Watermarking does not prevent copying, but it provides a quick and simple system to determine who made and distributed the copy. Legit copies would be individually watermarked at the time of purchase (when downloaded). This is not an expensive system when done on a community of scale. Each unique distributed work would need it's own watermarkign pattern, within which the personal details of the purchaser would get recorded. only a few hundred individual packets need to be modified for each file as it's transimited, so the overhed to watermark is relatively small.
It would be possible to compare 2 different files and strip the differences between them, but much of the watermark would be the same between both files. If the watermark systematically repeats within the same file, using algorithms, then data stripped by comparing 2 files may or may not be sufficient to completely erase the data. the watermark should be able to be reconstituted from as little as 10% of it's surviving data. Also, stripping this information is a MASSIVE process requiring huge amounts of ram and lenghty system resources. besides, how do you validate that the copy your comparing it to is the exact same eddition with the exact same watermark pattern? or that it wasn't seeded by the recording industry with the intent of spoofing a watermark stripping application? The only way to be sure is for 2 people that trust each other to each have a legitimate copy of the media to be cleaned... If you got a "cleaned" file from a P2P, how can you be sure it is in fact clean? Also, you can only clean what's NOT identicle. Part of the watermark is a self identifying section that sais "I'm watermarked" so simply having a watermarked file on your PC that's been "cleaned" could be against the law. Sure, your personal information gets stripped (or theirs does, and even this is only a HOPE it's been stripped) but if authorities find you in posession, you're still automatically guilty. A media player could easily be created to look for broken watermarks like this
most people commit crimes like this only because they are 99% certain they can get away with it. Reduce that certainty to say 10% and how many people would still do it?
Some company (Sony) logs onto a P2P and posts "cleaned" files. They then partner with Microsoft to have WMP, or some other background tool snoop for the broken watermarks they purposely distributed. Once found, the system reports everything it knows about your personal PC and you back to Sony automatically... How do you know the fise you got from BT isn't Sony's file??? Sure, the less than 1% of people that can install a completely open sourced linux system and bypass all of this by using exclusively rematered and recompressed files, and players known to not be spying, they'll still steal... The 99% of other folks who have Windows or a Mac and don't know any better? They'll either get smart or get cuaght. Others will simply rip from retial copies (cracked bluray disks without watermarks). The ones who will get caught quickest are the ones who are looking through BT for cracked bluray files which in fact happen to be watermarked Sony files... It's too easy to get caught because it's impossible to tell a clean file from a watermarked file, both play equally without DRM or proprietary requirements.
All this boils down to HDCP (High Definition Content Protection). Its a protocol that blu-ray, HDDVD, and Windows Medial 11 DRM content run through. The decoders, based in hardware, that play this content perform endpoint to endpoint content protection. This entire system was designed for 1 simple reason: to prevent you from recording the steap being outputed from the player to another medium. Since it's a digital signal all the way, it is too easy to make perfect copies simply by steaming the HDMI signal into a device that can record HD feeds. HDCP is a protocol that prevents this streaming by requiring each device in the chain to support the protocol or the video will be downscaled or blocked entirely by the viewing source. The software or firmware playing the source can also detect bidirectionally if the display, or any device between itself and the display, is not compliant and software can thus revoke the keys that media player 11 won't let you back up anymore...
What does all this prevent? It prevents the layman from making copies of DRM media that they are already holding a copy of in their hands, or have already legally downloaded. Does this stop piracy? NO! It's easy enough to strip the DRM and keep the HD video and audio feeds intact, then distribute the files in free and open formats anyway. What was the point?
DRM sucks. It's too easy to bypass. Lets look at watermarking instead. why? A watermarked file will play on anything, with or without decryption or decoding. problem is, you can't tell if a file is digitally watermarked or not, at least, not unless you can compare it directly with the original unmarked source material (gold master), which you can not do. The mathematics required to validly detect and remove a watermark and MASSIVE. Once watermarked files start leaking into the community (likely to be SEEDED by the RIAA and other organizations), if you get a watermarked file on your machine illegally, or worse, someone else gets one of yours, then it's a self incriminating scenario, and you can be easily found guilty. It's the perfect theft deterent. Realistically, it's no different that laser etching a diamond, or putting a tracking seen beneath your pet's skin. If someone other than you is in posession of it, it's stolen. simple.
You can't remove a watermark unless 1) you know it's there, 2) you know the source it came from, 3) you know the file is unmodified, so that the watermark pattern is in fact preserved perfectly in the file, and 4) you have an unwatermarked version to comapre it to or have a database of the specifics of each individually watermarked file pattern, which will be different for each track distributed by each company. It's virtually impossible to defeat, and has no DRM or hardware specific blockouts. We should be encouraging the use of this technology!
Sure, Vista has a pretty new Aero interface, and that requires more horsepower... or does it? It requires a dedicated graphics chip, but Aero doesn't even have all the 3D integration that MacOS has (and has had for years). The graphic options simply don't use that much CPU or disk, so they have little impact on performance.
Where vista is causing issue are in simple, every day tasks. Launching Office 2007 should not take longer on Vista than it does on XP, it's the same application and code, but because of Vista's poor handling of disk activity and it's security model, it takes nearly twice as long.
Vista actually plays many games faster, and for hard core CPU intensive tasks, it's better in most tests as well. unfortunately, a file system level problem exists that causes random data reads and writes, especially when dealing with large numbers of files, to be excruciatingly slow. Also, when multitasking, Vistas security model, memory management, and more get in the way, and cause bad lag between applications, again related to disk performance. This is made worse by Vista's heavy (and unecesary) use of RAM. Systems with less than 2GB or RAM, and without ReadyBoost, suffer dramatic page file swapping delays which make the problem multiple times worse.
If M$ chose to limit the default features enabled at startup to some simple graphic improvements, and left things like the doc, file indexing, desktop search, and other tools optional and defaulted to off, Vista would perform significantly better, but until they fix whatever is plaguing file system performace, throwing more hardware at Vista doesn't make that much of a difference. The OS is not reading or writing that much more data compared to XP, it's just doing it slower. The CPU is not the bottleneck, and neither is the disk (I/O is actually lower than XP on the same hardware, it just really is going SLOWER!).
Add to this the fact that other than a new GUI, and support for DirectX 10 (which was a MS choce, not a hardware limitation) there's hardly any feature you can't add to XP that offers the same or better functionality than Vista. What compelling reason is there to upgrade to it??? Nothing is really easier to do in Vista than XP, the interface is not that radically different, There is no cool new technology only availible in vista (except some limited HD support and DX10, which only hard core users care about, and most of them can hack XP to use anyway.
11% adoption? I'd say it would be 5% or less if we actually had a choice at purchase time, like we did when XP came out. Even all of my techie firends, and their non-techie family members are going out of their way to buy hardware that fully supports XP, and refuse to buy hardware that doesn't come with it pre-installed (unless they're building their own box). 3 of my firends said "fuck it" and bought a mac and paralells, and now run XP side-by-side.
Taxation is done by millage and zone, not by individual house, so you seeing exactly what I paid is irrelevent. You only need to know the estimated value of the property you plan to buy combined with the current and historical millage rates to determine the tax history for a proerty in a given neighborhood. You do NOT need access to my personal tax records, or my personal information to do so.
Keeping a record of the appraised value of a property is fine, so long as this information can be requested only by licnesed personel, and only on a single proeprty by property basis (so you can't pull the value of every home all at once and target market the residents). If you are genuinely interested in purchasing up your whole neighborhood, your real estate agent should be able to show you the value of the properties that are currently for sale, as well as those whose owners have opted in to seeing that information, but for those comfortable in their homes and not interested in your sales pitch to buy it out from them, well, you'll just have to suffice with a market valuation estimate based on the visible condition of the property and its features vs the appraised values of nearby units (or a market approximation rounded to not closer than 10% of the properties sale value if purchaed within the last 2 years). Also, companies not working for specific named buyers should not have access to that information (if you're not planning to buy it, or if I have not requested a loan from you, you should not be able to determine the value of my property with anything more than an general estimating tool).
A buyer should not have access to my information. A certified and registered agent should, but he should have to do it 1 lot at a time. (If you're buying dozens of lots it's worth his time, but if your a bank trying to collect target marketing information, it should cost you the time just the same. Lets not make it easy for them!). An agent who abuses his power, provides information to anyone who is not a signed buyer of his agency, or in any way is found to abuse your private information should loose their license to do so on the first conviction.
This information should be accessible, but only to parties that have a government approved reason to access it, and use that information in conjuction with approved policy, and only if you have not blocked them from doing so (or better yet, opted IN to them doing so). Unless a specific number or detail is of critical importance (like to the bank signing the loan) then an estimate of varying accuracy (depending on the party requesting the information, the type of information requested, and for what purpose) is all that should be provided.
