If two competitors are trying for your dollars, they can choose to price their products competitively, ensure that they have the best product, market extensively, or pursue other customer experience factors to earn your business. This is good, constructive competition.
What we're talking about here, though, is a firm limiting your ability to buy the competitor at all. Doing this by forcefully strong arming the middle-man (in this case computer manufacturers) into not actually giving you a choice. Only in delusional land is this a win for the consumer. Only in delusional land could you think Intel's "fuzzy math" (some economic agreements intended to stifle competition) somehow end up as better deals for consumers.
Yeah, I really went off in the wild blue yonder talking about bags of soil and rocks. I should have aimed lower. Maybe bags of refuse? Would that have been more acceptable to you?
Igoring the lame troll, I have become very aware of social trends after reading the excellent book "Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion". Very highly recommended (and no that link does not include any referrals, at least unless Slashdot inserts one).
I don't even know where to start with this one..."inconsequential", my ass.
SEEMINGLY inconsequential. Read many of the other replies to this submission to understand why I said seemingly. Of course Norway holds significance, however it isn't surprizing that many thought that they were an irrelevant little nodule of Europe.
Hey! You said I'm inconsequential, you insensitive clod!
Well I did say seemingly.:-) Norway is becoming quite a powerhouse with the oil reserves and such, and has a very credible military for its size, but I knew that the general perception would be that they didn't matter.
This is a very good example for other countries to follow.
Two quick (and largely similar) stories:
-I was at a Rona recently getting some bags of gravel for a project. A gentleman walking by saw my gravel, at this point 9 bags on my cart, and suddenly decided that he needed gravel. It was obvious that he didn't intend to buy gravel, but seeing me buying gravel made him believe that there was something interesting about this gravel, and he should follow.
-Again at a Home Improvement store, yesterday I was at Home Depot and a gentleman was standing there trying to decide which soil to buy, asking the clerk to help him out, when I pulled up and started loading some "magic soil" into my cart. Instantly his mind was made up, and he started loading up. Seeing two people loading up, suddenly several other people pulled their carts over to get some of this deal. Of course I chose this soil completely randomly.
Both were cases of a social proof, and it's much like everyone waiting for the first one to leave a party. For these reasons this sort of event, even when it's a small, seemingly inconsequential Scandinavian country, are very much noteworthy. Often it's the pebbles that precede a landslide.
Yes, you could buy a player from one of the more innovative consumer-electronics companies like Apex
The constraints that the players are imposing is a part of the DVD spec (and a part of the licensing agreement with the DVD consortium) - "innovative" players like APEX are simply disregarding that part of the requirements (I believe that they're a Chinese company, so that isn't surprizing), and apparently thus far they've gotten away with it. I highly doubt either Toshiba or Pioneer (my two players) care whether I skip past a Madagascar ad, but they're simply abiding by their legal contracts.
Of course some studios are so abusive that I am willing to give the finger to the DVD consortium, but I'm not praising the great gods of APEX.
Understandable, but my beef is with the contention that "people want to watch movies at home, therefore they probably would like to illegally download the movies". There is seeming surprize that the percentage is so low (though there is coy hint that it's actually more, but I think that is delusional).
That's as logical as saying "despite the fact that most people prefer to eat at home, only 5% used NetGrocer to buy their groceries". Just because you want to do an activity at home doesn't mean that you are unable to do activities out of the home to achieve them.
No, it's a presumption by the submitter trying to push a certain agenda. Given that many who download videos are very proud of it, I would imagine the number is quite accurate.
Next chapter is usually disabled. I believe it's Shrek 2 that has some monstrous ad for Madagascar on it (among others), and they disable the menu and next chapter buttons (WHICH INFURIATES ME btw. My next DVD player will be purchased based upon it having a back-door around this abusive bullshit, and Hollywood can suck on a choad). To make matters even more fun both of my DVD players (from entirely different manufacturers, and made 6 years apart) crash if I fast forward past the end of that chapter. I'm forced to fast forward, and then hit play right before that craptacular ad ends.
Nothing engenders sympathy for video pirates more than the abusive practices of the large media companies.
Despite this demand for home viewing, only 5% admitted to downloading a movie from the internet.
Despite? How in the world is this despite, as if downloading movies is part and parcel of watching movies at home?
