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why USB ? because firewire you have to pay apple for every device you ship (unless your sony who apple love)

You say that as if 25 per port will make or break FireWire...the manufacturer of a FireWire device probably pays more than that for the connector. (While it's probably not the least expensive source for manufacturer-quantity buying, the cheapest price I found at DigiKey for board-mountable FireWire connectors was $1.152 each for quantities >=100.)

USB is a standard that is Open and backwards compatable and people love that because it works with all your old hardware

...unless your old hardware isn't USB. I'm a little bit pissed that the notebook I recently bought has no serial or PS/2 ports...that means you have to fork over extra $$$ to plug in a keyboard, mouse, or serial device (like a modem or the HotSync cradle for my Palm III). Besides, the last time I checked, the FireWire drivers in Linux are as open-source as the rest of the kernel. (After loading the kernel from a floppy, I booted SuSE 8.something from a FireWire HD. That'd be a nice solution for moving your Linux setup between computers...the only thing missing is the ability to boot from a FireWire (or USB, for that matter) device, which is a matter of BIOS support.)

Planet Starbucks.

And don't forget, it's Unamerican not to go to the Cavalcade of Chrome!

If you want a good laugh, visit a Hummer dealer. The Hummer 2 is a mommymobile. Everybody looking at them has rugrats in tow. The thing doesn't even have enough driver legroom for tall guys, and the towing capacity is low (less than a Ford Explorer) for the size of the thing.

I think we may safely say "disputed" :-)

If nothing else, the belgians would claim the french version doesn't taste the same...

http://www.businessweek.com/1999/99_22/c3631157. htm

A Nation of Thieves?

Something happened on the way to the 21st century. Media and entertainment companies started "converging" and "shareholder value" became far more important than customer service and respect for company employees ever managed to be. Compensation packages for company executives hit the stratosphere -- while holding them accountable for their company's results became nearly impossible.

These executives are indeed very naïve if they think that people haven't noticed.

People are noticing that something isn't quite right -- that something is indeed very wrong. After a decade during which the stock market gained apparent respectability as a legitimate, sensible form of investing, the recent slew of huge corporate scandals reveals that it is still what it has always been: a sick place where neurotic, puerile gamblers get their kicks off the backs of millions of "anonymous" workers and individuals, who have no control over what happens to their hard-earned retirement savings.

Yet this is the place that most company executives feel is much more important to watch than the actual people for whom they produce their goods and services. This is the place where the fate of thousands of employees is decided every day by people staring at computer monitors showing ever-changing, meaningless lists of numbers and charts. And if you happen to personally hold shares in a company that has just announced that it is "restructuring" in order to improve its bottom-line and thus increase its "shareholder value", don't kid yourself: When the company is talking about "shareholders", it's not talking about you and your measly couple of thousands of shares. It's only talking about big shareholders -- i.e. other companies that own a more significant share of its market value.

This is a world where "hostile takeovers" and government-approved "mergers" are feeding a never-ending cycle of fewer and fewer executives wielding more and more power on a multinational scale. Soon enough, the "World Company" and George Orwell's 1984 will no longer be the stuff of satire or fiction -- but prophetic descriptions of a very real "New World Order" gradually unfolding before our eyes.

A Little History

Let's start with a simple list: America Online, Time, Life, Warner Bros., Fortune, Elektra, Sports Illustrated, HBO, Turner Broadcasting, CNN, Cinemax, Entertainment Weekly, New Line Cinema, In Style, Warner/Chappell Music, Time Warner Cable, WBN, ICQ, Warner Music Group, Netscape, People, Reprise, Rhino, Atlantic, WEA, TNT, MapQuest, WinAmp, In Demand, Erato, Moviefone, Road Runner, etc.. All owned by the same corporate giant (AOL Time Warner).

And another one: Universal Music Group, Verve, Nathan, Canal+, Impulse!, Cegetel, USA Networks, Decca, Interscope, Geffen, A&M, Barclay, Armand Colin, L'Express, Universal Studios, Larousse, Sierra, MP3.com, MCA Records, Deutsche Grammophon, Cineplex, etc.. All owned by the same corporate giant (Vivendi Universal).

