Your example of music CDs and DVDs is irrelevant because the creation of new albums and movies requires an ongoing infusion of development money, whereas the Blu-Ray R&D is a one-time expense. A better example would be the price of a CD-R; I remember when they were $20 each.
It's not irrelevant - Sony is not the only company making Blu-Ray players. Do you think Pioneer can just pocket all the profit they make from their $1000 Blu-Ray devices..? No way - some (if not most) of that money goes back to Sony, the company responsible for the R&D you're talking about (just like the majority of the money paid for music CDs goes back to the label/artist).
Plus, I don't disagree that basic economics apply here.. but basic economics do not produce an exact price after an exact period of time (e.g., $150 after one year).
You know what's great about Internet postings? It's how people can be so certain of themselves and yet not provide fact one to back up that certitude. Go, man, go!
You know what I like most about Internet postings? The complete alternate personality that people adopt when they're hiding behind a nickname. Think about this sort of conversation in real life -- since when do people carry around documents to prove statistics they mention in a random conversation? Tell me if this conversation ever take place in-person:
(Bob) "Hey Dan, I finally got the new car! Went with the red one."
(Dan) "Bullshit. Do you have any paperwork to prove it?"
That would never happen, because then nobody would enjoy hanging around Dan. I'm not sure what's so different about posting on the Internet (particularly/.), but that constant "prove it or I'm going to tactlessly accuse you of lying" attitude is the reality here. So instead of typing "HDTV one in six" into Google (result #2), the more "acceptable" behavior is to just accuse someone of blatantly lying about whatever they've just posted, with some profanity thrown in for good measure. Sad.
Blue ray is going to be a flash in the PAN..A FAILED flash in the pan I think as well, the new 18 gb disc from Toshiba I read about will be on the market soon, are compatible all the way around and can be made in existing factories at VERY LITTLE RETOOL costs. The industry is stuck on recovering their outlay costs before really tooling up for massive blue ray orders which aren't going to appear. Sony is in the end going to eat BlueRay and PSP format just like they ate the minidisc format here in the states.
I've come to realize that most/. users live in some alternate reality where events like the one you've just described actually happen. In this alternate reality, nobody has an HDTV, the Wii is king, and the PS3 & Blu-Ray format are both complete failures.
Only time will tell, but I'm willing to bet that none of those things will happen (the HDTV comment excluded; that one is already incorrect). Since I have no way to look into the future, I won't waste my time arguing.. but given/.'s general opinion about HDTV (i.e., nobody has one, who needs it, it won't catch on for another 20 years, etc), I can say with absolute certainty that most people here are incredibly narrow-minded when it comes to technology they don't own, or can't afford.
Bullshit. Nowhere near 1 in 6 houses have an HDTV. 1in 6 purchases might be an HDTV, but not 1 in 6 marketshare. Hell, 1 in 6 houses haven't even bought an HDTV since HD started being pushed.
"The report from Leichtman Research Group found that Americans have increased their adoption of HDTV technology in the last two years from one in every 14 households owning an HDTV set, to one in every six."
Toss that into Google if you're interested in any additional information.
And the PS3 won't have those early adoption failure rates.
The PS3 hasn't even been released yet - it's completely impossible to know what the failure rate (or even the internal build quality) is going to be... but hey, whatever helps you sleep at night.
There's nothing about a Blu-Ray player that is particularly expensive to produce, and that $1,000 price is a completely artificial one designed to appeal to early adopters. I certainly question their sanity; in mere months, the price will be less than $300. The ability to play the handful of released Blu-Ray titles in the meantime cannot possibly be worth $700, and barebones players will probably be $150 within a year or so.
Any chance you could provide the source of this information? Particularly, where did you hear that Blu-Ray players will be $150 within one year?
Using this same logic, the price of music CDs and DVDs should be going down pretty soon, since the current high prices are "artificial" as well..
Thats great- for the less than 5% of people who have an HD-TV. Of course, a large chunk of those people either already have, or do not want, a bluray player, so it may help 1% or so of gamers. ANd going from the PS2, its probably a shitty BluRay player.
1 in 6 households have an HDTV (from from 1 in 14 two years ago) - note the distinct "upward trend". So yeah, it is great.