Like i said, if my house was appraised 9 months ago for 212,000, and I have it listed on the market for sale, an agent should be able to see that information (but not you personally). If it's not listed currently, they should see only that my appraisal was for $200-225K.
Why should my taxes be of public(ally accessibly) record? Sure, there needs to be a back tracable record for auditing purposes, tax income to SSN and what not, but why should an individual outside of a government or 3rd party auditing firm have any access to that information? The general public needs to know the total taxes collected, and how that divides up by taxe type, code, and region, but not down the the detail of which individual paid (or owes) how much. This information has no interest or value on an individual to individual basis except to be abused by marketers to target me for products or services. If I offer this information by opting into an advertising matrix then they can have it. If I have no interest in credit cards I don't want to get 8 mailers a week offering me one. This is called selective initiated target advertising, and if people comply and list themselves for specific products then companies can save billions in falsly targeted mailings and the information I want to keep private can remain private.
The government needs to know how much to bill me for taxes, and wether or not i have paid it, sure. I can see where companies that issue credit or loans need to be aware of your credit rating and wether or not you have outstanding tax or other collections against you, but that information should be kept between you, the government, and the company you authorized to use that information for a specific purpose, it should not be out there for everyone to peruse! They shuold not be able to simply look that stuff up at will, but shuold be required, like when switching phone companies, to get 3rd party real time authorization.
If i want to switch from my local phone company's long distance plan to AT&T, I not only have to get on the line with AT&T, but they have to get a 3rd party on the line to confirm 1) i am who I say I am and 2) to confirm I authorized the change. Only then can AT&T file the paperwork to switch me. Some company offering me credit should have to do the same: 1) contact me in some way, or get me to contact them, 2) get my approval, with a 3rd party firm on the line at the same time to access my credit detail history, then and only then 3) access my detailed credit report. Prior to this point, all they should be able to get is my beacon score, debt to income ratio, and last year's income figures, and only if they already have my name and address and if I have not opted out of allowing them that information. They should have no knowledge of any collections against me, loan balances, number of credit cards, or anything else. If they want to offer me services, all they need is to know if I qualify in general. If I want their services, then can perform a full qualification, but only with 3rd party approval. They should not be given information outside of what qualifies or declines me (the fact that I have 6 credit cards with a total balance of $2000, $300 available is important, and wether or not I'm making payments on time, but who those cards are with is irrelevent) How much I PAID for my house has no bearing on what I'm selling it for, only what it's appraised for (to a potential buyer) and my loan balance (to another lender) has any bearing there. Maybe how long I've owned it... Even that information should be by individual request only and not published in some freely available list. Consumers should not be able to get a detailed list of what each house on my street sold for and when, but should only be able to get estimates or averages, or price ranges in 25, 50, 100, or 250K (based on total price). For example, if I bought my house for 182K, all anyone should be able to know is in 2006 when that happened, i paid between 150K and 200K for it, they should not see my exact closing price.
If every company offering or merketing a service, loan, credit, or porduct had to get my permission before accessing my personal information, and confirm that permission with a 3rd party auditing firm, then identity theft would be MUCH harder to pull off.
I do believe the idea here is "how did they get it?" Your name and phone number may be published in phone books from the phone company to which you subscribe, but you can easily enough opt out (become unlisted) and then that information is no longer publically accessible. Your e-mail address, employer, physical address, and more should not be part of public record. Sure, that information may be contained in legal and tax documents held by your local, state, or federal govt offices, but when requesting (legally) copies of documents that do not reference YOU directly, then the office of gov't providing you the copies is supposed to blank out (with heavy, permanant black marker or other obscuring technique) any personal data.
So how are they coming aboiut your information "legally?" This is where the state of CT actually has some power. It may not be in their power to make it illegal for you to have that data from public records, or even to publish it, but they can make it illegal to have any gov't office provide it to a 3rd party, and they can allow you to do this through an opt out list, or simply make it the default policy. They can also require the companies traficking in personal information to list how and when they acquired your data (and individually which peices of it) upon request, make it illegal to resel lists on which people have not opted IN to being included, and more.
Here's an example where I have issue: I'm selling a house. Any person can request from a city office to tell them how much I paid for that house. In the market where I'm selling my home, this clearly indicates that I greatly underpaid for my home 2 years ago vs the current market value, and that I will be making a substantial profit selling it. This is regardless of it's real appriased value with is still even higher. If I go to buy a used car, I can "ASK" to know how much the dealer paid for it, but I can't legally acquire that information independetly. Nor can I do so for the shiny new HDTV I want from a local electronics store. How is it legal for people, or real estate companies, to get this information from the city office on a simple request? If I had bought the house for more money, or if I had bought it this year instead of last year, the value I paid on paper would be higher, and I would not be haggling over such a drastic price difference. Am I not allowed to take advantage of a lucky deal and make money? The buyer can even determine how much I owe on the mortgage on the property by following a paper trail and having a realtor make a credit inquiry. This should not be legal. This is PRIVATE information. Were it legal to do this in all forms of sales, the margins on products acress the board would collapse and the US market would go into an instant depression and the dollar would fall to all-time low values.
While I'm talking about mortgages, how is it that the value of my mortgage is so readily available to hundreds of companies offering me credit cards, home loans, refinance, cash advances and more. How is my personal credit report open in such a way, but even I have to PAY to see a copy!?!?...and there's no way for me to secure my credit information (though I can prevent new accounts being created, I can't stop them from pulling my report at will).
How much I pay in taxes, what kind of car I drive, where I live, my numbers and e-mails, all of this is important and private information. IT SHUOLD BE ILLEGAL TO GET THIS UNLESS I SPECIFICALLY OPT-IN TO ALLOW YOU TO COLECT IT, and then you can't resel that information unless I specifically opt-in to allow you to sell it. the opt-in process should not legally be allowed to be a byline in some contract either, or some hidden or automatic option, but should be legally required to be a seperate complete document that must be individually agreed to and signing it can NEVER be made a condition of any contract, service, or sale of any kind.
Last the longest??? I don't get it. The Dell does not have dedicated video, and the iMac can hold more RAM and the same HDDs. They're the same CPU and screen. The Dell is one up having a TV tuner, but you can add a USB one to the Mac at will, the Dell's is integrated (and uses a bulky external connector to boot) so it can't be upgraded or replaced easily....and since the Mac can run Vista, but the Dell can't run Leopard, if one or the other company was no longer the OS leader, you could allways use the Apple hardware whichever OS won out......and for $300 buck more ($100 more with same RAM and wireless keyboard) it's kind of a no-brainer to me. The article said the Dell had superior hardware, but only due to RAM size, standard features (which the Mac offers) and because it included the tuner (which you can get for the Mac for less than the $100 difference anyway). The author clearly stated he'd stil pick the Mac, but Dell sily has put together a nice competitive hardware platform (which incidently costs more).
Am I beating to death the "Apple costs less than PC" idea?..and that's before buying Office, Antivirus, Spyware, a "quality" video editing package, a photo management package, and CD/DVD burning software (since Windows doesn't support RWs or DVD burning out of the box). Oh yea, Apple support costs less too.
This whole argument just pisses me off. Here's the correct answer: If you're in public, then you're not guaranteed any privacy rights!!!...but besides that:...there might be cameras on the streets watching your every move, but just for all you paranoids out there, YOU ARE NOT BEING FOLLOWED, YOU ARE NOT BEING MONITORED FOR YOUR BEHAVIORS, YOU ARE NOT BEING VIOLATED! How do I know? Well, IT'S NOT POSSIBLE!!!
The horsepower required to perform facial recognition or other tracking of moving people in real time for hundreds of cameras in a metro ethernet environment is insane! Even if it were possible to do that on a camera by camera basis, to correlate all that information into a real time tracking system and allow a single individual in the network to be located by request is again, almost impossible. Even in a small environment, like a casino, it's very hard to track a single person this way. It's done mostly manaully, not by automated computer.
To take a system, make it city, county, or worse, state based, and collect that much information, over a disparate network would be nearly impossible. A computer to crunch data from over 1000 cameras would be massively expensive and unrealistic. A database to catalog and store tracking information for that many people would be beyond the scope of any existing database technology. Do you have any idea how much information we're talking about???
OK, think of this in terms of MMO (something every/.er should understand...) A typcial zone, which tells YOUR computer where YOU are, and actually sends a simple coordinate system and instructions, not full frame video, will lag when only a few thousand people are in the zone. The central system knows who you are already, and knew your starting location, and was given hints all through the process, but even powerful grid systems with hundreds of nodes can't keep up. You're contantly feeding it GPS style updates to that information and if your connection lags, your PC sends the system your last known location (or vice versa), yet still you lag. their software and you are perfectly alligned and each know what the other is doing. To do this by video tracking, by anylizing frames from multiple individual cameras, trying to correlate even a 2D map of the city and track each individual in real time, and from only 1 side of the camera (you're not giving they're system any hints or coordinate information feed are you?), and to do this for upwards of a few MILLION simultaneous "mobs" is frankly impossible. Just taking a single still image one time across the city and trying to identify which person was the same person from 1 angle as another camera saw from another would take hours of processing, let alone doing it in real time 10 times per second....and you want it to not only track the objects (people, cars, etc) but in real time look them up in some massive (non-existant) database and put names to faces? BULLSHIT! We'll be on Mars before a system like this was possible, let alone getting the CIA or other black ops body to use it without some low paid city engineer being aware of the abuse of that system and letting us all know.