And yet another one: Disney, ABC, ESPN, Hyperion, Miramax, Touchstone, Hollywood Pictures, A&E, The History Channel, E! Entertainment, RTL-2, Buena Vista, Mr. Showbiz, Wall of Sound, Mammoth Records, etc.. All owned by the same corporate giant (Walt Disney).

Need we say more? See for yourself... There's already only 7 of these corporate giants in total -- and how long will it be before there are even fewer?

It all began innocently enough. Young entrepreneurs in the early 20th century started up new companies with a mix of creative ambition and business acumen. Then these companies grew bigger and bigger, and whatever entrepreneurial vision was present at their birth became more and more diluted and less and less relevant. Then corporate accountants suggested merging with or taking over other companies -- and it all became an all-too-real game of Monopoly.

Then the Internet and "new technologies" came about, and the accountants' next big idea was convergence -- i.e. the merging of "content" providers and "access" providers in order to control everything from the inception of a "cultural product" to its ultimate consumption by the unsuspecting masses.

The Art of Manipulation

It is easy to guess what got lost along the way... Creativity. Artistry. Independence. Critical objectivity. Uncontrolled access. The ability to "break through" cultural barriers. Cultural diversity. Innovation. Freedom. Real music. Real art.

Juggling between art and commerce is a delicate balance at the best of times... and these are definitely NOT the best of times.

So now we have a so-called magazine "reporting" on the latest new blockbuster movie with a 10-page, full-color spread -- as if the reporters weren't aware that the same company that produced the movie also owns their magazine... Yes, this is still called a "magazine". These are still called "reporters". And this is still called "journalism"... And yet millions of people are gleefully letting themselves be had.

Maybe we should stop calling this "art", or even "entertainment" for that matter -- for what is so entertaining about being involved in a collective hallucination? Maybe we should start calling it what it really is, i.e. unfettered MANIPULATION.

In 1995, Clear Channel Communications owned 43 radio stations. Now it owns more than 1,200 -- and its army of so-called "independent promoters" are letting legalized payola dictate what you get (or rather don't get) to hear on the radio.

Everywhere you look, the story is the same: more and more money, less and less choice, less and less freedom of access, fewer and fewer companies. How far will this have to go before a big shift in people's attitude causes this commercial hubris to collapse onto itself and implode?

Power Struggles

The first major cracks in this highly concentrated corporate world have, of course, already begun to appear, in what has been making the headlines in the past few months, i.e. shady accounting practices involving enormous amounts of money -- enough to shake the economy of the most powerful nation of the world. And the hysterical stock markets have of course been swayed by this news, at the expense of tens of thousands of workers worldwide and millions of small investors who thought that their holdings had nowhere to go but up.

The value of AOL Time Warner's stock is now a quarter of what it was at the time of the merger between AOL and Time Warner, and this decline forced the company to take a $54 billion writedown earlier this year. And now it too is being investigated about its accounting practices. The story at Vivendi Universal is similar. Disney shares are near an 8-year low. And there is little doubt in people's mind that the problems are similar everywhere, in every big conglomerate that has become utterly out of touch with the reality of everyday work and the essence of human creativity.

In addition, people also realize all too well that governments have little -- if any -- power left when it comes to regulating these multinational monsters. Governments have much more power when it comes to regulating the lives of ordinary, law-abiding citizens -- and they use and abuse this power as a way to distract people's attention from how much control the conglomerates have over what we get to hear, watch, read, eat, drink, buy, and generally experience as "free" citizens of the world.

One of the areas where this struggle is most acutely felt is, of course, the online world -- a sprawling, anarchic community that is still in its infancy and whose exponential development in the last decade took everyone by surprise. And nothing exemplifies the struggle between government, big business, and individual rights better than the highly controversial issue of "peer-2-peer" file sharing and its many digital variations.

A Nation of Thieves?

Will the media/technology giants recover from the latest stock market slump? They probably will -- but at what cost? In all likelihood, the cost will be more "restructuring", more layoffs, more executive shuffles and golden parachutes, causing even further alienation from their own employees and customers. And this, in turn, will further encourage the very behaviors that they claim are illegal and want punished by criminal law -- all the while preserving their own impunity as they continue to carelessly flounder a capital that they do not own.

Napster may have gone bankrupt and become a closed chapter in the Internet's short history, but its death is by no means a reflection of a decline in peer-2-peer (P2P) file sharing, quite the contrary. If anything, P2P has grown even further -- but since it's becoming totally decentralized, there is no easy way to measure its significance.