I'll wait until they sell it for $250 USD. I'm in no rush.
Sony isn't reselling the PS2 (with a new controller) under a different name, so I think you might be waiting for quite a long time. Hey, at least it's a good excuse not to buy an HDTV!
No one in their right mind would think a gaming console cost that much money...
That's why it also plays Blu-Ray discs. Considering the fact that Blu-Ray players currently cost around $1,000 (US), I don't see what you're complaining about.
If you don't have $600 to spend on that sort of device, that's fine.. but don't question the sanity of people who do.
Hi there! Just read over your message and wanted to share a couple observations with you:
- Your message follows the classic "quote, correction, sentence beginning with 'Remember' followed by something obvious that everybody already knows" format.
- You've apparently decided that using standard quotation marks on both sides of quoted text is not sufficient for posting on Slashdot. Instead, you've chosen two ``backticks" in place of the opening quotes.
Based on those two observations, I've come to the conclusion that you're a complete asshat.
The main issue is that you can't get a job there unless you're a citizen and you can't become a citizen unless you live there for seven years. There are loop-holes, but you have to find them.
I would definitely telecommute to a job in the US.. probably (under the table) computer-related contract work. As much as I would love to repair shoes or pick fruit for a living, I don't think it would be wise to waste my current job experience just because I had to flee the country.
I decided years ago that if I ever had to leave (for whatever reason), I'd head for Belize -- a beautiful, low-key, English-speaking country -- can't go wrong as far as I'm concerned.
I have been told to avoid the drug cartels in Belize City, but that's certainly not a deal-breaker.
Belize Motto: Sub Umbra Floreo ("Under the Shade I Flourish")
To make matters worse, there have been studies that support the fact that pregnant women stressed by all these gadgets/technology, are more likely to have kids with severe mental or psychotic problems. Do you know that the chances of a kid getting a brain disorder are just 1 in 166? It iused to be 1 in 11000 in the late sixties.
Diagnosis for that sort of thing has changed quite a bit since then - it's barely an apples-to-apples comparison. That said - any legitimate increase, when you get right down to it, is just evolution at work. Trying to slow down the adoption rate of new technology will only delay the inevitable...
Because of this, I'm still a fan of reiserfs, it's fast too, and I can grow and shrink the filesystem live, and at will.. it's never let me down yet either. (not that either filesystem is infallable based soley on my personal success rate)
I still use reiserfs for my primary OS partition (separate HDD), but xfs for my storage partition (RAID). reiserfs makes me nervous, as it seems to "degrade" more than other filesystems.. but xfs has been rock-solid, and the supporting toolset (xfsprogs) is fantastic. reiserfs "tools" are pretty much non-existent, with the exception of reiserfstune (which is barely powerful enough to break something in the wrong hands).
Anyway, I couldn't agree more - xfs is untouchable in my mind when it comes to free *nix filesystems. Modern versions of VxFS is also nice, but obviously not open source (or free).
You need root for installing software and configuring daemons. That's all. If you need to access another user's files/mail spool, sudo su - user will get you there.
I won't even touch on your extreme oversimplification of what tasks require root access, but "sudo su - user" counts as using root. Not everybody has sudo (myself included), in which case you have to do it the old-fashioned way.
Because an exploit for *any* software you run has full access to your system? If you run as root, the cracker merely needs to alter the execution of your program and they're in with full priviledges.
Who is the "cracker"? If the only thing protecting you from this "cracker" is the fact that you're logged in as a non-privileged user, you have a major problem. I personally don't run pre-compiled software unless I'm 100% sure it wasn't created with malicious intent. You can feed me "what ifs" all day long about how I'm not being safe, but the fact remains that I'm careful about what I do and I've never had a problem.
How about you turn the question around. Why run as root? You don't need it for 99.999% of tasks, and instead of spending time worrying about what you'll clobber every time you do something as root, spend the 5 seconds typing sudo xxx and your password if you need it?
