off where they are used most often. People use credit cards online a lot now, more than they did when that saying was originally said. Also, because the unwashed masses have this idea that The Internets are made of magic fairy dust distilled directly from truth and love, they're prepared to believe whatever The Internets tells them.
Thieves steal what's easiest to steal and get away with.
The problems with piracy in China are not only with software and media. From what I've heard, you can buy a fake anything there. Books, golf clubs, watches - anything. This seems like an action designed to get China into the better graces of the West without really addressing the issue.
For cars with purely mechanical keys, there are a finite number of keyset combinations. That finite number is vastly smaller than the number of cars manufactured with a particular design of lockset. As I recall, for GM cars in the mid-80s, the number of unique lockets was very very low. With enough time and a large enough fleet of vehicles, finding two cars with the same lockset would be possible, if tedious.
We can pretty easily extrapolate that to anything with a purely mechanical key. Diebold should have used a combination mechanical/chip key, like many automakers do. I remember the way BMWs worked - they had (maybe still do) a controller in the car that held ten spaces for electronic key signals (which meant you could have a max of ten keys for the car). Every time you used the key, it would check with the controller to allow access. Once access was allowed, the controller would reprogram the code in that slot, and the key you just used to match. So every time you used the key to start the car, it would automatically re-randomize the electronic code.
Seems that voting security in the US is not worth as much as a luxury car.
The US economy went in the dumper in mid-2000, before the presidential election, after many years of high times. Now, there were a lot of factors in play, of course, but I have always felt that the markets were preparing for a Republican presidency. As soon as it became feasible for Bush to win that election, the markets started turning down.
Now, we're about to have a mid-term election where it's feasible that the Dems could gain control of one or both houses of Congress. And gas prices fall.
I'm sure someone who's paid more attention than I have will dispute that theory, and I welcome it. Still, I think that world investors and markets are proactive more than reactive, and that the world oil prices are reacting to the possibility that the Bush administration will be put in check to some degree this November.
TCourts typically determine if something is "art" based on its cost. If $thing costs more than its utilitarian value, then its art.
I can see that as being a legal definition of "art." Following that, the question "Is $THING art?" is unanswerable, being that no context is stated. "Is $THING legally art?" is a question that can be far more easily debated, as would be "Is $THING relatively art?" (example: a sculpture is art, because there are a wide variety of similar historical examples which are almost universally considered "art").
So, when asking "Are videogames art?" one must provide a context. "If a movie with multiple endings, where the ending is chosen based on the input of the viewer is art, then are videogames art?" To that I would say yes.
The best real-world example I have found is a woman in NYC who has sex with men on videotape for money.
You make my friends list simply for knowing that. Got a reference?
I've often considered that the thing which is most functional for its purpose is the best art. Think "chair." Four legs, seat, back. A perfect representation of "that upon which people sit," and you can actually sit on it.
So let's think about videogames. Are they art? Is Monopoly (the board game) art? Is chess? Is a paper airplane? Is masturbation? All these things entertain us, in one form or another.
Fact is, whether or not $THING is art is wholly subjective, depending on the person making the determination. Beyond that, there's whether or not $THING (which may or may not be art) is good art or bad art.
That's a whole other discussion.
Re:It should NOT evolve into more that just a brow
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Marketing Mozilla
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As I recall, what turned Netscape into a steaming pile was its acquisition by AOL, and the AOLification of the app.
This isn't a technology problem. This isn't a problem with the Internet. It's a management issue.
I have seen soooo many cases where management dictates that IT implement a technology "solution" to a management problem. I believe this stems from management's "not wanting to deal with it" and "foisting responsibility for dealing with it onto underlings." It's the same reason why middle managers exist; as a buffer between the people who are instructed to do their work stupidly and upper management who dictates the stupid way to work. Upper management wants to make decisions in a vaccuum, and have those decisions obeyed without question. This is why creative underlings who question and have fresh ideas about how to manage are not promoted and "yes men" and toadies are.
Hence, internet filtering. If the internet is filtered, underlings must, by definition, obey the rules without question. Perhaps not without grumbling, but the grumbling - interestingly - is often directed at IT for implementing the filters. Hey, guess what? IT doesn't give a crap about what you do at your desk, and we'd sure as hell rather not have to manage and monitor an internet filtering system. You wanna point fingers? Point higher.