What a metro camera system can do is allow an individual camera to basically monitor itself. It can identify simple behaviors: a car runs a red light, a car has no license plate passes by, a car with an APB out on it passes by, a loiterer has been standing at a bus stop and several busses have passed by, someone passes through a storefront window (i.e they're breaking in). the camera can then notify central dispatch of a potential issue for which a real cop can be sent to the scene, put his human eyes on it, and react appropriately, all while he himself knows he's being recorded doing it. The reverse is also true: you dial 911 and give them your location (or if your phone is GPS enabled, they get the info from there). The closest cameras to you locate you automatically send the video feed to an oper
If you read the article in its entirety, you would have learned that they do in fact do port filtering. These are jobs handles by ACL tables and routing rules, not by firewalls. Packet filtering is either being handled by a cisco guard or by ISS and ISA. Their security model is software, not hardware, and security is handled at the machine, not at the perimeter, except for the handling of DoS and similar attacks. I know, it sounds similar, but what a firewall is, what a router is, what happens to your packet as it passes through the various layers and tiers inside their network is different from what you would see in an SMB or small enterprise network. What shocks me is they're not running AV on many of their systems, not that they're running without firewalls.
Also remember, systems you yourself place in your DMZ, your mail server, web server, etc, ALL of those are operating outside your own firewall. They're either software hardned, or hacked. They have little other protection, why should big M$ be any different?
Actually, where many aspects of XP were inhereted from the development team behind the kernel of 2003 server, they have little in common and are not the same thing. In fact, Vista credits much of it's internals to 2003 server's kernel, almost as many is it inhereted from 2008, but it got very little from XP. Sure, 2008 and Vista were developed together, but they work very differently. Many things (control panel redesigns, Aero, security model, etc) were built into 2008 server, and it's look and feel will be a similar experience, but much else the core does is very different, much faster, and better threaded than Vista will ever be capable of. they're simply designed and optimised for 2 very different purposes. Sure, they can run the same code and drivers, but underneath that is a very different engine interfacing the code and you.
Stopping at book 1, you are right. It's not a saga, it's a story. the first 4 books as a set, great read. The other trilogies associated with the world however can't really be read alone without reading these 4 first, but do theyt really add to the overall story? no, they are simply episodes taking place there in that world. It's filler reading. David Duncan has the same issue currently. There are not enough characters of interest, not a large enough web of possibilities to account for a story so large.
the first potter book was practically a script for the movie from what m y wife explains (with obvious lack of followthrough on minor, unimportant details of the world and side conversations as all movies lack when they are translated from books) Each further movie I understand was less true to the source, with almost a third of the 5th book bbeing left out of the movie. Note that each book is longer, but each theatrical release was shorter than it's predecessor. Still, you claim an additional hour or so would have done it justice, my wife thinks 2 m,ore hours. even still, that makes the biggest book a mini-series special on Sci-fi... I could not imagine the first book of WoT taking less than 8 hours on screen. Later books, more than half a season of TV each. George Martins books are currently being stumbled over by HBO as they try to hire actors and plan filming. Each book is planned to be a 24 episode complete season, standing on it's own, and they're woried that won't capture enough of the story to satisfy the core fans of the series! Potter could NEVER carry 24 hours of video per book. It's too simple of a story, too straight of a path.
APrt of the story IS the polotics. He's telling this story from multiple sides, multiple perspectives. If you don't like this type of reading, then that's your choice, and I don't begrudge it, but it is what it is. this is not a common fantassy, this is 3rd generation hard fantasy. it's like the difference between a mystery and a romance, they should not be compared directly.
Also, if you don't like this, don't go anywhere near George R R Martin!!!
When i know how a Law and Order eppisode ends, I don't watch it. Part of the WoT's attraction is that all of us KNOW how it's going to end. It's the 13 books to get us there, the experiences and growth of the characters, that make it a worth read. That and his wonderful descriptions.
We must forgive Jordan of his 8th book. He was having serios health problems as well as a death in his family (His father if i recall) and the publisher mistakenly pressured him into pushing out the book. he admitted it was his worst work and appologised to his fans for allowing the publisher to push their contract in such a way.
He made up for this with the following novels.
Also remember, some of what he's writing is repetitive due to the long times between books. He writing for his fans that have been following the series, not for those picking it up for the first time. At some point, I'd suggest TOR hire a good editor to consolodate and re-edit the series for such a purpose eliminating the redunancies while maintaining the integrity of the store (don't edit out plot, or even prose, just simple reppetittion, and onyl when justified).
...and again to the point, did this do anything more than add pages to the same volume? These "tedious" reminders don't make the series longer, only the book in your hand, which costs you the same as the thinner abridged volume you are requesting. If you don't like his style, read another author, but please don't complain about authors who do this being money horders.
(note: i appologise if you're not the original poster, forgot to check)
Every member of my family (11 households) stopped purchasing CD music mre than 3 years ago. If I can't rip it (currently legally) from a streaming broadcast, digital FM or satellite transmission, or other free legal broadcast, then I'm not interested in owning a copy at all unless I can purchase the music directly from the artist without any other 3rd party intervening. In no way am I going to provide a marketing, packaging, distribution, or agent with money just for providing me with a convenience I have not required since they year 2000...
Recording companies that contract their artists for dsitribution and marketing contracts no longer need to sell directly to me. If the band is good, it will get radio play (on air, internet, sattelite, or other medium). I'll hear of the band through the broadcast, word of mouth, or website associated with other popular bands. The grass roots marketing process does work, and bands with or without marketing agents get exposure.
I don't need an expansive retail outlet, warehousing system, distribution chain, and millions of dollars in advertising wasted that could all go directly to the artist instead (or lower the cost of music).
For now, the popular music is free (LEGALLY!) if you know how to get it. The rest, if you really like the artist and want to contribute funding to them directly, contact them! Check out their myspace page or whatever you can find and ask to purchase their tunes directly. Have them set up a paypal store. they don't actually have to send you a copy electronically, they just have to sell you a "listening licence." a piece of paper granting you fair use of their collective works. You can get the copy of the work from anywhere, even through illegal distribution if you like, but then having a copy is perfectly legal. I'm sure the bands out there can afford to hire a few folks to make this happen for you at $.50 per song and still make 3-5 times what they get from the RIAA and their marketing company. You save more money, they make more money, and the RIAA gets fucked. It's a win, win, win.
As far as broadcast music... Once it's gone out over the air, that broadcast is public domain. Provided you were in the listening area, you could have heard it, and thus you could legally record it for personal use. Is it illegal to trade copywritten material if that material was obtained legally, and is traded with someone else who could have done the same? Selling it would be illegal, but a direct trade or gifting of the files is not a profit action, and thus protected by law. We're just waiting for someone to challenge that in court.
It's a continuation of his Baroque cycle (forthcoming). The copy of the 3rd book I have lists the titles of the next 3 books in the saga. I do not know what the release data will e (sorry), just as I eagerly await work of Tad William's and George Martins next announcements (2 authors I desperately hope do not join Rober Jordan in leaving this existance with unfinished works... both are aging more rapidly than they are aproaching the end of their legacies.
So you don't classify this a character development?
Sure, one may be tempted to state that such phrases were repeated regularly in the series, but c'mon, all this means is that each book could have been 30-50 pages shorter... also, it's a long series, authors must remind us of how their characters think from time to time or we begin to forget who they are and substitute our own thoughts for theirs. personally I appreciate this detail and I wish more authors used similar techniques.
We're not talking about parragraphs and pages of useless descriptions (though many were lenghty, its much of that poetic verse that makes the story worth reading, and I considder little of it useless or wasteful), and we're not talking about complete tangents from story that have no impacts on the characters or the story... besides, ether he used such prose or not would have made no impact on how many books he published. What it would have made an impact on is how many pages each book was published, saving the publisher money. In fact, considdering that, I counter that jordan was in fact not milking his publisher and the public for money, but in fact, he was milking them OF such money, as each hardcover, regardless of cost to produce, is sold for the same retail price...
