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"The aim is to 'commoditize the protocol'. By giving the stack away, maybe we can stop everyone obsessing over how to format the bits on the wire, and get them writing applications instead."

...not. Same for Cinelerra and Kino and Jahshakah and Firefox and Wengophone and apt-get and dvgrab and transcode and ffmpeg2theora and Annodex and YouTube and Facebook and, oh well, you get the point.

As it so happens, I am producing a distributed film with FOSS called the Digital Tipping Point, and our community would never have been able to create all these great BASH scripts to automate the process of capturing, compressing, and uploading the video to the Internet Archive's Digital Tipping Point Video Collection without the freedom of FOSS. Oh, and coincidentally, neither the Internet or the Internet Archive would exist without FOSS.

This guy clearly does not know what he is talking about.

A really good (and free) movie on this subject is The Power of Nightmares. If you haven't seen it and are interested in learning more about the similarities between neocons and muslims, I highly recommend it.

http://www.archive.org/details/ThePowerOfNightmares

Just to keep history in perspective, AOL didn't kill Netscape, and neither did Microsoft. The latter did their bit, but the primary Netscape killer were the Four Horsemen of the Silicon Valley Apocalypse: Mediocrity, Vanity, Lack of Direction, and Middle Management.

The reason that AOL was able to buy Netscape in the first place because Netscape was already failing financially and in market share. The reason Netscape was failing financially was because of its own misuse of the hottest property ever squandered in the age of the Web: www.netscape.com. The home page of the first popular consumer browser, the word once synonymous with the World Wide Web (and, however incorrectly, The Internet) was never taken advantage of. It was pathetic.

Also, in addition to vain infighting of the worst kind, the company was overrun with useless middle management from various hastily and foolishly made acquisitions which included deals for positions of "power" at Netscape. I think there was something like 30 Vice Presidents (most made via acquisitions, not promotions from within) at one point, when it was maybe 2000 employees? That's more VPs than Microsoft had at the time (with 20000 employees)... There were 7 (seven!) people between a senior engineer and Jim Barksdale...

Microsoft's role in the demise of Netscape was simply to provide a hard hitting competitor, something Netscape had no idea how to counter. Yes, Microsoft pulled some evil tricks, such as giving away free software (11 years later we are still seeing that this model can work!) purposefully breaking JavaScript using their monstrous, non-compliant JScript (which singlehandedly pushed back the coming of Web 2.0 at least 5 years), various deals for IE only installations brokered with computer makers, i.e. their usual bag of tricks.

Netscape's response was to flail and fail instead of doing something original like, say, making netscape.com into what Google eventually would become... The talent was there, more importantly the *audience* was there, but there was no one brave enough at the helm to take advantage of it. Or, more fairly, there was too much dead weight for those brave and talented folks to carry...

R.I.P.

Heh - I recall being stuck with a 2.4k modem once (my 'fast' 14.4 had busted for some odd reason and I was waiting for its replacement to ship to the local geek shack I'd bought it from).

I clocked this version of www.discovery.com loading in just under 42 minutes.

...and to think of all the FPS gamers today whining to the Heavens about, oh, ~40ms of lag... Heh.

/P

You are editing a file that is saved directly to a shared folder on WHS, which WHS accepts and gives the A-OK signal to your software, then later has a problem writing the file, and tells you about it, with no chance of recovering the file at that time. Since this can happen after you have exited your software, you have no way of recovering the file.

The problem is not:

• You make backup files, then try to edit them directly on the WHS share folder.
• Your backup files get corrupted.
• You are doing something that WHS was not intended for.

The third one is the trickiest. See, if you go to the current WHS Discover site (click Help and How-To's) you will see that the big thing is Remote Access, Media Sharing, and Computer Backup. This would lead people to believe that any other use, is not what it was meant for, and when something goes wrong, you should have known better.

But, one only needs to look back at previous pages for WHS to see that Sharing was a central feature. Yes, full sharing, not just Media Sharing. Even the Overview of that page focuses on sharing first, and backup (protection) was third. The first overview item was Sharing, and that is simply what this problem is about, shared folders. Either for your own use as a networked server, or to share with other users.