What is for sure, however, is that, in spite of its many claims to the contrary, the recording industry has yet to provide evidence that P2P is actually detrimental to music making as an artistic endeavor, and even as a commercial venture. It is worth remembering, for example, that sales of music CDs actually increased when Napster was at its peak, and declined after Napster was abruptly shut down. Even economists who thought that file sharing "should be" hurting the recording industry are now expressing their doubts, based on what they say is simply not happening.

More importantly, many well-respected artists have sided with Internet users against corporate greed and actually use the Internet to promote alternative ways to distribute their music and reach out to a non-captive, legitimate audience of authentic music lovers.

This does not mean, of course, that all forms of file sharing are equally innocuous. There is little doubt that, when people use the Internet as a substitute for radio, i.e. as a way to discover new music, it can help promote the work of artists. But when a young junior high school student downloads tracks off the Internet and makes CD-R copies of them that he then sells for $5 in the schoolyard, it hurts sales of the original CD and it's disrespectful of the artist -- regardless of how small a cut of the actual CD price the artist actually gets after all the executives and the middlemen in the recording industry have taken their piece of the pie.

Still, can we really go as far as to say that digital technology is creating a "nation of thieves" who no longer recognize the just value of art?

Protecting the Product

It is worth noting, to begin with, that the recording industry itself is far from having distinguished itself by recognizing the true value of art. Instead, it has consistently fought to be allowed to deprive many artists of their most fundamental rights. It has allowed popular artists to go bankrupt even though their albums were selling by the millions. It has reduced the artists' cut of the album sales pie to a ridiculously small portion of the actual income generated by these sales. It has consistently pushed commercial musical products at the expense of real musical artistry.

This hardly entitles the recording industry to lecture anyone about recognizing the just value of art.

It is also interesting to note that the cultural products that seem to be the primary concern of the industry giants are those that are already the most popular ones, and that things such as CD copy protection are being experimentally used mostly with items that will sell millions regardless of whether they are copy-protected or not.

So are most citizens really being completely disrespectful of the value of art and the need to provide appropriate compensation to the artists for their works? We've said it before and we'll say it again: the rise of digital technology and peer-2-peer file sharing has little to do with people's intrinsic respect for art and artists, and everything to do with the cynical attitude of big industry conglomerates, which have consistently pushed for more and more commercial, highly profitable products at the expense of authentic art and respect for artists.

If people do not feel enough guilt to prevent them from making digital copies of the latest episode of a popular TV show or hit pop song, it is precisely because the industry giants have succeeded in making these works purely commercial products, with little or no consideration for their actual artistic value. It is precisely because these companies have been consistently promoting commercial products at the expense of artistic works.

The fact that actual works of art still manage to seep through the cracks of this huge profit-driven industry does not change anything about the fundamental equations that have been driving and still drive the industry, today more than ever -- i.e. that art = money, artists = money-makers, and art lovers = consumers.

As a simple example of how little music is valued as an art form by the industry, it is estimated that only about 20 percent of music ever recorded is currently available -- and, of this 20 percent, what proportion is actually readily available to music lovers? What proportion is not the current 100 top albums on the SoundScan charts?

It simply appears that the instinctive reaction of the lover of art (be it music, TV shows, movies, or other forms of art) is such that, if the industry has no respect for his or her identity as an appreciator of art, then he or she has no reason to have any respect for the industry as a purveyor of art. By making digital copies of so-called cultural products, many people are not demonstrating their lack of respect for art and for artists, but are expressing -- consciously or not -- their frustration with the way the entertainment industry profits from art at the expense of both art makers and art lovers.

The consumers of the commercial products of the entertainment industry are only as cynical as the industry has deliberately made them, by dumbing down their products, by exploiting artists, by making profit-driven choices and decisions, and by providing their own kind with obscene compensations and legal impunity that are completely out of touch with the real world of ordinary people.

Don't Get It Twisted

That being said, the whole debate about file sharing and digital piracy is, most of all, a convenient way for industry conglomerates to deflect attention from their own shady business practices and dubious alliances.