Some authors do produce books in volume simply for money. Some of those authors are worth reading, others not so much. I gave up on Goodkind for this reason after his 4th book. Each additional story was not moving the characters forward, or expanding the world, it only prolonged the saga for profit. I'd argue that the original runelords series was quite good, but continuing that series with another (at least) trilogy is not worth my reading time (though if the second saga could stand on its own without first having to read the 4 books previous to it, it might be) the Dune Saga also has this weakness. If you truly love the world, you've got over 15 books of it to read now, but the original book alone stands on it's own. the first 3 sequals add to it, but reading beyond is unnecessary.
but of course, this is your opinion. I enjoy books with depth, complexity, and longevity. I avoid books and series that are simple or episodic. If it can be made into a 3 hour or less movie, it's not worth my time. Each book should take at least half of a full season of TV to conclude and a saga should take years of watching. LoTR produced 12 hours of feature movie, and from only a few hundred pages (about the total length of a single book from Jordan). Each potter book, some of which are 800+ pages) only translate into 2 hour movies. I read the first 5 books of the potter series in about 3 days time. Each book of Jordan's, Martin's, William's, or Stepheson's enthrawled me for more than a week. Anyuthing less can't hold my interest, is too predictable, or is simply episodic and I have no addiction to the series. Not everyone feels the same way, and i hold no ill will towards them. The only readers I wish stripped from the face of Terra are those who read romance novels...
There was allways an end. If you read the books carefully enough, then you know what the end is. It was foreshadowed in the early pages of the first book, and reiterated in the 2nd volume several times. the fun is not in reading the ending, but in the twists, turns, and unexpected events that spin us towards the enevitable, that which is destined to repeat as the wheel turns and spins age anew.
Granted, having started reading the series with the release of the 4th book, the end has been a long time coming. 2-4 year between volumes is a loooonnnng time. I'm held in this same pattern by George Martin (Song of Ice and Fire saga), Neil Stepheson (he just announced a second trilogy to his current works), Tad Williams (otherland took forever to be completed, and each volume of his current fantasy series is eagerly awaited), i even went through this with Isaac Asimof and his 13 book saga of the Foundation (not including 2 others he went back in and added later!).
I fill the gaps with Mercades Lackey, Robin Hobb, Bob Salvatore, and a dozen others not to mention all these other fantasies I end up reading just to keep up with what's in the theatres. (notice i did not mention the potter books however).
Jordan had no personal interest in monetary fortunes. His story was alive within him, and as all things that grow in nature, this story grew above and beyond his dreams and took its own course. George R R Martin is experiencing a similar pain with his series, as did Terry Goodkind. The stories and worlds simply become so vast, that in order to move one's characters to the end of the story, it takes more volumes than one expects.
After book 3 Jordan expected the series to be complete at 6 books. after book 5, he thought he was closer to the end than the beginning. He was on a good pace to do that until he experienced a major death in his family while writing book 8. That book got away from him, and in order to complete his works and tie off all of the ends of his story, we needed books 9 and 10 to put things back on track.
Jordan rarely used "filler prose" as you claim. His descriptions were allways vivid and captivating, and all of his writing for his more than 20 main characters was exceptional.
Maybe you're looking at it wrong. This is not a simple story about a few characters on a quest, AKA J R R Tolkein style. this is 3rd generation hard fantasy. This is a collection of stories about seperate individuals following seperate paths each intertwined in common fates inside of an expansive world. This is really no different than the Dragon Lance series, other than in this case, each individual story has the power to move others. If this is more than you can follow, (not to say too complex, but simply the sheer volume of information and time required to invest in it) or if the collection is simply longer than your attention span, then I can reccomend many other great authors to you, and I will caution you to avoid Tad Williams, Neil Stepheson, George Martin and many other emerging fantasy gods of writing who are also on paths to publishing stories that cross 7-10 1000 page novels.
I mean no disrespect, but maybe it's just not your style.
I (unfortunately) worked in retail PC sales for about 3 years, so I'm very familiar with this premise. Major retail PC sellers (BestBuy, Walmart, etc) believe there are basically 4 PC user types; Internet users (grandma), school computers (which also double as photo/music PCs), Media centric folks with more than 1 PC (targets for media center based PCs), and hard core gamers.
Here are the problems with this:
1, the PC set up for grandma and young children, the bottom of the line hunk of shit, is also usually underpowered even for that purpose, and simple upgrades (adding 1GB of RAM for example) actually costs more than simply buying the next level up in quality. Also, the basic PC is typically castrated in upgradability, making certain that as a person becomes more PC familiar, maybe adding a video camera and trying to make DVDs, will typically require PC replacement, not upgrade, because they fail to include a power suppy capable of supporting a graphics card (or fail to include a PCI X port for one at all). If it was clearly labled, this would not be an issue, but since it's sold side by side with other systems, only those who know PC specs and what they mean can tell the difference.
2, the "school computer" typically sold, especially notebooks intended to be used in colleges, typically don't meet the minimum requirements of the colleges... Most schools publish a system specification, and this typically (at least) involves the inclusion of a network OS (XP pro of Vista Pro), but none of these systems include that. Also, kids play games. Any "school PC" that doesn't at least include a graphics processor (shared or dedicated memory) is going to be useless to most kids in their perspectivce. These systems, also being at the low end of the price and component chart, typically are not equipped with enough RAM, or a fast enough (or big enough) HDD to handle the mass of video and music the kids will place on the machine. Again, buying this machine and upgrading it costs more than buying a better machine that already has the updates. Also, student packaged computers should come with the largest screens and resolutions possible. Kids will allways have a music player, internet page, e-mail, and chat room open while they're actually doing their work in a word processor or powerpoint session. They need dual screen or a 22" or larger high res display, again, which none of these packages include (or can't support due to embeded cheap graphic chips).
3, media center systems, boasting video capture, massive storage potential, and more, are usually strapped with slower hard drive and weak processors. The intent is that noone actually uses the PC, it just operates by itself as a stand alone media server, but the marketing folks ignore this just like they ignored the correct user base for Windows ME (Windows ME didn't suck, it did what Microsoft said it would do, but the marketing folks sold it to everyone, which was wrong!). Marketing is telling people not only to keep all, their videos on the media center, but that this is a real PC for someone to use too. Lets face it, trying to get this lower end CPU to crunch MPEG 4 video and rip a DVD while 2 other people are playing music from it and it's recording TV just doesn't work. The new Home Server model may acually correct this, but maybe not (I'm sure marketing will still screw this up). The Media Center machines also typically come with a vid card, but it's usually a bottom of the line dedicated card, and the power units in these PCs are also typically very close to maxed out, so replacing the card with a gaming card also means replacing the PS, which due to all the other included components in this small chassis is usually impossible. Also, the tuner only works for analog cable or OTA broadcast, so recording from cable TV or sattelite typically still requires a Tivo or real DVR, so the card's inclusion is just a waste of $100.
The hard core gamer... Well, about 5% of all PC gamers are "hard core" and need $2000 systems. The real gam
It's bad enough that most of the crap on the radio is overplayed. Now, every time I drive to work I'm going to hear the exact same playlist, and since it's based on vibrations in the car, there's no mute button. Vehicular suicide will be at an all time high!
"They are free to fire you, however you *will* take this to the unemployment office to get full compensation as it is illegal to your employer has fired you for an outright illegal reason."
Unfortunately in a right to work state, or at-will employment area, or if you are under an employment contract and your employment contract requires you to sign updated agreements, or if your existing contract allows them to ammend your existing non-compete at will, then you have no legal grounds, they can fire you for not signing, and you won't get unemployment. (btw, I was on unemployment myself recently, thankfully for only 2 weeks, and due to my paygrade, my weekly stipen after taxes was only about 30% of my regualar pay after taxes, so unemployments not much of a safety net)
I've been forced to sign many non-competes in my time in IT. My current one is effective for 2 years after I leave the company. Since my company is into so much this means I can't work for any other IT contractor; reseller of IT systems, telephony, hosted services, or managed services; an ISP specializing in business services; or an IT consulting firm that operates in the south east region. When I leave, its going to be really hard for me to find any work unless I get a job working inside a single company on their own systems and network. Few companies around here pay what I make, very few. To make matters worse, I won't be able to work for any of the companies that are currently or have been our clients as getting a job as on-staff IT directly competes with managed services from a contractor.
Fortunately, they're paying me a lot and its a good job I'm not likely to leave soon, and after a few more years I plan to move my family to the north east anyway. (We have a baby now, and I refuse to raise that child in the public education systems in this state and I refuse to place my child in a religious based private school of which around here is the only alternative, so in 4-6 years, maybe less, we're outta here).
Some of their models do that, others provide conflict priority. Problem is, the box with HDMI is the one that doesn't resolve conflicts... It's a 2 year old model though. A new one, with multi-room broadcast support (to other supporing set top boxes) is in beta and soon to be released (and once your town has them, you can trade out for free). They're also beta testing one with a flash slot so you can copy movies to a card and take them to someone elses house (though from what I understand, it's a proprietary slot/pin-out and you have to buy/rent the cards from time warner if/when they become avaialble.