Why is it, then, that every HP or Dell computer (and probably others) comes with Java preinstalled with Windows?
I agree that Sun needs to be a little more open with the use of their free as in beer Java browser plugin. But if it can be done for Windows machines coming out of computer manufacturers, why not in a Linux distro?
Is Java installed by default? Because installing Java for Linux is a massive pain the ass. I can see all the power users now, downloading their favorite distro, installing, deciding to get Firefox - then they wanna do a speed test at DSLReports. Uh oh, need Java - screw it, I'm going back to Windows.
(Unless I'm doing something wrong myself, in which case I am most certain that I will be corrected.)
I know at least one (okay only one) person who needs to use MS Excel because of features it has over the OOo counterpart. He's an accountant. I expect that there are other business users in the world who run into the same kind of thing.
And hey - OOo is open source, right? So if it doesn't do something that you want it to do, you can contribute your own code! Oh... you're an end user and not a developer? Oh well, too bad then.
So you don't have any routers or switches or VoIP systems or servers or printers or workstations or backup storage or --
Yeah, the project managers and developers can take care of all that stuff in their free time.
For the nth time, IT is more than programming/development. There's a whole lot of infrastructure that needs installing, repairing, maintaining, and securing, and your development staff and management is either unwilling or unable to deal with it. Which is fine, because there's a whole bunch of people out there (yes, like me) who are both willing and able, for the right price.
Oh and one last thing: if you plan on hiring and promoting people who have stronger business skills and knowledge (stronger than technical skills and knowledge, presumably), you're going to end up with a head that doesn't know what to tell the body to do. Again. Or still. Whatever, "business leaders" - you're just there to soak money until the place goes under or you get canned with severance.
The only thing it proves is that someone had the presence of mind to think, "Hey if we don't allow burning of movies to DVD, we're effectively killing off the entire revenue stream of downloadable movies," and was able to convince other people of the same.
Your post should read: "Further evidence that the MPAA and its members aren't quite as stupid as the RIAA and its members."
Why would the porn or DM industries oppose a do-not-email list? Why do they have such a boner to keep sending spam to people who are willing to sign up to a list that says they are NOT interested?
Because the companies outsource their mass-mailing operations to third parties. Those third parties are the ones who would have to filter their mailing lists against myriad "do not email" lists from as many geopolitical groups. Those third parties are often small outfits that run botnets to deliver their spam.
Do you really think that someone who runs a spam botnet is going to take extra time out to filter their mailing list that way? The more time spent doing the job, the less money per hour spent doing it. Bottom line - it's cheaper not to filter a mailing list.
The only way to turn that around is to make it cheaper to filter a mailing list, possibly through large court settlements or jail time.
I noticed something right away about your erudite post. (Italics added, because your post is a great one, and I don't mean to tear it down with the following.)
The section wherein you describe the "our government is just looking out for us" position is made up of declaratory statements. The "hidden conspiracy" section is made up of questions (partially excluding "These patches might be a wolf in sheep's clothing," which could be considered a draw to cause the reader to question, and "I don't think the government...," which is the conclusion of all the prior statements).
For the first part, statements are made and presented as fact, then a conclusion. The reader may choose to agree or disagree with the statements, and thereby the conclusion - but it seems clear that if the statements are true, the conclusion is also true.
For the second part, the reader self-answers the questions posed, and is asked to agree with the conclusion based on those answers. A conclusion cannot be derived from a series of questions; there must be answers (facts) on which conclusions must be based.
This is how many arguments between conspiracy theorists (CT) and non-conspiracy theorists (NCT) go. CTs present questions without answers, with the presumption that whoever is reading the questions will answer them in the way desired. NCTs present statements of fact, and the reader must judge whether to take those statements as true or not.
Asking questions as your argument allows the reader to go back and modify the self-provided answers (perhaps unconsciously) in order to allow the conclusion to be true. Presenting statements of fact does not allow this kind of manipulation.
If CT lines of reasoning did not ask questions, and instead presented statements of fact, it would be very simple for readers to discount them as bunk. But because the reader is self-providing answers (and a self-provided answer is very likely to be one that the reader believes is true), CT arguments can come off as more valid than they really are.
Wikipedia refers to 'highbrow' as "intellectual" or "high culture," and it's interesting that the etymology goes back to phrenology. Wordnet offers a short definition: "highly cultured or educated."