For example, it is worth noting that the Warner Music Group is heavily involved in the recording industry's fight against piracy, but that its own parent company, AOL Time Warner, is directly benefiting from file sharing, as a provider of Internet access to millions of Internet users worldwide. When AOL Time Warner repeatedly flaunts its ever-increasing number of members (34 million and counting) and the billions of hours that they spend online, is there any doubt that a good part of this growth involves the "unlawful" exchange of computer files at the detriment of recording artists?

In other words, the real "thieves" are not necessarily those that are currently getting the blame... Rather than a "nation of thieves", the current situation looks, to us, much more like an "elite of thieves".

And the real victims of this thievery are very much, as usual, the recording artists themselves, who will never get their share of AOL's profits as an Internet access provider, even though these profits are partly based on the content that they originally provided. And the real victims also include authentic music lovers, who already suffer from restricted access to the full range of music that they would like to explore, and who are also likely to suffer from technological restrictions that will soon prevent them from making legitimate copies of the works that they have lawfully purchased for their own enjoyment.

Make no mistake: the entertainment industry (including TV, movies and music) might be big, but the technology industry is even bigger. Remember that it is AOL that bought Time Warner, and not the other way around. Remember that Sony makes much more money in electronics and computer equipment than it does in record sales...

If the technology industry ends up implementing technological limitations that prevent users from lawfully enjoying their purchases -- as it is threatening to do -- the beneficiaries will not be the artists whose works are thus being allegedly "protected". And it will certainly not be the art lovers whose enjoyment of art will thus be restricted. No, it will simply be, once again... the industry conglomerates, who will have yet another generation of incompatible media and devices to sell to us under the guise of "technological improvement".

Conclusion

The technology and entertainment industries are simply to big for us to expect any overnight changes. The industry giants will continue to do their best to deflect people's attention away from their own wrongdoings and to blame falling profits and commercial failures on piracy at the same time that they are encouraging their customers to adopt the very technologies that make piracy possible. Artists will continue to be lured by unrealistic promises and contracts with big numbers and lots of small print.

How long, however, before a critical mass of established artists realize that it is in their best interests, both artistically and commercially, to leave the system for good? How long before a critical mass of young aspiring artists become aware of the enslaving aspects of the system and are careful not to get involved in it without a maximum of precautions? And how long before a critical mass of art lovers get together to provide these artists with a real, valuable, legitimate, truthfully enthusiastic alternative audience that completes the process of rendering the existing system artistically irrelevant?

It all depends on us -- and it all depends on you.

[Ed: original used "2" for both "to" and "too" -- grammatical errors in that department are my fault. Only changes should be related to spelling, formatting and links preserved. Various Unicode characters translated to ASCII for the benifit of Slashdot. "Peer-2-peer" is kept as original.]

The Soul of a New Machine" by Tracy Kidder. It chronicles the development of Data General's 32 bit architecture circa 1980. They were chasing DEC's tail and things were pretty intense.

My favorite quote from the book was the resignation letter of an engineer who burned-out dealing with nanosecond timing issues. He said he was going to Vermont where he would not deal with any unit of time shorter than a season.

companies should foster an environment where the employees want to contribute, and not have to be forced to contribute.

Is it worth it?

After all, you've already got them by the balls. You don't have to put up with low productivity.

My God, you are a dumbass.

Cable companies use two policies to block P2P use. The first is closing ports (which doesn't work very well). The second is by charging outrageous prices for high-bandwidth users (remember that once the infrastructure is in place, the biggest costs are tech support and not bandwidth.) Business Week outlines the practice.

P2P sucks up more bandwidth than simple client server interaction. It has to. It needs a more complicated control architecture. If you go back and check previous slashdot articles on the subject, you will find hundreds of posts saying that anyone who needs that much bandwidth "must be a pirate."

And use your account next time you want to attack someone. A lot of karma won't get your cock sucked any more than usual.

You may have been reading articles written by the clue-lacking. The NYT piece is good. BusinessWeek isn't bad either.

Meanwhile, I totally agree about the name. It is misleading: but it, and the use of chalk for that matter, were just chosen because, well, they sound cool.

As for why an icon and not a flyer - well, because iconography is inherently more understandable. Why have roadsigns that are symbols and not words? Because they're easy to understand, and to see.

Have a look at Warchalking.org - Matt Jone's site, for better examples.