Now, if you go to Eric Bott's blog, you will see the explanation that the largest factor is "a home server is under extreme load." Well, I'm sorry, but if the touted role, even at the beginning and not right now, was acting as a share folder to save your stuff to, then by damn it better do that. If the server gets loaded down, it should not pretend it got the file and tell you later that it didn't, it should just either not respond (and your software would have to let you know it couldn't do it) or it should give an error response (your software's problem now).

Honestly, this product was marketed as a home server for storing and sharing your files, with acting as a backup server making 3rd on the list of features. Now, they want to change that and say that it is for backup first, file sharing from special locations and under special conditions, and not really for file storage.

Indie artists can use HTTP (and Torrent if necessary), theres plenty of willing hosts.

The question isn't where can we store our terabytes and terabytes of information for a 100 years and never touch it, the real question is where can we store our terabytes of information and allow it to be used to generate copies for sale at any time in a current format? I imagine the answer for the industry will resemble the Internet Bookmobile, where a consumer needs only submit the name of the movie they want, indicate a format and shipping preference, and the movie arrives for set price - a portion of each sale will be applied to keep the data migrated to a fresh format, and when interest wanes, a studio could decide to migrate to a "final copy" and "burn" the film to celluloid. That would the last hope for a film, resulting in lowered storage costs for the long haul, at the expense of accessibility and flexability.

The problem is the current storage model doesn't take into account the long tail of retail, and ignores the ability of technology to create new revenue streams to fund storage options...

Just think, if a movie house could order up a "print" of any movie ever made and show it in a theater - and offer DVD, HD or Blu-Ray copies to be delivered to the home of anyone that wanted one..Heck, I'd pay REAL MONEY to see Stop Making Sense on a big screen with the sound turned up to 11 ;^)

The original Chuck Norris facts site was at http://4q.cc/index.php?pid=top100&person=chuck Note that they also have the Vin Diesel facts, which as documented in the
Wikipedia page on Chuck Norris Facts were done before the ones about Chuck. You can also see in the Wayback Machine that the 4q.cc site had their original Chuck facts as of November 5, 2005, and my mail archive says I was forwarding that site to my friends by December 8th.

The http://www.chucknorrisfacts.com/ site was registered on December 20, 2005, weeks after this had already become a popular Internet meme. Their site is pretty clearly linked with chucknorris.com - in addition to the shared registration info, there's a link right on the facts site to the main one.

So while it seems true Chuck or someone related to him in a business capacity registered the chucknorrisfacts.com domain to cash in on the popularity of the meme, and it's fair to say someone here is cash hungry, that didn't happen until some time after the original site has already become hugely popular. Saying Chuck made the whole thing up for self-promotion is off base. Now that you've insulted Chuck's manhood, I hope this information helps clarify what you've done wrong during your final few moments on Earth.

"Possibly the most massive, energetic, and powerful particles in the universe, the hardon exhibits an incredibly long decay time. While most particles decay after a few microseconds, the hardon tends to last 10-15 minutes. Hardons are formed by interactions of hitons ("sex" bosons), but can also be found in the presence of high energy partyons.

Hardons can decay quickly when subjected to bombardment by negative leadons. When a hardon interaction occurs and a leadon is present, the hardon emits a lot of energy and emits a comeon (guilt boson).

The hardon has a relatively common antiparticle, nominally called the tampon, which will annihilate with the hardon producing tremendous amounts of heat energy in process cosmologists call the "big lack of bang." Energy emitted in this process is detectable only in erenkov counters.

The discovery of the hardon proved to be the most significant discovery in recent particle physics. After the research team of Herzog, Walter, and Chandler made their discovery, they began work on a Sex-Death-Guilt Unification Theory. While their new theory has not been published, it has already made an impact on the scientific community, and hormone levels in labs around the world have soared to record levels."