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Watermarking does not prevent copying, but it provides a quick and simple system to determine who made and distributed the copy. Legit copies would be individually watermarked at the time of purchase (when downloaded). This is not an expensive system when done on a community of scale. Each unique distributed work would need it's own watermarkign pattern, within which the personal details of the purchaser would get recorded. only a few hundred individual packets need to be modified for each file as it's transimited, so the overhed to watermark is relatively small.
It would be possible to compare 2 different files and strip the differences between them, but much of the watermark would be the same between both files. If the watermark systematically repeats within the same file, using algorithms, then data stripped by comparing 2 files may or may not be sufficient to completely erase the data. the watermark should be able to be reconstituted from as little as 10% of it's surviving data. Also, stripping this information is a MASSIVE process requiring huge amounts of ram and lenghty system resources. besides, how do you validate that the copy your comparing it to is the exact same eddition with the exact same watermark pattern? or that it wasn't seeded by the recording industry with the intent of spoofing a watermark stripping application? The only way to be sure is for 2 people that trust each other to each have a legitimate copy of the media to be cleaned... If you got a "cleaned" file from a P2P, how can you be sure it is in fact clean? Also, you can only clean what's NOT identicle. Part of the watermark is a self identifying section that sais "I'm watermarked" so simply having a watermarked file on your PC that's been "cleaned" could be against the law. Sure, your personal information gets stripped (or theirs does, and even this is only a HOPE it's been stripped) but if authorities find you in posession, you're still automatically guilty. A media player could easily be created to look for broken watermarks like this
most people commit crimes like this only because they are 99% certain they can get away with it. Reduce that certainty to say 10% and how many people would still do it?
Some company (Sony) logs onto a P2P and posts "cleaned" files. They then partner with Microsoft to have WMP, or some other background tool snoop for the broken watermarks they purposely distributed. Once found, the system reports everything it knows about your personal PC and you back to Sony automatically... How do you know the fise you got from BT isn't Sony's file??? Sure, the less than 1% of people that can install a completely open sourced linux system and bypass all of this by using exclusively rematered and recompressed files, and players known to not be spying, they'll still steal... The 99% of other folks who have Windows or a Mac and don't know any better? They'll either get smart or get cuaght.
Others will simply rip from retial copies (cracked bluray disks without watermarks). The ones who will get caught quickest are the ones who are looking through BT for cracked bluray files which in fact happen to be watermarked Sony files... It's too easy to get caught because it's impossible to tell a clean file from a watermarked file, both play equally without DRM or proprietary requirements.
All this boils down to HDCP (High Definition Content Protection). Its a protocol that blu-ray, HDDVD, and Windows Medial 11 DRM content run through. The decoders, based in hardware, that play this content perform endpoint to endpoint content protection. This entire system was designed for 1 simple reason: to prevent you from recording the steap being outputed from the player to another medium. Since it's a digital signal all the way, it is too easy to make perfect copies simply by steaming the HDMI signal into a device that can record HD feeds. HDCP is a protocol that prevents this streaming by requiring each device in the chain to support the protocol or the video will be downscaled or blocked entirely by the viewing source. The software or firmware playing the source can also detect bidirectionally if the display, or any device between itself and the display, is not compliant and software can thus revoke the keys that media player 11 won't let you back up anymore...
What does all this prevent? It prevents the layman from making copies of DRM media that they are already holding a copy of in their hands, or have already legally downloaded. Does this stop piracy? NO! It's easy enough to strip the DRM and keep the HD video and audio feeds intact, then distribute the files in free and open formats anyway. What was the point?
DRM sucks. It's too easy to bypass. Lets look at watermarking instead. why? A watermarked file will play on anything, with or without decryption or decoding. problem is, you can't tell if a file is digitally watermarked or not, at least, not unless you can compare it directly with the original unmarked source material (gold master), which you can not do. The mathematics required to validly detect and remove a watermark and MASSIVE. Once watermarked files start leaking into the community (likely to be SEEDED by the RIAA and other organizations), if you get a watermarked file on your machine illegally, or worse, someone else gets one of yours, then it's a self incriminating scenario, and you can be easily found guilty. It's the perfect theft deterent. Realistically, it's no different that laser etching a diamond, or putting a tracking seen beneath your pet's skin. If someone other than you is in posession of it, it's stolen. simple.
You can't remove a watermark unless 1) you know it's there, 2) you know the source it came from, 3) you know the file is unmodified, so that the watermark pattern is in fact preserved perfectly in the file, and 4) you have an unwatermarked version to comapre it to or have a database of the specifics of each individually watermarked file pattern, which will be different for each track distributed by each company. It's virtually impossible to defeat, and has no DRM or hardware specific blockouts. We should be encouraging the use of this technology!
Sure, Vista has a pretty new Aero interface, and that requires more horsepower... or does it? It requires a dedicated graphics chip, but Aero doesn't even have all the 3D integration that MacOS has (and has had for years). The graphic options simply don't use that much CPU or disk, so they have little impact on performance.
Where vista is causing issue are in simple, every day tasks. Launching Office 2007 should not take longer on Vista than it does on XP, it's the same application and code, but because of Vista's poor handling of disk activity and it's security model, it takes nearly twice as long.
Vista actually plays many games faster, and for hard core CPU intensive tasks, it's better in most tests as well. unfortunately, a file system level problem exists that causes random data reads and writes, especially when dealing with large numbers of files, to be excruciatingly slow. Also, when multitasking, Vistas security model, memory management, and more get in the way, and cause bad lag between applications, again related to disk performance. This is made worse by Vista's heavy (and unecesary) use of RAM. Systems with less than 2GB or RAM, and without ReadyBoost, suffer dramatic page file swapping delays which make the problem multiple times worse.
If M$ chose to limit the default features enabled at startup to some simple graphic improvements, and left things like the doc, file indexing, desktop search, and other tools optional and defaulted to off, Vista would perform significantly better, but until they fix whatever is plaguing file system performace, throwing more hardware at Vista doesn't make that much of a difference. The OS is not reading or writing that much more data compared to XP, it's just doing it slower. The CPU is not the bottleneck, and neither is the disk (I/O is actually lower than XP on the same hardware, it just really is going SLOWER!).
Add to this the fact that other than a new GUI, and support for DirectX 10 (which was a MS choce, not a hardware limitation) there's hardly any feature you can't add to XP that offers the same or better functionality than Vista. What compelling reason is there to upgrade to it??? Nothing is really easier to do in Vista than XP, the interface is not that radically different, There is no cool new technology only availible in vista (except some limited HD support and DX10, which only hard core users care about, and most of them can hack XP to use anyway.
11% adoption? I'd say it would be 5% or less if we actually had a choice at purchase time, like we did when XP came out. Even all of my techie firends, and their non-techie family members are going out of their way to buy hardware that fully supports XP, and refuse to buy hardware that doesn't come with it pre-installed (unless they're building their own box). 3 of my firends said "fuck it" and bought a mac and paralells, and now run XP side-by-side.
Taxation is done by millage and zone, not by individual house, so you seeing exactly what I paid is irrelevent. You only need to know the estimated value of the property you plan to buy combined with the current and historical millage rates to determine the tax history for a proerty in a given neighborhood. You do NOT need access to my personal tax records, or my personal information to do so.
Keeping a record of the appraised value of a property is fine, so long as this information can be requested only by licnesed personel, and only on a single proeprty by property basis (so you can't pull the value of every home all at once and target market the residents). If you are genuinely interested in purchasing up your whole neighborhood, your real estate agent should be able to show you the value of the properties that are currently for sale, as well as those whose owners have opted in to seeing that information, but for those comfortable in their homes and not interested in your sales pitch to buy it out from them, well, you'll just have to suffice with a market valuation estimate based on the visible condition of the property and its features vs the appraised values of nearby units (or a market approximation rounded to not closer than 10% of the properties sale value if purchaed within the last 2 years). Also, companies not working for specific named buyers should not have access to that information (if you're not planning to buy it, or if I have not requested a loan from you, you should not be able to determine the value of my property with anything more than an general estimating tool).
A buyer should not have access to my information. A certified and registered agent should, but he should have to do it 1 lot at a time. (If you're buying dozens of lots it's worth his time, but if your a bank trying to collect target marketing information, it should cost you the time just the same. Lets not make it easy for them!). An agent who abuses his power, provides information to anyone who is not a signed buyer of his agency, or in any way is found to abuse your private information should loose their license to do so on the first conviction.
This information should be accessible, but only to parties that have a government approved reason to access it, and use that information in conjuction with approved policy, and only if you have not blocked them from doing so (or better yet, opted IN to them doing so). Unless a specific number or detail is of critical importance (like to the bank signing the loan) then an estimate of varying accuracy (depending on the party requesting the information, the type of information requested, and for what purpose) is all that should be provided.