I feel that there are plenty of games that are "smart enough." Depends on how the player is able to interpret them. As with any creative work, the interpretation is up to the consumer, not the creator. When the consumer is able to get a meaning out of the work that the creator hadn't intended to convey - that's a sign of quality.
One might argue that the question "Why are there no highbrow video games?" points back to the questioner. Reworded for truth: "Why are there no video games that are smart enough for me?" Well, maybe you should look into yourself and figure out why you've placed yourself in a different intellectual class than "run-of-the-mill gamers." Take another look and see what meaning you can discover. There might be something you missed.
Wrong. I'm not writing blog entries that refer to content elsewhere, then submitting my own blog to aggregation sites. I am a consumer of such things, and it has just struck me on the head today that I would prefer to consume the meat of the story as opposed to the styrafoam container in which it is delivered. My personal scale finally tipped to the point where I feel I am consuming more packaging than content.
As it stands right now, I don't see any other option (apart from being less informed), and that irks me.
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Wire quality with copper is definitely an issue, particularly premises wiring. When I was installing DSL back in 1999/2000, I recall installing for a residential customer in Rogers Park in Chicago. High rise apartment building right on Sheridan. The premises wiring was circa 1910 - cloth insulated, looked like 10 gauge. Running a new wire from the demarc in the basement up to the suite many many floors up was out of the question for me, as I didn't have the tools or expertise to pull it off, and it would have taken much longer than our two hour install window. Having a third party do it would be extremely expensive, and silly to just pull a single cable for one unit.
Oddly enough, the guy's service came up at 1MB SDSL, the highest speed offered by Telocity at that time. Still, I doubt it would be sufficient to handle 100MB speed.
Point is, the wiring quality has to be good enough end to end, from the equipment in the cage to the endpoint in your house. Way way back, AT&T used to own all the wiring in the premises, but when they found out that they would be responsible to replace all that wiring, they generously "gave" it all to the property owners. And some of that very old wiring is still in use today.
Copper POTS lines are broken up into several segments. There's a bundle from the telco to the neighborhood box. There's bundles from the neighborhood box to the pedestal or pole behind your house. There are runs from the pedestal to each customer premises. There are crossconnects at each junction.
The telco is obliged to connect a pair of wire from the telco office to your premises for voice service. They can use any pair to the neighborhood, any pair to the pedestal and any pair to your house. Some of that wiring is older, some of that wiring is damaged, some of that wiring has other equipment attached. It's not uncommon for bad crossconnects to be made. The telco can change what pairs are providing the loop to your house at any time, perhaps to pairs that are of lower quality than you previously had, and subject again to the possibility of bad crossconnects. All of those things have an effect on internet service over POTS lines, and hence, VoIP over DSL.
Cable, on the other hand, has far fewer "moving parts." Fewer pieces of physical equipment and cabling lowers the likelihood that there will be breakage in the normal course of operations. And when there is breakage, it's not just the one phone line to one place has a little extra noise on it - the symptom is more widespread, meaning the company is (should be) more motivated to fix it. "Noise on the line that effects DSL speed" isn't usually cause enough for the telco to make repairs, since they only really have to give you phone service. If it's not affecting phone service, tough luck.
Au contraire - banks are not experts at technology whatsoever. Small banks usually don't have their own IT staff. Most banking applications (provided by third parties) are built on very old technology.
No, banks are good with money and accounting, not the administration of the technology they use to do those tasks.
Since when do we listen to "users?"
Can you run Linux on him?
Credit cards are most likely to be ripped off where they are used most often. People use credit cards online a lot now, more than they did when that saying was originally said. Also, because the unwashed masses have this idea that The Internets are made of magic fairy dust distilled directly from truth and love, they're prepared to believe whatever The Internets tells them.
Thieves steal what's easiest to steal and get away with.
The problems with piracy in China are not only with software and media. From what I've heard, you can buy a fake anything there. Books, golf clubs, watches - anything. This seems like an action designed to get China into the better graces of the West without really addressing the issue.
For cars with purely mechanical keys, there are a finite number of keyset combinations. That finite number is vastly smaller than the number of cars manufactured with a particular design of lockset. As I recall, for GM cars in the mid-80s, the number of unique lockets was very very low. With enough time and a large enough fleet of vehicles, finding two cars with the same lockset would be possible, if tedious.