I drop by my local Blockbuster every now and then and peruse their selection of full-quality DVDs, getting very recent movies. My life is too busy these days to differentiate between 0-dayz and 3 months old, and I'm perfectly happy to wait until it comes out on DVD (most of the time it isn't even waiting -- it's simply the first time I have an opportunity to see the movie).
How in the world this was moderated insightful is a mystery.
Never have more people used the internet in their daily lives - from buying odds and ends on ebay, to doing their banking, to reading the news, to fulfilling their consumerism pangs through ecommerce sites. The internet as a whole is much larger, and more robust, than it was in 2000, and it is a far more pervasive part of even more people's daily lives.
They just want more people to watch their boring Money TV programs.
So true. Apart from the few lucky guys that bailed out at the right time and got rich, the biggest beneficiaries of the boom were the stock porn purveyors pimping round-the-clock information whores.
How useful is a comparison between a raster processing software and a word processor?
Yes, because you'll notice that I said "compared to Word" when referencing GIMP, right? Oh, wait, no I didn't, and you're just an idiot that can't stop yourself from some lame, flaming response when someone offends on your cult.
GIMP is a f'n ridiculous pig (on Windows). Corel Photopaint, a more feature rich (and intuitive) application, loads and has a 8MP image up in about 1/2 of a second. GIMP can't even get a toolbox up in 30 times that.
My machine is an Athlon 2600+ with 512 MB RAM. MS Office 2003 opens in less than a second, the first time and every time. I would suggest that part of the problem might be that his computer has a corrupted install of Word, and/or spyware or other problems.
Absolutely true, and my experience (both on my Athlon XP 2400+, and my wife's Celeron 1.7Ghz) is the same - Word 2003 loads in a split second, and closes in even less time (disappearing from the process list). These numbers are absolutely ludicrous, and worthless. What's with the recent slate of "my baseless 2 minute blog entry" Slashdot "articles"?
Of course if people want to talk about bloat, benchmark GIMP. Holy shit is that application a hog, taking about 20 seconds to load on the same PC that loads and initializes Word 2003 in about a quarter of a second.
Re:Dumbest thing I've read all week...
on
The Evil in E-Mail
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
So very, very true. I'd support the guy just because he's a fellow Ontarian, but there is nothing in this article of any substance or worth, and it sounds like a giant heap of grant-sucking bullshit. I think the "researcher" caught the season premiere of "Numbers", one in which they caught the criminal based on exclusion of activity (e.g. he committed crimes in the area around his stomping grounds, excluding where he lived and worked), and thought he could rationalize some nonsense about email analysis.
Extracting the formatting and code from the document will just make it EASIER to create a duplication.
From a pure data perspective it makes it no easier or more difficult. However, I think his point was moreso that if one were to hash some text, it would be significantly more difficult to find a collision while maintaining plausible text - e.g. you can just add a comment block and add variable sizes of bytes.
and this isn't really a cryptographic discovery of hash function weakness of any kind
It's an example of the hash collision weaknesses recently documented, giving a practical example of how it could be used for malicious purposes.
Traditionally we haven't had to worry about nonsensical things like applying the hash only to easily verifiable English text, because the hash is supposed to practically protect against intentional searches for collisions.
Maybe you haven't been paying attention, but these days "Beta" really means commercial release. Furthermore, alpha means beta, and vapourware means alpha. This is the new vocabulary.
Intel is all about making a profit and keeping the profit margins. It's making _great_ money dominating the integrated graphics market.
Great money? You really think Intel makes great money on integrated graphics? While that's almost funny, Intel's goal was purely to lower the cost of the Intel platform against AMD for low-end PCs - allowing very low engineering costs for places to stick a Centrino or Intel Extreme solution together basically as a complete solution. Intel has made virtually zero headway against the markets of nvidia or ATI, and instead has supplanted shops like S3, SIS, or Trident: Basic garbage chipsets that come by default. The only place I've ever seen Intel graphics (usually not mentioned by name) are absolute bottom end PCs.
TEH L33T 3DMARK SCOREZ
Yeah, that's right - only l33t gamers care about half-decent graphics capabilities in their PC. Good ad hominem.
Those dollars brought it to the position of market leader, starting from zero.