This may not be the definitive answer to the question, "Why Andersen, but not KPMG/PWC/E&Y/C&L?", that you raise in point #3, but to me, it's a darn good one:

All auditing companies have an internal review panel for reviewing auditing practices when questions arise, right? But when a client wanted to stretch the rules, that could be a problem. Andersen decided to make a significant marketing element out of the fact that at Andersen, the local engagement partner (e.g. David Duncan, in the case of Enron) would have final say as to the auditing standards used. No need for things to get held up by some board at headquarters or worse, overruled.

Needless to say, this was a system whose architecture would inevitably corrupt the local engagement partners. David Duncan did some stupid and perhaps criminal things, but the real misdeed was done by whoever decided to adopt the policy of auditing standards being settled by the local engagement partner. Greedy dumb bastards.

I took the time to go back and look up where I read about this so you wouldn't have to take my word for it. You can find it discussed in this interesting Business Week Online article. Worth reading.

--LP

Not everyone would agree with you on that - some say the culture has changed. As for the government - remember, President Kim Dae Jung was the first opposition leader to be elected Korean president. So blaming him and his government for what had happened before is a little unfair...

I believe that prior to this announcement, using the name FireWire cost the OEMs $1-2 per product.

Are you sure you aren't thinking about Adrian Lamo who broke into the New York Times internal site and found the home phone numbers for the op-ed contributors in February 2002. A reputable source said he also had access to social security numbers for people like Rush Limbaugh, Michael Bloomberg, and Bill Gates. This detail is not in any of the news reports I found, though. As of early July the NY Times has not pressed charges.

Chrylser tried this buzz thing by stocking PT Cruisers at rental car locations in hip parts of Miami.

Here is the definitive article on buzz marketing.

It ALSO contains caffeine...
from here...

Many people think Red Bull is loaded with caffeine. However, an 8.3-ounce can has just 80 milligrams of the stimulant, about the same amount in a mug of coffee -- and hardly enough to keep most people dancing until 5 a.m. So, where does the buzz come from? Red Bull says it's the result of two natural ingredients, amino-acid taurine and glucuronolacton. It's their reaction with caffeine that makes the product work, the company says. The end result, Red Bull's maker claims, is an invigorated state of body and mind, not to mention a boost in performance and longer endurance. And that's without the effects of the vodka.

In any case, saying that ATI blows nVidia's GF4 away with the 9700 series card (when it's not even out yet) is like comparing a Pentium 4 3GHz processor to an AMD Athlon 2200 even though the 3GHz version isn't out yet...

Greenspan is not just an acolyte of Ayn Rand metaphorically, he actually hung out with her. It's not an accusation, it's the simple truth.

The Fed, Alan Greenspan, and Ayn Rand

Alan Greenspan, Cultist?

The Motley Fool: Who is Alan Greenspan?

quote:
In the 1950s, Greenspan, who had been steeped in the free-market skepticism of John Maynard Keynes along with most economists of his generation, became an acolyte of Ayn Rand. Rand's philosophy of what she termed "enlightened selfishness" bears considerable similarity to today's libertarianism. Greenspan met Rand through his first wife, painter Joan Mitchell. Although Greenspan's friends and colleagues suggest that his relationship with Rand's Objectivism was more of a flirtation than a real commitment, Greenspan remained part of the philosopher's circle until at least the late 1960s. In addition to writing for The Objectivist, a rather surprising essay he wrote in defense of the gold standard -- surprising in light of his later work, that is -- appeared in the Rand-edited 1967 collection of essays Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. Still, something about Greenspan's obvious pragmatism and political instincts fits poorly with the uncompromising sense of purity that characterizes Rand's heroes. If Greenspan ever was an Objectivist, his years in Washington have probably made him reconsider.

Businessweek: The Chairman as Political Animal

quote:
RAND FAN. By his mid-20s, Greenspan turned from music to economics--and the virulently antigovernment views of philosopher-novelist Ayn Rand. Greenspan became a regular in her salon in the 1950s and remained in touch until her death in 1982.

Randies may think of Greenspan as an apostate today, but the Chairman still thinks of himself as a Randite, if his reading preferences are any indication. And it's not hard to get become an apostate of Objectivism -- dissent ain't tolerated much in that salon.

Mayhap Greenspan deviated from Rand because he's actually working in the real world.