An article linked from that article suggests otherwise. And lest you object that that article is discussing mathematical models only, read the current article linked from the story: "The team developed a mathematical model to show the impact of unexpected events such as a lorry pulling out of its lane on a dual carriageway." Does a model count as knowledge?

On the other hand there's this thing called the Live Music Archive, where you can fill your music player with hours upon hours of live music from talented musicians.

Here is the link to the Live Music Archive in case anyone is interested.

I'd never heard of Richard Milton, so went to look at his website (one of four, actually; the other three are about how to do your own PR, increase google hits, etc.). It seems to be down (and not archived by the Wayback Machine since mid-2007), but the latest incarnation may be found here: http://web.archive.org/web/20061205072241/www.alternativescience.com/ .

      It's interesting, and he makes some good points, but apparently he's not done much of his research so very well (see esp. the stuff on the Michelson interferometer) and when I saw this quote: "Harvard's Stephen Jay Gould has famously criticised the central feature of Darwinist thinking, gradualism, in many books" I knew the guy was not understanding at least part of that which he wrote about.

Simply visit http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.startrek.com/ or is that too obvious? ;-))

Years ago, before I had my second kid, I created a Fossil computer that was Victorian themed in brass, wood, and had an old fish fossil mounted where the tag went. It took a huge amount of time, but was one of those great father-son bonding experiences (he has a full machine shop, so he did most of the work). I loved the look and still feel I should turn it into a Media PC and stick it in our living room.

It seems a little sad that it's now my daughter's computer, sitting on the floor. The most excitement it gets these days is to play online Barbie or NickJr games.

That's not quite right. AudioSpotlight has been shipping similar products since 2000. Indeed, I saw them featured on Tomorrow's World in that same year.

http://web.archive.org/web/20000302223042/www.bbc.co.uk/tw/stories/technology/0001audiospotlight.shtml

The relevant part of the episode is still hosted by Holosonic.

http://www.holosonics.com/media/BBC_TW_AudioSpotlight_1Mbps.mpg

Their website also lists alternative applications..

http://www.holosonics.com/customers.html

Similar thing happened to me with the cowboys at highimpactsites.com - they redirected my website to penpals.com whilst it was registered to me.

I got www.generalmedicalcouncil.info to help somebody who had http://www.generalmedicalcouncil.co.uk/ taken from her by Nominet - she used it to complain about the GMC.

My original site is shown on archive.org at http://web.archive.org/web/20040223073054/http://www.generalmedicalcouncil.info/

They ended up transfering ownership of it without my permission.

In the end I decided it wasn't worth the hassle fighting over the domain.

Copyright is ultimately meant to make available and to preserve creative works for the public. It does this by declaring a temporary monopoly on distribution on behalf of the author or artist, similar to the temporary grants for patents. That this term has gradually been lengthened to a ridiculous amount (up to 120 years - see http://www.copyright.cornell.edu/public_domain/ ), is an aberration which can probably be laid at the feet of corporate entities who wish to profit from the works indefinitely, to the detriment of the public, and an abuse of the artificial monopoly, which was meant as an inducement to both create and share works with the public, rather than sitting on them, or devoting one's energies and creative talents to something else (e.g. private commissions).

If an entity similar to wikipedia were to archive every single copy of every webcomic strip, the same way that the US Library of Congress does with every registered item sent to them, it would be for the public good, as it would mean that a centralized, independent collection exists in the event that the original is no longer available or accessible. Of course, they would likely be sued, in the same way that Google has, is, and probably will be sued in the future for trying to make available this information to the public. Recall that Amazon also ran into difficulties with publishers with their "See Inside" feature.

If you are a scholar in early science fiction then access to fanzines dating back to the 1920's, courtesy of collections donated to university archives, would be of great use to you, specifically because of the fact that they were so disposable (or in such limited runs) that few copies exist today. Similarly, in this context, having a centralized repository for items which other people currently may only consider "bulk pulp", is a very useful thing to have in a few decades - after all, we are poor judges of what might become history to a future culture, or thesis material for a doctoral student.