Intel has been at the graphics chipset game for about a decade now, yet still the only buyers of their chipsets are the people who get it by default and don't know any better. It's like claiming that Microsoft has become the market-leader in scientific calculation equipment because every copy of Windows comes with calc.exe.
Such a move could -- and provably did -- negate a decade of "RISC is inherently better" advertising, alienate customers, create the Osbourne effect, etc.
99% of Mac owners wouldn't know if it was actually powered by hyper-intelligent squirrels -- I really doubt that the bulk of the Mac userbase is going to be disenfranchised going to a supposedly CISC architecture. Indeed, if the software works I doubt most customers will care at all. Apple is, at the core, a software company, and what is under the hood means very little if the software runs and performs in the same way.
Of course, this announcement could absolutely create the Osbourne effect, which is why the way that they announced it is so shocking - if they wanted developers to have a heads up they could have simply proposed x86 as a parallel line (for instance an x86 mobile line - given the purported ease of cross porting, they could easily rationalize both) rather than an imminent replacement. Of course that is central to why it's hard to take this as simply a normal technology roadmap change, and the prelude to something much larger. From that angle I think that Cringley is on to something - it isn't just a processor shift.
In any other profession, this would be called "talking out of the ass".
Have you ever been to a group brainstorming session? In such a session, it is actually the goal that the vast majority of what people say is actually, by itself, largely garbage. However ideas feed off of each other, and refine to the point that you yield something valuable. Cringley is brainstorming. You read it, ruminate on it, and believe or discard what you will.
No, it's just business speculation. You know, the same sort of speculation like that Apple would move to Intel chips -- how absolutely absurd and impossible that was presented by the status quo contrarians. Cringely has the ability to actually think outside of the box of "more of the same", and often he'll be wrong, but sometimes he'll be right. There is vastly more value in that sort of thought than the standard "take however things are now and presume more of the same".
Slashdot Mirror
The Consumer Loses
What a superficial, naive analysis.
If two competitors are trying for your dollars, they can choose to price their products competitively, ensure that they have the best product, market extensively, or pursue other customer experience factors to earn your business. This is good, constructive competition.
What we're talking about here, though, is a firm limiting your ability to buy the competitor at all. Doing this by forcefully strong arming the middle-man (in this case computer manufacturers) into not actually giving you a choice. Only in delusional land is this a win for the consumer. Only in delusional land could you think Intel's "fuzzy math" (some economic agreements intended to stifle competition) somehow end up as better deals for consumers.
This is what i love about apple. They see the customers need and they execute simple as that.
When Microsoft does this (comes late to the game with a rip-off entrant that brutalizes a small-guy innovator) they tend not to be viewed as kindly.
Yeah, I really went off in the wild blue yonder talking about bags of soil and rocks. I should have aimed lower. Maybe bags of refuse? Would that have been more acceptable to you?
Igoring the lame troll, I have become very aware of social trends after reading the excellent book "Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion". Very highly recommended (and no that link does not include any referrals, at least unless Slashdot inserts one).
I don't even know where to start with this one..."inconsequential", my ass.
SEEMINGLY inconsequential. Read many of the other replies to this submission to understand why I said seemingly. Of course Norway holds significance, however it isn't surprizing that many thought that they were an irrelevant little nodule of Europe.
Hey! You said I'm inconsequential, you insensitive clod!
:-) Norway is becoming quite a powerhouse with the oil reserves and such, and has a very credible military for its size, but I knew that the general perception would be that they didn't matter.
Well I did say seemingly.
This is a very good example for other countries to follow.
Two quick (and largely similar) stories:
-I was at a Rona recently getting some bags of gravel for a project. A gentleman walking by saw my gravel, at this point 9 bags on my cart, and suddenly decided that he needed gravel. It was obvious that he didn't intend to buy gravel, but seeing me buying gravel made him believe that there was something interesting about this gravel, and he should follow.
-Again at a Home Improvement store, yesterday I was at Home Depot and a gentleman was standing there trying to decide which soil to buy, asking the clerk to help him out, when I pulled up and started loading some "magic soil" into my cart. Instantly his mind was made up, and he started loading up. Seeing two people loading up, suddenly several other people pulled their carts over to get some of this deal. Of course I chose this soil completely randomly.
Both were cases of a social proof, and it's much like everyone waiting for the first one to leave a party. For these reasons this sort of event, even when it's a small, seemingly inconsequential Scandinavian country, are very much noteworthy. Often it's the pebbles that precede a landslide.