Like i said, if my house was appraised 9 months ago for 212,000, and I have it listed on the market for sale, an agent should be able to see that information (but not you personally). If it's not listed currently, they should see only that my appraisal was for $200-225K.
Why should my taxes be of public(ally accessibly) record? Sure, there needs to be a back tracable record for auditing purposes, tax income to SSN and what not, but why should an individual outside of a government or 3rd party auditing firm have any access to that information? The general public needs to know the total taxes collected, and how that divides up by taxe type, code, and region, but not down the the detail of which individual paid (or owes) how much. This information has no interest or value on an individual to individual basis except to be abused by marketers to target me for products or services. If I offer this information by opting into an advertising matrix then they can have it. If I have no interest in credit cards I don't want to get 8 mailers a week offering me one. This is called selective initiated target advertising, and if people comply and list themselves for specific products then companies can save billions in falsly targeted mailings and the information I want to keep private can remain private.
The government needs to know how much to bill me for taxes, and wether or not i have paid it, sure. I can see where companies that issue credit or loans need to be aware of your credit rating and wether or not you have outstanding tax or other collections against you, but that information should be kept between you, the government, and the company you authorized to use that information for a specific purpose, it should not be out there for everyone to peruse! They shuold not be able to simply look that stuff up at will, but shuold be required, like when switching phone companies, to get 3rd party real time authorization.
If i want to switch from my local phone company's long distance plan to AT&T, I not only have to get on the line with AT&T, but they have to get a 3rd party on the line to confirm 1) i am who I say I am and 2) to confirm I authorized the change. Only then can AT&T file the paperwork to switch me. Some company offering me credit should have to do the same: 1) contact me in some way, or get me to contact them, 2) get my approval, with a 3rd party firm on the line at the same time to access my credit detail history, then and only then 3) access my detailed credit report. Prior to this point, all they should be able to get is my beacon score, debt to income ratio, and last year's income figures, and only if they already have my name and address and if I have not opted out of allowing them that information. They should have no knowledge of any collections against me, loan balances, number of credit cards, or anything else. If they want to offer me services, all they need is to know if I qualify in general. If I want their services, then can perform a full qualification, but only with 3rd party approval. They should not be given information outside of what qualifies or declines me (the fact that I have 6 credit cards with a total balance of $2000, $300 available is important, and wether or not I'm making payments on time, but who those cards are with is irrelevent) How much I PAID for my house has no bearing on what I'm selling it for, only what it's appraised for (to a potential buyer) and my loan balance (to another lender) has any bearing there. Maybe how long I've owned it... Even that information should be by individual request only and not published in some freely available list. Consumers should not be able to get a detailed list of what each house on my street sold for and when, but should only be able to get estimates or averages, or price ranges in 25, 50, 100, or 250K (based on total price). For example, if I bought my house for 182K, all anyone should be able to know is in 2006 when that happened, i paid between 150K and 200K for it, they should not see my exact closing price.
If every company offering or merketing a service, loan, credit, or porduct had to get my permission before accessing my personal information, and confirm that permission with a 3rd party auditing firm, then identity theft would be MUCH harder to pull off.
I do believe the idea here is "how did they get it?" Your name and phone number may be published in phone books from the phone company to which you subscribe, but you can easily enough opt out (become unlisted) and then that information is no longer publically accessible. Your e-mail address, employer, physical address, and more should not be part of public record. Sure, that information may be contained in legal and tax documents held by your local, state, or federal govt offices, but when requesting (legally) copies of documents that do not reference YOU directly, then the office of gov't providing you the copies is supposed to blank out (with heavy, permanant black marker or other obscuring technique) any personal data.
...and there's no way for me to secure my credit information (though I can prevent new accounts being created, I can't stop them from pulling my report at will).
So how are they coming aboiut your information "legally?" This is where the state of CT actually has some power. It may not be in their power to make it illegal for you to have that data from public records, or even to publish it, but they can make it illegal to have any gov't office provide it to a 3rd party, and they can allow you to do this through an opt out list, or simply make it the default policy. They can also require the companies traficking in personal information to list how and when they acquired your data (and individually which peices of it) upon request, make it illegal to resel lists on which people have not opted IN to being included, and more.
Here's an example where I have issue: I'm selling a house. Any person can request from a city office to tell them how much I paid for that house. In the market where I'm selling my home, this clearly indicates that I greatly underpaid for my home 2 years ago vs the current market value, and that I will be making a substantial profit selling it. This is regardless of it's real appriased value with is still even higher. If I go to buy a used car, I can "ASK" to know how much the dealer paid for it, but I can't legally acquire that information independetly. Nor can I do so for the shiny new HDTV I want from a local electronics store. How is it legal for people, or real estate companies, to get this information from the city office on a simple request? If I had bought the house for more money, or if I had bought it this year instead of last year, the value I paid on paper would be higher, and I would not be haggling over such a drastic price difference. Am I not allowed to take advantage of a lucky deal and make money? The buyer can even determine how much I owe on the mortgage on the property by following a paper trail and having a realtor make a credit inquiry. This should not be legal. This is PRIVATE information. Were it legal to do this in all forms of sales, the margins on products acress the board would collapse and the US market would go into an instant depression and the dollar would fall to all-time low values.
While I'm talking about mortgages, how is it that the value of my mortgage is so readily available to hundreds of companies offering me credit cards, home loans, refinance, cash advances and more. How is my personal credit report open in such a way, but even I have to PAY to see a copy!?!?
How much I pay in taxes, what kind of car I drive, where I live, my numbers and e-mails, all of this is important and private information. IT SHUOLD BE ILLEGAL TO GET THIS UNLESS I SPECIFICALLY OPT-IN TO ALLOW YOU TO COLECT IT, and then you can't resel that information unless I specifically opt-in to allow you to sell it. the opt-in process should not legally be allowed to be a byline in some contract either, or some hidden or automatic option, but should be legally required to be a seperate complete document that must be individually agreed to and signing it can NEVER be made a condition of any contract, service, or sale of any kind.
Last the longest??? I don't get it. The Dell does not have dedicated video, and the iMac can hold more RAM and the same HDDs. They're the same CPU and screen. The Dell is one up having a TV tuner, but you can add a USB one to the Mac at will, the Dell's is integrated (and uses a bulky external connector to boot) so it can't be upgraded or replaced easily. ...and since the Mac can run Vista, but the Dell can't run Leopard, if one or the other company was no longer the OS leader, you could allways use the Apple hardware whichever OS won out... ...and for $300 buck more ($100 more with same RAM and wireless keyboard) it's kind of a no-brainer to me. The article said the Dell had superior hardware, but only due to RAM size, standard features (which the Mac offers) and because it included the tuner (which you can get for the Mac for less than the $100 difference anyway). The author clearly stated he'd stil pick the Mac, but Dell sily has put together a nice competitive hardware platform (which incidently costs more).
..and that's before buying Office, Antivirus, Spyware, a "quality" video editing package, a photo management package, and CD/DVD burning software (since Windows doesn't support RWs or DVD burning out of the box). Oh yea, Apple support costs less too.
Am I beating to death the "Apple costs less than PC" idea?
This whole argument just pisses me off. Here's the correct answer: If you're in public, then you're not guaranteed any privacy rights!!! ...but besides that: ...there might be cameras on the streets watching your every move, but just for all you paranoids out there, YOU ARE NOT BEING FOLLOWED, YOU ARE NOT BEING MONITORED FOR YOUR BEHAVIORS, YOU ARE NOT BEING VIOLATED! How do I know? Well, IT'S NOT POSSIBLE!!!
/.er should understand...) A typcial zone, which tells YOUR computer where YOU are, and actually sends a simple coordinate system and instructions, not full frame video, will lag when only a few thousand people are in the zone. The central system knows who you are already, and knew your starting location, and was given hints all through the process, but even powerful grid systems with hundreds of nodes can't keep up. You're contantly feeding it GPS style updates to that information and if your connection lags, your PC sends the system your last known location (or vice versa), yet still you lag. their software and you are perfectly alligned and each know what the other is doing. To do this by video tracking, by anylizing frames from multiple individual cameras, trying to correlate even a 2D map of the city and track each individual in real time, and from only 1 side of the camera (you're not giving they're system any hints or coordinate information feed are you?), and to do this for upwards of a few MILLION simultaneous "mobs" is frankly impossible. Just taking a single still image one time across the city and trying to identify which person was the same person from 1 angle as another camera saw from another would take hours of processing, let alone doing it in real time 10 times per second. ...and you want it to not only track the objects (people, cars, etc) but in real time look them up in some massive (non-existant) database and put names to faces? BULLSHIT! We'll be on Mars before a system like this was possible, let alone getting the CIA or other black ops body to use it without some low paid city engineer being aware of the abuse of that system and letting us all know.