The Fed may be anti-democratic in nature, but thank god for that, or we would have collapsed into something resembling the Weimar Republic in the 80's.

(Why is it people constantly compare apples share of the market to the SUM OF ALL OTHER COMPANIES COMBINED and then say apple's a small company? Its one of the largest computer companies in the world and for a long time was the largest.)

To summarize, this is a nice screen but the display panel is one generation out of date. A much faster response time would have been infinitely preferable. Mac users who want to play with their screens really ought to opt for a different LCD monitor... if the video output socket on their monitors lets them do so, of course.

That was from a review in March!

possibly exclusive to apple

Exclusive means no-one else sells it. Last I checked, Dell, Gateway, HP-Compaq all were of a larger market share than Apple. Not to mention all of the LCD's that ae sold seperate by the manufacturers.

Apple owns %30 of the company that makes the LCDs

So? 30% is a minority, not a majority. The factory has other investosr/s of higher importance, who get what they want first because they own more, and contribute more to the profitability of the factory.

As for Apple itself, Wallstreet is not impressed:

Analyst Andrew Neff cites the disappointing rollout of the new flat-panel iMac

As for better pricing? A Dell, for $1827 has double the memory, 20GB bigger HDD, surround sound with subwoofer, 3 year warranty, and MS Word. Everything else is comparable, except GeForce 4 MX in the Dell versus 2 MX in the iMac. Both have the "superdrive," 15" LCD, music, photo, and video editing software (apple's is nicer though). For $20 you can get a USB 2 card for the Dell. Plus, were are talking a P4 2.0 GHz, with PC 800 RD RAM, not PC133.

OSX does kick ass, but it is sooo slow. My friend has a G3 Powerbook, and it is nearly unusable, and that is with 1 GB of RAM!

First thing I thought about when I saw Sherlock 3 was Watson. Even Apple's Phil Schiller said how cool it was. I guess Apple thought it was so cool they would practically copy it!
Watson provides many more services than Sherlock 3, but it also costs $30.

The only thing necessary to rectify this situation, is that the neighbourhood must be cleaned up. And contrary to "cleaning up a neighbourhood" in real life, cleaning up an ISP by kicking all the spammers is doable in a fairly short period with not that much effort (unless the spammers sue the ISP, although in the end they've always lost until now).

The Internet was indeed designed with the philosophy you mention. And unfortunately, due the spammers, it's become impossible to keep working that way. Just read this article: AT&T's spamfilter fails during a spam avalanche -> their mail servers get overloaded, spam costs the total economy worldwide about $8.6 billion a year, ... Isn't that property abuse? Note that no-one is saying that communication an sich is property abuse, but using other people's equipment (without their conscent) to distribute your commercial messages is. It's as if telemarketeers would call you and you had to pay for that. Would you accept that also in the name of freedom of communication?

It's the same with mail servers: originally, they were setup so that anyone could send mail through any mailservers. But then the spammers started using those servers so that a) they can send one copy of the message and 1000 BCC-recipients to it putting most of the distribution burden on that server and b) they are slightly harder to trace, so now all servers should be configured so that they only relay for the intended domains. It's really sad that it has come this far, but I think you cannot blame blacklists for that; after all, they were simply a reaction to the increasing abuse.

On the topic of blacklists: they are all lists of IP-addresses published by individuals or groups of individuals. These people say: we do not accept mail sent from these IP-addresses because (they are open mail relays|they belong to spam-supporting/ignorant ISP's|...). You can also use this list to block mail if you want. No-one's stepping on anyones free speech rights here (the blacklist maintainers simply voice an opinion, they personally don't block mail sent to anyone but themselves). The only problem that can occur here, is that when an ISP uses such a list without clearly informing their customers. But that's a problem with the ISP, not with the list.

After all, even if the list didn't exist, the ISP could still filter mail using its own filters or blacklists. And as long they clearly inform their customers about this, there is no problem: it's their property and their bandwidth that is being used to annoy the hell out of their customers. Some of those customers may prefer to have no filters (since I'm quite sure it's impossible to design a filter without any false positives) and more spam. Then they should not take an account at that ISP (as I've said before, this filtering should be indicated clearly), or maybe the ISP could offer a (more expensive?) unfiltered account to people that want it.