Come on Hemos - we could have debated for hours about how the web itself is now banned by SCOTUS.
As the GP said, the summary for this submission is so remarkably incorrect that one wonders if the submitter just drew a conclusion from the headline.
b and+Statistics+For+1+January+2005.aspx
http://www.itu.int/osg/spu/newslog/ITUs+New+Broad
Yes, you could buy a player from one of the more innovative consumer-electronics companies like Apex
The constraints that the players are imposing is a part of the DVD spec (and a part of the licensing agreement with the DVD consortium) - "innovative" players like APEX are simply disregarding that part of the requirements (I believe that they're a Chinese company, so that isn't surprizing), and apparently thus far they've gotten away with it. I highly doubt either Toshiba or Pioneer (my two players) care whether I skip past a Madagascar ad, but they're simply abiding by their legal contracts.
Of course some studios are so abusive that I am willing to give the finger to the DVD consortium, but I'm not praising the great gods of APEX.
You, sir, are the one making the assumption that any downloading of movies would inherently be illegal.
Do you disagree with this assumption?
Understandable, but my beef is with the contention that "people want to watch movies at home, therefore they probably would like to illegally download the movies". There is seeming surprize that the percentage is so low (though there is coy hint that it's actually more, but I think that is delusional).
That's as logical as saying "despite the fact that most people prefer to eat at home, only 5% used NetGrocer to buy their groceries". Just because you want to do an activity at home doesn't mean that you are unable to do activities out of the home to achieve them.
No, it's a presumption by the submitter trying to push a certain agenda. Given that many who download videos are very proud of it, I would imagine the number is quite accurate.
Next chapter is usually disabled. I believe it's Shrek 2 that has some monstrous ad for Madagascar on it (among others), and they disable the menu and next chapter buttons (WHICH INFURIATES ME btw. My next DVD player will be purchased based upon it having a back-door around this abusive bullshit, and Hollywood can suck on a choad). To make matters even more fun both of my DVD players (from entirely different manufacturers, and made 6 years apart) crash if I fast forward past the end of that chapter. I'm forced to fast forward, and then hit play right before that craptacular ad ends.
Nothing engenders sympathy for video pirates more than the abusive practices of the large media companies.
I love how the submissions says the following:
Despite this demand for home viewing, only 5% admitted to downloading a movie from the internet.
Despite? How in the world is this despite, as if downloading movies is part and parcel of watching movies at home?
I drop by my local Blockbuster every now and then and peruse their selection of full-quality DVDs, getting very recent movies. My life is too busy these days to differentiate between 0-dayz and 3 months old, and I'm perfectly happy to wait until it comes out on DVD (most of the time it isn't even waiting -- it's simply the first time I have an opportunity to see the movie).
Recovery? More like a dead-cat bounce.
How in the world this was moderated insightful is a mystery.
Never have more people used the internet in their daily lives - from buying odds and ends on ebay, to doing their banking, to reading the news, to fulfilling their consumerism pangs through ecommerce sites. The internet as a whole is much larger, and more robust, than it was in 2000, and it is a far more pervasive part of even more people's daily lives.
They just want more people to watch their boring Money TV programs.
So true. Apart from the few lucky guys that bailed out at the right time and got rich, the biggest beneficiaries of the boom were the stock porn purveyors pimping round-the-clock information whores.
How useful is a comparison between a raster processing software and a word processor?
Yes, because you'll notice that I said "compared to Word" when referencing GIMP, right? Oh, wait, no I didn't, and you're just an idiot that can't stop yourself from some lame, flaming response when someone offends on your cult.
GIMP is a f'n ridiculous pig (on Windows). Corel Photopaint, a more feature rich (and intuitive) application, loads and has a 8MP image up in about 1/2 of a second. GIMP can't even get a toolbox up in 30 times that.
My machine is an Athlon 2600+ with 512 MB RAM. MS Office 2003 opens in less than a second, the first time and every time. I would suggest that part of the problem might be that his computer has a corrupted install of Word, and/or spyware or other problems.
Absolutely true, and my experience (both on my Athlon XP 2400+, and my wife's Celeron 1.7Ghz) is the same - Word 2003 loads in a split second, and closes in even less time (disappearing from the process list). These numbers are absolutely ludicrous, and worthless. What's with the recent slate of "my baseless 2 minute blog entry" Slashdot "articles"?