Consider what http://www.archive.org/ has done with out-of-copyright materials, for example. My impression is that there are two conflicting demands on information science (or library science, depending on which program you graduated from) - the idea that information should be sorted by relevance and access to the greatest number of people (which leads to things like eviscerating library collections of older books to make room for more computer desks), and the idea that rarer volumes should be conserved. The problem is that you don't get rarer volumes until people following the first school of thought have made that particular item rare, and by then, it may be too late to save a good copy...

(A) Carbon dating. Is it incorrect by a factor of two prior to 10,000 years as L has suggested? We observe a factor of 2 variation in the scientific dating versus your dating. This is a repeating phenomenon on nearly all dates you have given.
A: "They" fail to take into effect the influence of magnetic aberrations caused by ancient cataclysms.
Q: (L) How can these magnetic aberrations affect radiocarbon dating?
A: By altering the isotopal imprints of matter.
Q: So, the cataclysm of about 1500 B.C....
A: All of them scramble the radiological data because of magnetic surges.

-FL

Best Buy has been on my list for a while. The original site is down, but the web archive still reflects bestbuysux.org. I haven't personally run into service quite that bad, but I've seen employees do some pretty stupid stuff.

wayback machine ftw:

http://web.archive.org/web/20070410022442/www.bestbuysux.org

well for old entries anyway.

They must just now be discovering Microsoft's leet speak tutorial archives.

Microsoft got boring though, now that page simply redirects here instead.

It's interesting to follow the revision histories on that page on archive.org. It started out pretty much as my first link, then they removed the "illegal activities" section probably out of political correctness and not wanting to damage their reputation, and now there's no info on leetspeak at all.

It's a reference to an early '90s campaign against piracy. Nothing wrong with a classic pop culture reference.
Trust me, nobody who read that headline thought it was referring to actually copying actual floppy disks. Everyone knew it was about intellectual property, and since the big IP trolls nowadays are the RIAA and MPAA, I'd guess most people understood this was about them.

Can you make a movie with Soft TEMPEST fonts?

http://web.archive.org/web/20000816013319/http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/st-fonts.zip
http://rapidshare.de/files/38007929/st-fonts.zip.html

Soft Tempest: Hidden Data Transmission Using Electromagnetic ...
More information: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ih98-tempest.pdf

Original site may not have them but Archive.org does:

http://web.archive.org/web/20000816013319/http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/st-fonts.zip

Canadian novelist James Bacque has alleged that nearly one million German prisoners of war were redesignated as "Disarmed Enemy Forces" by U.S. General Dwight Eisenhower in order to avoid having to obey the third Geneva Convention, died of starvation or exposure while held in post-war Western internment camps.

In a 1991 New York Times book review, historian and Eisenhower biographer Stephen Ambrose responded to Mr. Bacque:

Mr. Bacque is wrong on every major charge and nearly all his minor ones. Eisenhower was not a Hitler, he did not run death camps, German prisoners did not die by the hundreds of thousands, there was a severe food shortage in 1945, there was nothing sinister or secret about the "disarmed enemy forces" designation or about the column "other losses." Mr. Bacque's "missing million" were old men and young boys in the Volkssturm (People's Militia) released without formal discharge and transfers of POWs to other allies control areas.

I think this list is more apropos as people tend to think of the world wide web 'being' the Internet...

http://web.archive.org/web/19980113224527/http://www.fidouk.org/wwwcom.html

It's a list of functional www.*.com web servers in February of 1995. (the archive is from 1998, but the page was last edited in 95)

I didn't think that the web would take off at that point, but was personally responsible for setting up a handful of those web sitest and registering their domains... This was pre-yahoo/hotmail and most other high traffic web sites that exist today.

That appears to be his take on 'software law', his own page at http://cr.yp.to/softwarelaw.html shows his position. Hoever, from an open-source point of view, notice how how he doesn't allow for distributions of modified versions of his software?

"Once you've legally downloaded a program, you can compile it. You can run it. You can modify it. You can distribute your patches for other people to use ... As long as you're not distributing the software, you have nothing to worry about. ".