If you don't have that choice for one reason of another, then I still think the only ones to blame for your problem are the spammers: if they didn't spam, there would be no need for blacklists or filtering and everybody would be happy. The rest are just symptoms of the root cause. And while blacklists mainly combat the symptoms (spam instead of the spammers), it's unfortunate that there are simply no better ways (that I know of) in most cases (only if you live in certain states of the US and have lots of time on your hands and manage to track down the spammer, then you can sue him).


Jonas

How hard can it be to call the people who maintain it and ask them for the Perl Foundation to email Ryan Air and the other huge companies that rely on Perl for a relatively small donation?

Besides the fact that this would be spam, the reason companies are using free (as in beer) solutions like Perl is that these companies simply don't have the spare cash to spend on software. To use your example, airlines are simply bleeding red ink these days.

What a waste of taxpayer money

According to this article from long ago in Businessweek, BeOS would have been the foundation of the modern Apple OS had Gassee simply not wildly overplayed his hand. According to the article, Gassee's minimum asking price was rumored to be around a 200 million dollar stock deal. Considering that BeOS's assets were eventually sold for about 11 million, Gassee overvalued his property by about a factor of 20. Furthermore Gassee missed out on the opportunity to be Apple's savior instead of having the honor go to Jobs.

Don't forget what the MS in MSNBC stands for:
Micro$oft

While verifying this, I found thisin Business Week. Funny stuff!

• 60 of 98 FBI Terrorism Cases were thrown out because of lack of evidence - The article even has a quote from an FBI spokesman admitting to arresting and trying to prosecute people knowing that it would never go through.
• Village Voice Analysis - It's the Village Voice, take it with a grain of salt. (I'm just adding it to this list because it is quite insightful.
• Business Week Article discussing the various infringement of civil rights
• NYTime Editorial on naming an American citizen as an illegal combatant
• Ohio State graduates threatened with expulsion/arrest if they "demonstrate or heckle" during Bush's speech - "But immediately before class members filed into the giant football stadium, an announcer instructed the crowd that all the university's speakers deserve to be treated with respect and that anyone demonstrating or heckling would be subject to expulsion and arrest. The announcer urged that Bush be greeted with a "thunderous" ovation.
• Federal Courts strike down Bush Administrations attempt to prevent people from challenging censorship laws
• Justice Department raising questions about case on John Lindh
• Another NYTimes article on illegally detaining American Citizens

These numbers look kind of piddling, of course, next to the $575 million Eisner took home in 1998. Dig how, in the WSJ article, it talks about how hard they've been working to cut costs -- painting fewer stripes on one animated girl's bathing suit, for example (this is not a joke.)

You moderators are idiots. This is a news story printed in Business Week Magazine last december. Didn't it read more like a press piece than a /. comment? User 956 is not an insightful poster, he is a blatant plagarist. 4 moderators were either stupid or naive enough to believe that he was insightful when he posted this comment. Please, think before you moderate. I know I will get modded down for this* but I just had to say something.

*Standard 'I know I'll get modded down' to ensure that I get modded up

You moderators are idiots. This is a news story printed in Business Week Magazine last december. Didn't it read more like a press piece than a /. comment? User 956 is not an insightful poster, he is a blatant plagarist. 4 moderators were either stupid or naive enough to believe that he was insightful when he posted this comment. Please, think before you moderate. I know I will get modded down for this* but I just had to say something.

*Standard 'I know I'll get modded down' to ensure that I get modded up

Plagerism

And for those who are wondering who DCX is, it's simply DaimlerChrysler's ticker symbol.

Subject: "Opening the Open Source Debate"

Date: 31 May 2002 15:45:59 +1200

Some references you might wish to consider before publishing your article "Opening the Open Source Debate"

http://www.businesswire.com/cgi-bin/f_headline.cgi ?bw.053002/221502375

Bruce Schneier, one of the recognized leading expert on computer security on Kerckhoffs' Principle and Secrecy, Security, and Obscurity of software.

http://www.counterpane.com/crypto-gram-0205.html#1

Dr. Blaine Burnham, Director, Georgia Tech Information Security Center (GTISC) and previously with the National Security Agency (NSA), gives an keynote speech overview of current encryption and security technologies and outlines possible strategies for future defense.

http://technetcast.ddj.com/tnc_play_stream.html?st ream_id=411

Also you might wish to address the issue of Microsoft's disproportionately high number of open vulnerabilities in its Internet Explorer components. All of which where discovered without access to the source code.

http://jscript.dk/unpatched/

Richard Purcell, Microsoft's director of corporate privacy, has recently stated that any major improvement in regard to the security of it's products may be at least "5, 10 years, maybe".

http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/may 2002/tc20020523_6029.htm

As for the issue of Trojan horse injection into open source code, it is far from being an open source only issue.

http://www.eeggs.com/

Or were all the "Easter Eggs" currently found in Microsoft's products officially authorized?