Of course if people want to talk about bloat, benchmark GIMP. Holy shit is that application a hog, taking about 20 seconds to load on the same PC that loads and initializes Word 2003 in about a quarter of a second.
So very, very true. I'd support the guy just because he's a fellow Ontarian, but there is nothing in this article of any substance or worth, and it sounds like a giant heap of grant-sucking bullshit. I think the "researcher" caught the season premiere of "Numbers", one in which they caught the criminal based on exclusion of activity (e.g. he committed crimes in the area around his stomping grounds, excluding where he lived and worked), and thought he could rationalize some nonsense about email analysis.
Extracting the formatting and code from the document will just make it EASIER to create a duplication.
From a pure data perspective it makes it no easier or more difficult. However, I think his point was moreso that if one were to hash some text, it would be significantly more difficult to find a collision while maintaining plausible text - e.g. you can just add a comment block and add variable sizes of bytes.
and this isn't really a cryptographic discovery of hash function weakness of any kind
It's an example of the hash collision weaknesses recently documented, giving a practical example of how it could be used for malicious purposes.
Traditionally we haven't had to worry about nonsensical things like applying the hash only to easily verifiable English text, because the hash is supposed to practically protect against intentional searches for collisions.
...BETA!!
Maybe you haven't been paying attention, but these days "Beta" really means commercial release. Furthermore, alpha means beta, and vapourware means alpha. This is the new vocabulary.
Intel is all about making a profit and keeping the profit margins. It's making _great_ money dominating the integrated graphics market.
Great money? You really think Intel makes great money on integrated graphics? While that's almost funny, Intel's goal was purely to lower the cost of the Intel platform against AMD for low-end PCs - allowing very low engineering costs for places to stick a Centrino or Intel Extreme solution together basically as a complete solution. Intel has made virtually zero headway against the markets of nvidia or ATI, and instead has supplanted shops like S3, SIS, or Trident: Basic garbage chipsets that come by default. The only place I've ever seen Intel graphics (usually not mentioned by name) are absolute bottom end PCs.
TEH L33T 3DMARK SCOREZ
Yeah, that's right - only l33t gamers care about half-decent graphics capabilities in their PC. Good ad hominem.
Those dollars brought it to the position of market leader, starting from zero.
Intel has been at the graphics chipset game for about a decade now, yet still the only buyers of their chipsets are the people who get it by default and don't know any better. It's like claiming that Microsoft has become the market-leader in scientific calculation equipment because every copy of Windows comes with calc.exe.
Such a move could -- and provably did -- negate a decade of "RISC is inherently better" advertising, alienate customers, create the Osbourne effect, etc.
99% of Mac owners wouldn't know if it was actually powered by hyper-intelligent squirrels -- I really doubt that the bulk of the Mac userbase is going to be disenfranchised going to a supposedly CISC architecture. Indeed, if the software works I doubt most customers will care at all. Apple is, at the core, a software company, and what is under the hood means very little if the software runs and performs in the same way.
Of course, this announcement could absolutely create the Osbourne effect, which is why the way that they announced it is so shocking - if they wanted developers to have a heads up they could have simply proposed x86 as a parallel line (for instance an x86 mobile line - given the purported ease of cross porting, they could easily rationalize both) rather than an imminent replacement. Of course that is central to why it's hard to take this as simply a normal technology roadmap change, and the prelude to something much larger. From that angle I think that Cringley is on to something - it isn't just a processor shift.
In any other profession, this would be called "talking out of the ass".
Have you ever been to a group brainstorming session? In such a session, it is actually the goal that the vast majority of what people say is actually, by itself, largely garbage. However ideas feed off of each other, and refine to the point that you yield something valuable. Cringley is brainstorming. You read it, ruminate on it, and believe or discard what you will.
It's just another troll article by Cringely.
No, it's just business speculation. You know, the same sort of speculation like that Apple would move to Intel chips -- how absolutely absurd and impossible that was presented by the status quo contrarians. Cringely has the ability to actually think outside of the box of "more of the same", and often he'll be wrong, but sometimes he'll be right. There is vastly more value in that sort of thought than the standard "take however things are now and presume more of the same".