The horsepower required to perform facial recognition or other tracking of moving people in real time for hundreds of cameras in a metro ethernet environment is insane! Even if it were possible to do that on a camera by camera basis, to correlate all that information into a real time tracking system and allow a single individual in the network to be located by request is again, almost impossible. Even in a small environment, like a casino, it's very hard to track a single person this way. It's done mostly manaully, not by automated computer.
To take a system, make it city, county, or worse, state based, and collect that much information, over a disparate network would be nearly impossible. A computer to crunch data from over 1000 cameras would be massively expensive and unrealistic. A database to catalog and store tracking information for that many people would be beyond the scope of any existing database technology. Do you have any idea how much information we're talking about???
OK, think of this in terms of MMO (something every
What a metro camera system can do is allow an individual camera to basically monitor itself. It can identify simple behaviors: a car runs a red light, a car has no license plate passes by, a car with an APB out on it passes by, a loiterer has been standing at a bus stop and several busses have passed by, someone passes through a storefront window (i.e they're breaking in). the camera can then notify central dispatch of a potential issue for which a real cop can be sent to the scene, put his human eyes on it, and react appropriately, all while he himself knows he's being recorded doing it. The reverse is also true: you dial 911 and give them your location (or if your phone is GPS enabled, they get the info from there). The closest cameras to you locate you automatically send the video feed to an oper
If you read the article in its entirety, you would have learned that they do in fact do port filtering. These are jobs handles by ACL tables and routing rules, not by firewalls. Packet filtering is either being handled by a cisco guard or by ISS and ISA. Their security model is software, not hardware, and security is handled at the machine, not at the perimeter, except for the handling of DoS and similar attacks. I know, it sounds similar, but what a firewall is, what a router is, what happens to your packet as it passes through the various layers and tiers inside their network is different from what you would see in an SMB or small enterprise network. What shocks me is they're not running AV on many of their systems, not that they're running without firewalls.
Also remember, systems you yourself place in your DMZ, your mail server, web server, etc, ALL of those are operating outside your own firewall. They're either software hardned, or hacked. They have little other protection, why should big M$ be any different?
Actually, where many aspects of XP were inhereted from the development team behind the kernel of 2003 server, they have little in common and are not the same thing. In fact, Vista credits much of it's internals to 2003 server's kernel, almost as many is it inhereted from 2008, but it got very little from XP. Sure, 2008 and Vista were developed together, but they work very differently. Many things (control panel redesigns, Aero, security model, etc) were built into 2008 server, and it's look and feel will be a similar experience, but much else the core does is very different, much faster, and better threaded than Vista will ever be capable of. they're simply designed and optimised for 2 very different purposes. Sure, they can run the same code and drivers, but underneath that is a very different engine interfacing the code and you.
Stopping at book 1, you are right. It's not a saga, it's a story. the first 4 books as a set, great read. The other trilogies associated with the world however can't really be read alone without reading these 4 first, but do theyt really add to the overall story? no, they are simply episodes taking place there in that world. It's filler reading. David Duncan has the same issue currently. There are not enough characters of interest, not a large enough web of possibilities to account for a story so large.
the first potter book was practically a script for the movie from what m y wife explains (with obvious lack of followthrough on minor, unimportant details of the world and side conversations as all movies lack when they are translated from books) Each further movie I understand was less true to the source, with almost a third of the 5th book bbeing left out of the movie. Note that each book is longer, but each theatrical release was shorter than it's predecessor. Still, you claim an additional hour or so would have done it justice, my wife thinks 2 m,ore hours. even still, that makes the biggest book a mini-series special on Sci-fi... I could not imagine the first book of WoT taking less than 8 hours on screen. Later books, more than half a season of TV each. George Martins books are currently being stumbled over by HBO as they try to hire actors and plan filming. Each book is planned to be a 24 episode complete season, standing on it's own, and they're woried that won't capture enough of the story to satisfy the core fans of the series! Potter could NEVER carry 24 hours of video per book. It's too simple of a story, too straight of a path.
APrt of the story IS the polotics. He's telling this story from multiple sides, multiple perspectives. If you don't like this type of reading, then that's your choice, and I don't begrudge it, but it is what it is. this is not a common fantassy, this is 3rd generation hard fantasy. it's like the difference between a mystery and a romance, they should not be compared directly.
Also, if you don't like this, don't go anywhere near George R R Martin!!!
When i know how a Law and Order eppisode ends, I don't watch it. Part of the WoT's attraction is that all of us KNOW how it's going to end. It's the 13 books to get us there, the experiences and growth of the characters, that make it a worth read. That and his wonderful descriptions.
We must forgive Jordan of his 8th book. He was having serios health problems as well as a death in his family (His father if i recall) and the publisher mistakenly pressured him into pushing out the book. he admitted it was his worst work and appologised to his fans for allowing the publisher to push their contract in such a way.
He made up for this with the following novels.
Also remember, some of what he's writing is repetitive due to the long times between books. He writing for his fans that have been following the series, not for those picking it up for the first time. At some point, I'd suggest TOR hire a good editor to consolodate and re-edit the series for such a purpose eliminating the redunancies while maintaining the integrity of the store (don't edit out plot, or even prose, just simple reppetittion, and onyl when justified).
...and again to the point, did this do anything more than add pages to the same volume? These "tedious" reminders don't make the series longer, only the book in your hand, which costs you the same as the thinner abridged volume you are requesting. If you don't like his style, read another author, but please don't complain about authors who do this being money horders.
(note: i appologise if you're not the original poster, forgot to check)
Every member of my family (11 households) stopped purchasing CD music mre than 3 years ago. If I can't rip it (currently legally) from a streaming broadcast, digital FM or satellite transmission, or other free legal broadcast, then I'm not interested in owning a copy at all unless I can purchase the music directly from the artist without any other 3rd party intervening. In no way am I going to provide a marketing, packaging, distribution, or agent with money just for providing me with a convenience I have not required since they year 2000...
Recording companies that contract their artists for dsitribution and marketing contracts no longer need to sell directly to me. If the band is good, it will get radio play (on air, internet, sattelite, or other medium). I'll hear of the band through the broadcast, word of mouth, or website associated with other popular bands. The grass roots marketing process does work, and bands with or without marketing agents get exposure.
I don't need an expansive retail outlet, warehousing system, distribution chain, and millions of dollars in advertising wasted that could all go directly to the artist instead (or lower the cost of music).
For now, the popular music is free (LEGALLY!) if you know how to get it. The rest, if you really like the artist and want to contribute funding to them directly, contact them! Check out their myspace page or whatever you can find and ask to purchase their tunes directly. Have them set up a paypal store. they don't actually have to send you a copy electronically, they just have to sell you a "listening licence." a piece of paper granting you fair use of their collective works. You can get the copy of the work from anywhere, even through illegal distribution if you like, but then having a copy is perfectly legal. I'm sure the bands out there can afford to hire a few folks to make this happen for you at $.50 per song and still make 3-5 times what they get from the RIAA and their marketing company. You save more money, they make more money, and the RIAA gets fucked. It's a win, win, win.
As far as broadcast music... Once it's gone out over the air, that broadcast is public domain. Provided you were in the listening area, you could have heard it, and thus you could legally record it for personal use. Is it illegal to trade copywritten material if that material was obtained legally, and is traded with someone else who could have done the same? Selling it would be illegal, but a direct trade or gifting of the files is not a profit action, and thus protected by law. We're just waiting for someone to challenge that in court.
It's a continuation of his Baroque cycle (forthcoming). The copy of the 3rd book I have lists the titles of the next 3 books in the saga. I do not know what the release data will e (sorry), just as I eagerly await work of Tad William's and George Martins next announcements (2 authors I desperately hope do not join Rober Jordan in leaving this existance with unfinished works... both are aging more rapidly than they are aproaching the end of their legacies.
So you don't classify this a character development?
Sure, one may be tempted to state that such phrases were repeated regularly in the series, but c'mon, all this means is that each book could have been 30-50 pages shorter... also, it's a long series, authors must remind us of how their characters think from time to time or we begin to forget who they are and substitute our own thoughts for theirs. personally I appreciate this detail and I wish more authors used similar techniques.
We're not talking about parragraphs and pages of useless descriptions (though many were lenghty, its much of that poetic verse that makes the story worth reading, and I considder little of it useless or wasteful), and we're not talking about complete tangents from story that have no impacts on the characters or the story... besides, ether he used such prose or not would have made no impact on how many books he published. What it would have made an impact on is how many pages each book was published, saving the publisher money. In fact, considdering that, I counter that jordan was in fact not milking his publisher and the public for money, but in fact, he was milking them OF such money, as each hardcover, regardless of cost to produce, is sold for the same retail price...