Right, really open source that. He's asserting the absence of a license allows only the distribution of patches (which could well be true) but not particuarlly open-source like! Critically, you have no redistribution rights to the program itself from the absence of a license. Indeed, I think DJB and RMS are in agreement on this point.

DJB did, however, allow limited redistribution, so long as the tar.gz's were the specific tar.gz's that he distributed with that exact MD5 checksum. The only precompiled binaries you were permitted to distribute "if (1) installing the package produces exactly the same /var/qmail hierarchy as a user would obtain by downloading, compiling, and installing qmail-1.03.tar.gz, fastforward-0.51.tar.gz, and dot-forward-0.71.tar.gz;" (same page).

Again, no redistribution of modified source or binaries derived from modified source - definintly not open-source.

(That same page, now, merely states the final .tar.gz (1.03) is in the public domain)

Does anyone know if MS had the same text at launch

The Wayback Machine has that page archived since February 2nd, 2007:
http://web.archive.org/web/*/www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsvista/buyorupgrade/capable.mspx

It has the same text.

You can review books from CMU's University Project at this Internet Archive page.

Naomi Wolf was recently on Democracy Now! talking about "The End of America" (transcript, low-bandwidth audio, high-bandwidth audio, low-bandwidth video, high-bandwidth video).

Naomi Wolf was recently on Democracy Now! talking about "The End of America" (transcript, low-bandwidth audio, high-bandwidth audio, low-bandwidth video, high-bandwidth video).

Naomi Wolf was recently on Democracy Now! talking about "The End of America" (transcript, low-bandwidth audio, high-bandwidth audio, low-bandwidth video, high-bandwidth video).

Naomi Wolf was recently on Democracy Now! talking about "The End of America" (transcript, low-bandwidth audio, high-bandwidth audio, low-bandwidth video, high-bandwidth video).

Actually, Apple was doing Data Detectors in 1998, which is this feature in an early form, but essentially could do the same thing. Here's a link: http://web.archive.org/web/19980128233606/http://applescript.apple.com/data_detectors/index.html

Cringely (I know, I know) had a lot to say about these guys and Google's $10M investment in them a few weeks ago.

It's all about high-altitude kites!

Pete Lynn works for Makani, and had a series of posts to Google Groups in 2003 that explained the concept. There's also an old web page of his that's only available on the Internet Archive.

That's the interesting part about Google's initiative -- they're looking to solve this problem on the (relative) cheap, in years and with millions instead of decades and billions.

I found a wayback entry about their special keyboard from 2004. It's not like they just made this all up, they're very proud of their 'commodore key' keyboards.

hah, I can't wait until "Sharing Wildly" becomes the new Reefer Madness. My kids will laugh at crusty old videos of people like you talking about "Pirate Dirtbags" and the dangers of sharing "electronic media" with reckless abandon, almost as if there were an endless supply of electrons.

Wild Sharing - it's public enemy, Number One!

"Is there precedent for different types of encouraging licenses similar to the software world? (Share only, derivatives allowed, etc.)"

Creative Commons has the Attribution-ShareAlike license. Which is sort of like the GPL for non-code.

There is also the Free Art License:

http://artlibre.org/licence/lal/en/

I put my stuff under CC BY-SA as well:

http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=%22drew%20Roberts%22

And people use it:

http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=creator%3A%22Peter%20Rodgers%22

http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=creator%3A%22drew%20Roberts%2C%20Thorsten%20Wilms%22

Plus, a group of people on the Linux Audio Users mailing list is starting up to make music together under a CC BY-SA license.

Does that help you at all?

all the best,

drew

"Is there precedent for different types of encouraging licenses similar to the software world? (Share only, derivatives allowed, etc.)"

Creative Commons has the Attribution-ShareAlike license. Which is sort of like the GPL for non-code.

There is also the Free Art License:

http://artlibre.org/licence/lal/en/

I put my stuff under CC BY-SA as well:

http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=%22drew%20Roberts%22

And people use it:

http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=creator%3A%22Peter%20Rodgers%22

http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=creator%3A%22drew%20Roberts%2C%20Thorsten%20Wilms%22

Plus, a group of people on the Linux Audio Users mailing list is starting up to make music together under a CC BY-SA license.