Well, for starters I don't spend any time "worrying" - my normal behavior includes carefully considering whatever I plan on doing before I actually do it. It's just a habit at this point. Also, I use root-level commands at least 20% of the time for various things.. updating or installing new software mostly. To answer your question- given the choice one way or the other, I'll always choose not to inconvenience myself by needlessly typing a password 20-30 times per day.
What if I asked you to setup a password-protected screensaver to takeover after 5 seconds of inactivity? Why not do it, seems like a pretty secure way of going about your business, right?
Who the hell runs as root?! I don't know anyone who does, except possibly for a few noobs running Lindows.
I login and do everything as root on my desktop machine. Without referring to any potential mistakes or accidents, please give me a good reason why I shouldn't use root..? I'm aware of the consequences of making a mistake - I'm very careful.
I've been using *nix as my desktop OS for almost 10 years now, and I'm still waiting for that big catastrophe that's supposed to be triggered by running everything as root.
1. This case is at the wrong court, it should go to a federal court instead.
2. (to the federal court) We agreed that you had jurisdiction over this, but we're going to pretend that we didn't say that.
3. What? You've decided that we broke the law? Well, you shouldn't punish us because we're really nice people.
Did you actually read this article, or any of the recent Spamhaus articles?
1. No, it should go to a UK-based court instead of a US-based court. Spamhaus does not operate in the US. The judge was lied to about this in order to push the case forward. 2. No clue what you're talking about (see #1). No federal court in either country has been involved. 3. No, they shouldn't be punished because the judge has no jurisdiction to do so. It's a matter for the UK courts, because it's a 100% UK (non-profit) company. Spamming is illegal in the UK, so good luck with that.
That would be a problem if every single message was slowed down, but it's not. The system uses sender reputation and behaviour to ensure that only malicious senders are slowed down.
I don't recall any mention of that in the article, but I guess it may have been a bit outside the scope. Either way, I didn't realize that - makes sense.
One way or another, you have to delay some of the traffic. You either do it up front and selectively -- applying the pain to the bad senders -- or you do it after the messages are queued, which hurts the recipients.
I'm certainly not suggesting that any rate limiting take place after a message is accepted -- I'm just stating my preference for SMTP-layer rate limiting, as opposed to network-layer rate limiting. With SMTP-layer rate limiting, the pain is still applied to bad senders in the form of "4xx You hit your limit" SMTP responses, but there's no possibility for size-related workarounds (e.g., completely blank messages, an odd annoyance for quite some time, would still come through pretty quickly). There's also no need to allow for a huge number of concurrent connections (but I suppose there's no downside to doing it anyway).
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying your approach won't work -- we're talking about fundamentally different ways of achieving the same goal (rate limiting). I simply prefer the SMTP-layer approach, because it seems to me like the place to do that sort of thing.
The article is correct - mail servers do not mind waiting a few minutes/hours/days to deliver their mail. Unfortunately, end-users do mind. The inherent delays for just about every message would be particularly painful for business email users, but even residential ISP customers are constantly opening tickets when they observe a delay (I work closely with several large ISPs, which is how I know).
Delays aside, I just can't buy into network-layer rate limiting when it comes to email. The metric for anti-spam success is measured in "messages" (or more accurately, "recipients"). Nobody ever calls their local email admin to say, "hey, I've received 1.3 megabytes of spam this week, what gives?"; instead, the problem is always quantified by the number of individual messages the end user had to look at and consider before deciding what to do.
Because of this, rate-limiting should be done per-recipient. That way, there's no question what a particular sender is going to get through. Once they pass the limit you've specified for their class of IP (known mail server, dynamic IP, etc) during whatever timeframe, they receive an SMTP 4xx error until that timeframe is up. That still slows them down, but you can't get around it with smaller messages, etc.
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Plus, I don't disagree that basic economics apply here.. but basic economics do not produce an exact price after an exact period of time (e.g., $150 after one year).
(Bob) "Hey Dan, I finally got the new car! Went with the red one."
(Dan) "Bullshit. Do you have any paperwork to prove it?"
That would never happen, because then nobody would enjoy hanging around Dan. I'm not sure what's so different about posting on the Internet (particularly
Only time will tell, but I'm willing to bet that none of those things will happen (the HDTV comment excluded; that one is already incorrect). Since I have no way to look into the future, I won't waste my time arguing.. but given
Toss that into Google if you're interested in any additional information.