We can pretty easily extrapolate that to anything with a purely mechanical key. Diebold should have used a combination mechanical/chip key, like many automakers do. I remember the way BMWs worked - they had (maybe still do) a controller in the car that held ten spaces for electronic key signals (which meant you could have a max of ten keys for the car). Every time you used the key, it would check with the controller to allow access. Once access was allowed, the controller would reprogram the code in that slot, and the key you just used to match. So every time you used the key to start the car, it would automatically re-randomize the electronic code.
Seems that voting security in the US is not worth as much as a luxury car.
IANAE(conomist), but here's my take:
The US economy went in the dumper in mid-2000, before the presidential election, after many years of high times. Now, there were a lot of factors in play, of course, but I have always felt that the markets were preparing for a Republican presidency. As soon as it became feasible for Bush to win that election, the markets started turning down.
Now, we're about to have a mid-term election where it's feasible that the Dems could gain control of one or both houses of Congress. And gas prices fall.
I'm sure someone who's paid more attention than I have will dispute that theory, and I welcome it. Still, I think that world investors and markets are proactive more than reactive, and that the world oil prices are reacting to the possibility that the Bush administration will be put in check to some degree this November.
I was thinking more along the lines of Sussussudio myself.
I can see that as being a legal definition of "art." Following that, the question "Is $THING art?" is unanswerable, being that no context is stated. "Is $THING legally art?" is a question that can be far more easily debated, as would be "Is $THING relatively art?" (example: a sculpture is art, because there are a wide variety of similar historical examples which are almost universally considered "art").
So, when asking "Are videogames art?" one must provide a context. "If a movie with multiple endings, where the ending is chosen based on the input of the viewer is art, then are videogames art?" To that I would say yes.
You make my friends list simply for knowing that. Got a reference?
Yes. No. Maybe. Depends.
I've often considered that the thing which is most functional for its purpose is the best art. Think "chair." Four legs, seat, back. A perfect representation of "that upon which people sit," and you can actually sit on it.
So let's think about videogames. Are they art? Is Monopoly (the board game) art? Is chess? Is a paper airplane? Is masturbation? All these things entertain us, in one form or another.
Fact is, whether or not $THING is art is wholly subjective, depending on the person making the determination. Beyond that, there's whether or not $THING (which may or may not be art) is good art or bad art.
That's a whole other discussion.
As I recall, what turned Netscape into a steaming pile was its acquisition by AOL, and the AOLification of the app.
Gotcha (although I'm sure that Microsoft is not redistributing Java, since it was Sun that took them to court to get them to dump Microsoft JVM).
I have seen soooo many cases where management dictates that IT implement a technology "solution" to a management problem. I believe this stems from management's "not wanting to deal with it" and "foisting responsibility for dealing with it onto underlings." It's the same reason why middle managers exist; as a buffer between the people who are instructed to do their work stupidly and upper management who dictates the stupid way to work. Upper management wants to make decisions in a vaccuum, and have those decisions obeyed without question. This is why creative underlings who question and have fresh ideas about how to manage are not promoted and "yes men" and toadies are.
Hence, internet filtering. If the internet is filtered, underlings must, by definition, obey the rules without question. Perhaps not without grumbling, but the grumbling - interestingly - is often directed at IT for implementing the filters. Hey, guess what? IT doesn't give a crap about what you do at your desk, and we'd sure as hell rather not have to manage and monitor an internet filtering system. You wanna point fingers? Point higher.
Why is it, then, that every HP or Dell computer (and probably others) comes with Java preinstalled with Windows?
I agree that Sun needs to be a little more open with the use of their free as in beer Java browser plugin. But if it can be done for Windows machines coming out of computer manufacturers, why not in a Linux distro?
Is Java installed by default? Because installing Java for Linux is a massive pain the ass. I can see all the power users now, downloading their favorite distro, installing, deciding to get Firefox - then they wanna do a speed test at DSLReports. Uh oh, need Java - screw it, I'm going back to Windows.
(Unless I'm doing something wrong myself, in which case I am most certain that I will be corrected.)
I know at least one (okay only one) person who needs to use MS Excel because of features it has over the OOo counterpart. He's an accountant. I expect that there are other business users in the world who run into the same kind of thing.
... you're an end user and not a developer? Oh well, too bad then.