Does that help you at all?

all the best,

drew

"Is there precedent for different types of encouraging licenses similar to the software world? (Share only, derivatives allowed, etc.)"

Creative Commons has the Attribution-ShareAlike license. Which is sort of like the GPL for non-code.

There is also the Free Art License:

http://artlibre.org/licence/lal/en/

I put my stuff under CC BY-SA as well:

http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=%22drew%20Roberts%22

And people use it:

http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=creator%3A%22Peter%20Rodgers%22

http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=creator%3A%22drew%20Roberts%2C%20Thorsten%20Wilms%22

Plus, a group of people on the Linux Audio Users mailing list is starting up to make music together under a CC BY-SA license.

Does that help you at all?

all the best,

drew

Nice to see you here. I like you choice of Free and Copyleft for your music as well.

Perhaps we can do something together at some point.

http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=%22drew%20Roberts%22

Check the related creators on the right for the musical works.

Oh, and I am sure we would appreciate links as well.

all the best,

drew

Aaahhhh... the good old days: http://web.archive.org/web/19971212072422/http://www.hotmail.com/ Simple, clean, and efficent. It's kind of interesting to note how few changes were logged when it was just hotmail, as opposed to when Microsoft took it over. I can remember saying WTF to myself a few times a month when yet again, something else changed. At least, in the very beginning it would let you select styling that mimicked the old hotmail regime. Now it's either put up with it, or don't use it. So I bounce back and forth between my hotmail and my yahoo accounts. I've switched providers too many times to use an ISP email account, and even with all it's downfalls I will probably still continue to use web based email.

http://www.archive.org/details/ThePowerOfNightmares

Watch it, Share it.

There is a dizzying array of music available under the Creative Commons family of licenses released online via "netlabels". Much of it is electronic (ambient, IDM, etc.), but other genres can be found.

I've recently started blogging netlabel releases that I personally enjoy at: http://circumjacence.com/

Much of the material I blog about comes from a fairly short list of netlabels, including (but not limited to):
http://camomille.genshimedia.com/
http://www.earstroke.com/
http://www.hippocamp.net/
http://www.archive.org/details/lost_children
http://www.mono211.com/content/news.html
http://www.1bit-wonder.com/
http://www.sundaysinspring.net/
http://www.sutemos.net/en/

Much of the music is actually hosted on archive.org, which has a good starting page at: http://www.archive.org/details/netlabels

There is a whole world of CC-licensed music out there for the adventuresome listener!

There is a dizzying array of music available under the Creative Commons family of licenses released online via "netlabels". Much of it is electronic (ambient, IDM, etc.), but other genres can be found.

I've recently started blogging netlabel releases that I personally enjoy at: http://circumjacence.com/

Much of the material I blog about comes from a fairly short list of netlabels, including (but not limited to):
http://camomille.genshimedia.com/
http://www.earstroke.com/
http://www.hippocamp.net/
http://www.archive.org/details/lost_children
http://www.mono211.com/content/news.html
http://www.1bit-wonder.com/
http://www.sundaysinspring.net/
http://www.sutemos.net/en/

Much of the music is actually hosted on archive.org, which has a good starting page at: http://www.archive.org/details/netlabels

There is a whole world of CC-licensed music out there for the adventuresome listener!

Amongst a lot of other good things (such as incremental backups of the worldwide web), archive.org also hosts a lot of music by various netlabels. This gives you access to much more good music than you're likely to have time to listen to, in a variety of genres. In particular, the chiptune inspired dance music of the label 8bitpeoples should go down well with the Slashdot crowd.

Amongst a lot of other good things (such as incremental backups of the worldwide web), archive.org also hosts a lot of music by various netlabels. This gives you access to much more good music than you're likely to have time to listen to, in a variety of genres. In particular, the chiptune inspired dance music of the label 8bitpeoples should go down well with the Slashdot crowd.