Using this same logic, the price of music CDs and DVDs should be going down pretty soon, since the current high prices are "artificial" as well..
If you don't have $600 to spend on that sort of device, that's fine.. but don't question the sanity of people who do.
I was wondering how the hell I could play movies.. mystery solved! Thanks Anonymous Coward!
Yeeee-hawww! [fires shotgun into the air several times]
Hi there! Just read over your message and wanted to share a couple observations with you:
- Your message follows the classic "quote, correction, sentence beginning with 'Remember' followed by something obvious that everybody already knows" format.
- You've apparently decided that using standard quotation marks on both sides of quoted text is not sufficient for posting on Slashdot. Instead, you've chosen two ``backticks" in place of the opening quotes.
Based on those two observations, I've come to the conclusion that you're a complete asshat.
I decided years ago that if I ever had to leave (for whatever reason), I'd head for Belize -- a beautiful, low-key, English-speaking country -- can't go wrong as far as I'm concerned.
I have been told to avoid the drug cartels in Belize City, but that's certainly not a deal-breaker.
Belize Motto: Sub Umbra Floreo ("Under the Shade I Flourish")
Anyway, I couldn't agree more - xfs is untouchable in my mind when it comes to free *nix filesystems. Modern versions of VxFS is also nice, but obviously not open source (or free).
Well, for starters I don't spend any time "worrying" - my normal behavior includes carefully considering whatever I plan on doing before I actually do it. It's just a habit at this point. Also, I use root-level commands at least 20% of the time for various things.. updating or installing new software mostly. To answer your question- given the choice one way or the other, I'll always choose not to inconvenience myself by needlessly typing a password 20-30 times per day.
What if I asked you to setup a password-protected screensaver to takeover after 5 seconds of inactivity? Why not do it, seems like a pretty secure way of going about your business, right?
I've been using *nix as my desktop OS for almost 10 years now, and I'm still waiting for that big catastrophe that's supposed to be triggered by running everything as root.
1. No, it should go to a UK-based court instead of a US-based court. Spamhaus does not operate in the US. The judge was lied to about this in order to push the case forward.
2. No clue what you're talking about (see #1). No federal court in either country has been involved.
3. No, they shouldn't be punished because the judge has no jurisdiction to do so. It's a matter for the UK courts, because it's a 100% UK (non-profit) company. Spamming is illegal in the UK, so good luck with that.
I'm certainly not suggesting that any rate limiting take place after a message is accepted -- I'm just stating my preference for SMTP-layer rate limiting, as opposed to network-layer rate limiting. With SMTP-layer rate limiting, the pain is still applied to bad senders in the form of "4xx You hit your limit" SMTP responses, but there's no possibility for size-related workarounds (e.g., completely blank messages, an odd annoyance for quite some time, would still come through pretty quickly). There's also no need to allow for a huge number of concurrent connections (but I suppose there's no downside to doing it anyway).
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying your approach won't work -- we're talking about fundamentally different ways of achieving the same goal (rate limiting). I simply prefer the SMTP-layer approach, because it seems to me like the place to do that sort of thing.
The article is correct - mail servers do not mind waiting a few minutes/hours/days to deliver their mail. Unfortunately, end-users do mind. The inherent delays for just about every message would be particularly painful for business email users, but even residential ISP customers are constantly opening tickets when they observe a delay (I work closely with several large ISPs, which is how I know).
Delays aside, I just can't buy into network-layer rate limiting when it comes to email. The metric for anti-spam success is measured in "messages" (or more accurately, "recipients"). Nobody ever calls their local email admin to say, "hey, I've received 1.3 megabytes of spam this week, what gives?"; instead, the problem is always quantified by the number of individual messages the end user had to look at and consider before deciding what to do.
Because of this, rate-limiting should be done per-recipient. That way, there's no question what a particular sender is going to get through. Once they pass the limit you've specified for their class of IP (known mail server, dynamic IP, etc) during whatever timeframe, they receive an SMTP 4xx error until that timeframe is up. That still slows them down, but you can't get around it with smaller messages, etc.