And hey - OOo is open source, right? So if it doesn't do something that you want it to do, you can contribute your own code! Oh
So you don't have any routers or switches or VoIP systems or servers or printers or workstations or backup storage or --
Yeah, the project managers and developers can take care of all that stuff in their free time.
For the nth time, IT is more than programming/development. There's a whole lot of infrastructure that needs installing, repairing, maintaining, and securing, and your development staff and management is either unwilling or unable to deal with it. Which is fine, because there's a whole bunch of people out there (yes, like me) who are both willing and able, for the right price.
Oh and one last thing: if you plan on hiring and promoting people who have stronger business skills and knowledge (stronger than technical skills and knowledge, presumably), you're going to end up with a head that doesn't know what to tell the body to do. Again. Or still. Whatever, "business leaders" - you're just there to soak money until the place goes under or you get canned with severance.
God I get so pissed about this.
The only thing it proves is that someone had the presence of mind to think, "Hey if we don't allow burning of movies to DVD, we're effectively killing off the entire revenue stream of downloadable movies," and was able to convince other people of the same.
Your post should read: "Further evidence that the MPAA and its members aren't quite as stupid as the RIAA and its members."
Because the companies outsource their mass-mailing operations to third parties. Those third parties are the ones who would have to filter their mailing lists against myriad "do not email" lists from as many geopolitical groups. Those third parties are often small outfits that run botnets to deliver their spam.
Do you really think that someone who runs a spam botnet is going to take extra time out to filter their mailing list that way? The more time spent doing the job, the less money per hour spent doing it. Bottom line - it's cheaper not to filter a mailing list.
The only way to turn that around is to make it cheaper to filter a mailing list, possibly through large court settlements or jail time.
I noticed something right away about your erudite post. (Italics added, because your post is a great one, and I don't mean to tear it down with the following.)
...," which is the conclusion of all the prior statements).
The section wherein you describe the "our government is just looking out for us" position is made up of declaratory statements. The "hidden conspiracy" section is made up of questions (partially excluding "These patches might be a wolf in sheep's clothing," which could be considered a draw to cause the reader to question, and "I don't think the government
For the first part, statements are made and presented as fact, then a conclusion. The reader may choose to agree or disagree with the statements, and thereby the conclusion - but it seems clear that if the statements are true, the conclusion is also true.
For the second part, the reader self-answers the questions posed, and is asked to agree with the conclusion based on those answers. A conclusion cannot be derived from a series of questions; there must be answers (facts) on which conclusions must be based.
This is how many arguments between conspiracy theorists (CT) and non-conspiracy theorists (NCT) go. CTs present questions without answers, with the presumption that whoever is reading the questions will answer them in the way desired. NCTs present statements of fact, and the reader must judge whether to take those statements as true or not.
Asking questions as your argument allows the reader to go back and modify the self-provided answers (perhaps unconsciously) in order to allow the conclusion to be true. Presenting statements of fact does not allow this kind of manipulation.
If CT lines of reasoning did not ask questions, and instead presented statements of fact, it would be very simple for readers to discount them as bunk. But because the reader is self-providing answers (and a self-provided answer is very likely to be one that the reader believes is true), CT arguments can come off as more valid than they really are.
So what do you search for after you've already found all the midget pr0n? I'm asking for a friend, of course.
Wikipedia refers to 'highbrow' as "intellectual" or "high culture," and it's interesting that the etymology goes back to phrenology. Wordnet offers a short definition: "highly cultured or educated."
I feel that there are plenty of games that are "smart enough." Depends on how the player is able to interpret them. As with any creative work, the interpretation is up to the consumer, not the creator. When the consumer is able to get a meaning out of the work that the creator hadn't intended to convey - that's a sign of quality.
One might argue that the question "Why are there no highbrow video games?" points back to the questioner. Reworded for truth: "Why are there no video games that are smart enough for me?" Well, maybe you should look into yourself and figure out why you've placed yourself in a different intellectual class than "run-of-the-mill gamers." Take another look and see what meaning you can discover. There might be something you missed.
Wrong. I'm not writing blog entries that refer to content elsewhere, then submitting my own blog to aggregation sites. I am a consumer of such things, and it has just struck me on the head today that I would prefer to consume the meat of the story as opposed to the styrafoam container in which it is delivered. My personal scale finally tipped to the point where I feel I am consuming more packaging than content.
As it stands right now, I don't see any other option (apart from being less informed), and that irks me.