Some authors do produce books in volume simply for money. Some of those authors are worth reading, others not so much. I gave up on Goodkind for this reason after his 4th book. Each additional story was not moving the characters forward, or expanding the world, it only prolonged the saga for profit. I'd argue that the original runelords series was quite good, but continuing that series with another (at least) trilogy is not worth my reading time (though if the second saga could stand on its own without first having to read the 4 books previous to it, it might be) the Dune Saga also has this weakness. If you truly love the world, you've got over 15 books of it to read now, but the original book alone stands on it's own. the first 3 sequals add to it, but reading beyond is unnecessary.
but of course, this is your opinion. I enjoy books with depth, complexity, and longevity. I avoid books and series that are simple or episodic. If it can be made into a 3 hour or less movie, it's not worth my time. Each book should take at least half of a full season of TV to conclude and a saga should take years of watching. LoTR produced 12 hours of feature movie, and from only a few hundred pages (about the total length of a single book from Jordan). Each potter book, some of which are 800+ pages) only translate into 2 hour movies. I read the first 5 books of the potter series in about 3 days time. Each book of Jordan's, Martin's, William's, or Stepheson's enthrawled me for more than a week. Anyuthing less can't hold my interest, is too predictable, or is simply episodic and I have no addiction to the series. Not everyone feels the same way, and i hold no ill will towards them. The only readers I wish stripped from the face of Terra are those who read romance novels...
There was allways an end. If you read the books carefully enough, then you know what the end is. It was foreshadowed in the early pages of the first book, and reiterated in the 2nd volume several times. the fun is not in reading the ending, but in the twists, turns, and unexpected events that spin us towards the enevitable, that which is destined to repeat as the wheel turns and spins age anew.
Granted, having started reading the series with the release of the 4th book, the end has been a long time coming. 2-4 year between volumes is a loooonnnng time. I'm held in this same pattern by George Martin (Song of Ice and Fire saga), Neil Stepheson (he just announced a second trilogy to his current works), Tad Williams (otherland took forever to be completed, and each volume of his current fantasy series is eagerly awaited), i even went through this with Isaac Asimof and his 13 book saga of the Foundation (not including 2 others he went back in and added later!).
I fill the gaps with Mercades Lackey, Robin Hobb, Bob Salvatore, and a dozen others not to mention all these other fantasies I end up reading just to keep up with what's in the theatres. (notice i did not mention the potter books however).
Jordan had no personal interest in monetary fortunes. His story was alive within him, and as all things that grow in nature, this story grew above and beyond his dreams and took its own course. George R R Martin is experiencing a similar pain with his series, as did Terry Goodkind. The stories and worlds simply become so vast, that in order to move one's characters to the end of the story, it takes more volumes than one expects.
After book 3 Jordan expected the series to be complete at 6 books. after book 5, he thought he was closer to the end than the beginning. He was on a good pace to do that until he experienced a major death in his family while writing book 8. That book got away from him, and in order to complete his works and tie off all of the ends of his story, we needed books 9 and 10 to put things back on track.
Jordan rarely used "filler prose" as you claim. His descriptions were allways vivid and captivating, and all of his writing for his more than 20 main characters was exceptional.
Maybe you're looking at it wrong. This is not a simple story about a few characters on a quest, AKA J R R Tolkein style. this is 3rd generation hard fantasy. This is a collection of stories about seperate individuals following seperate paths each intertwined in common fates inside of an expansive world. This is really no different than the Dragon Lance series, other than in this case, each individual story has the power to move others. If this is more than you can follow, (not to say too complex, but simply the sheer volume of information and time required to invest in it) or if the collection is simply longer than your attention span, then I can reccomend many other great authors to you, and I will caution you to avoid Tad Williams, Neil Stepheson, George Martin and many other emerging fantasy gods of writing who are also on paths to publishing stories that cross 7-10 1000 page novels.
I mean no disrespect, but maybe it's just not your style.
I (unfortunately) worked in retail PC sales for about 3 years, so I'm very familiar with this premise. Major retail PC sellers (BestBuy, Walmart, etc) believe there are basically 4 PC user types; Internet users (grandma), school computers (which also double as photo/music PCs), Media centric folks with more than 1 PC (targets for media center based PCs), and hard core gamers.
Here are the problems with this:
1, the PC set up for grandma and young children, the bottom of the line hunk of shit, is also usually underpowered even for that purpose, and simple upgrades (adding 1GB of RAM for example) actually costs more than simply buying the next level up in quality. Also, the basic PC is typically castrated in upgradability, making certain that as a person becomes more PC familiar, maybe adding a video camera and trying to make DVDs, will typically require PC replacement, not upgrade, because they fail to include a power suppy capable of supporting a graphics card (or fail to include a PCI X port for one at all). If it was clearly labled, this would not be an issue, but since it's sold side by side with other systems, only those who know PC specs and what they mean can tell the difference.
2, the "school computer" typically sold, especially notebooks intended to be used in colleges, typically don't meet the minimum requirements of the colleges... Most schools publish a system specification, and this typically (at least) involves the inclusion of a network OS (XP pro of Vista Pro), but none of these systems include that. Also, kids play games. Any "school PC" that doesn't at least include a graphics processor (shared or dedicated memory) is going to be useless to most kids in their perspectivce. These systems, also being at the low end of the price and component chart, typically are not equipped with enough RAM, or a fast enough (or big enough) HDD to handle the mass of video and music the kids will place on the machine. Again, buying this machine and upgrading it costs more than buying a better machine that already has the updates. Also, student packaged computers should come with the largest screens and resolutions possible. Kids will allways have a music player, internet page, e-mail, and chat room open while they're actually doing their work in a word processor or powerpoint session. They need dual screen or a 22" or larger high res display, again, which none of these packages include (or can't support due to embeded cheap graphic chips).
3, media center systems, boasting video capture, massive storage potential, and more, are usually strapped with slower hard drive and weak processors. The intent is that noone actually uses the PC, it just operates by itself as a stand alone media server, but the marketing folks ignore this just like they ignored the correct user base for Windows ME (Windows ME didn't suck, it did what Microsoft said it would do, but the marketing folks sold it to everyone, which was wrong!). Marketing is telling people not only to keep all, their videos on the media center, but that this is a real PC for someone to use too. Lets face it, trying to get this lower end CPU to crunch MPEG 4 video and rip a DVD while 2 other people are playing music from it and it's recording TV just doesn't work. The new Home Server model may acually correct this, but maybe not (I'm sure marketing will still screw this up). The Media Center machines also typically come with a vid card, but it's usually a bottom of the line dedicated card, and the power units in these PCs are also typically very close to maxed out, so replacing the card with a gaming card also means replacing the PS, which due to all the other included components in this small chassis is usually impossible. Also, the tuner only works for analog cable or OTA broadcast, so recording from cable TV or sattelite typically still requires a Tivo or real DVR, so the card's inclusion is just a waste of $100.
The hard core gamer... Well, about 5% of all PC gamers are "hard core" and need $2000 systems. The real gam
It's bad enough that most of the crap on the radio is overplayed. Now, every time I drive to work I'm going to hear the exact same playlist, and since it's based on vibrations in the car, there's no mute button. Vehicular suicide will be at an all time high!
"They are free to fire you, however you *will* take this to the unemployment office to get full compensation as it is illegal to your employer has fired you for an outright illegal reason."
Unfortunately in a right to work state, or at-will employment area, or if you are under an employment contract and your employment contract requires you to sign updated agreements, or if your existing contract allows them to ammend your existing non-compete at will, then you have no legal grounds, they can fire you for not signing, and you won't get unemployment. (btw, I was on unemployment myself recently, thankfully for only 2 weeks, and due to my paygrade, my weekly stipen after taxes was only about 30% of my regualar pay after taxes, so unemployments not much of a safety net)
I've been forced to sign many non-competes in my time in IT. My current one is effective for 2 years after I leave the company. Since my company is into so much this means I can't work for any other IT contractor; reseller of IT systems, telephony, hosted services, or managed services; an ISP specializing in business services; or an IT consulting firm that operates in the south east region. When I leave, its going to be really hard for me to find any work unless I get a job working inside a single company on their own systems and network. Few companies around here pay what I make, very few. To make matters worse, I won't be able to work for any of the companies that are currently or have been our clients as getting a job as on-staff IT directly competes with managed services from a contractor.
Fortunately, they're paying me a lot and its a good job I'm not likely to leave soon, and after a few more years I plan to move my family to the north east anyway. (We have a baby now, and I refuse to raise that child in the public education systems in this state and I refuse to place my child in a religious based private school of which around here is the only alternative, so in 4-6 years, maybe less, we're outta here).
Some of their models do that, others provide conflict priority. Problem is, the box with HDMI is the one that doesn't resolve conflicts... It's a 2 year old model though. A new one, with multi-room broadcast support (to other supporing set top boxes) is in beta and soon to be released (and once your town has them, you can trade out for free). They're also beta testing one with a flash slot so you can copy movies to a card and take them to someone elses house (though from what I understand, it's a proprietary slot/pin-out and you have to buy/rent the cards from time warner if/when they become avaialble.