If you are looking for a methodology for providing a suitably secure and hardened solution, start with a real world example.

http://www.openbsd.org/security.html

I welcome any open debate.

To Quote Richard Purcell, Microsoft's director of corporate privacy

You can't issue a memo on Jan. 18 and, within two weeks or even two months, have introduced your entire product line that's consistent with that. Trustworthy computing, as I try to emphasize, is about process change, so that products can then be delivered as a result. And it's a very long-term vision -- 5, 10 years, maybe

Is it really going to be another 5 to 10 years before Microsoft's products security becomes "Trustworthy"?

How utterly ironic that the Xserve has been much lauded for being very competivly priced. Perhaps you should have done a little bit more research before posting?

How utterly ironic that the Xserve has been much lauded for being very competivly priced. Perhaps you should have done a little bit more research before posting?

It's not that you can't build wearable displays. Many have been built. It's that wearing a display isn't fun. Wearable displays get tiring fast. Try one some time.

If you really want one of these things, MicroOptical sells a VGA-compatible eyeglass-mounted display for $2500. And here's an article about Linux on a wearable. This guy writes about using EMACS, "awk", and a wrist-mounted keyboard.

And then we wonder why Johnny can't read.

i had found the section containing this article and other related Linux ones yesterday. i think it's really interesting to see a businessweek view of linux.

For example, the WAP address wap.sex.com can be viewed on cell phones using Verizon Wireless, Nextel Communications and Sprint PCS wireless Internet services. But the same URL entered into a Cingular Wireless device returns the message "your client is not allowed to access the requested object."

Now compare this old business-week article

But in France, Germany, and most of the rest of the Continent, the pickings are still slim. One trouble is that many phone companies are still in the beginning phases of WAP, and they block access to other service providers. This is known in the industry lingo as a ''closed garden.'' And for the time being, that garden has high fences. When I go to Germany with my French Web phone, I can only gain access to the Web through an international call to France, where I get a French weather report. This will change in the next year or two as phone companies adapt their Web services for roaming travelers.

And this USA today article:

Moreover, the speed hike only seemed to make a marginal difference over other wireless Web phones I've tried; I was still viewing text, and you must punch too many menu keys to access particular screens. And whenever I entered the Web address for usatoday.com, I received the following message: "WAP Gateway: Your client is not allowed to access the requested object."

What may have happened is that the sources tried to get to porn sites, didn't work, and then concluded that those sites were being banned in specific. But it could be a general compatibility problem affecting many sites.

Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)

Science Fiction has proven many times to be prophecy. Artificial Intelligence is hard SF. It has basis in the real world. I may come to pass. It may not, as well. But to say we will never be able to create "HAL" is ridiculous. It may be 100 years, and "never in our lifetimes" may be accurate. But it may happen. Never rule our science.

Heck we might not even notice when this happens. People don't bother about computer architecture, just products and stuff. Did the whole world make a big deal out of SiS integrating Northbridge and Southbridge onto one chip? Was it on CNN? Nope. But they did make a big deal out of human cloning.

I think one day Intel will release a Pentium 5 and say, "Oh yeah, BTW 20% of this chip is biological". They'll pay off the senators so nobody questions them. And then one fine morning these biological CPUs will mutate or "evolve" and migrate through the keyboard and connect directly to the nerves in your fingertips forming a symbiotic relationship. Next step: Borg. Just like Sharon Apple and the neural interface in the YF-21 in the manga movie Macross

AMD can get a head start though because the Itanium runs so hot it'll bake any biological component integrated with it. Go AMD!

How does this tie back to Linux DVD players? Well, it's a minor miracle when there's any publicity for anything that even remotely challenges the status quo. It's one more crack in the wall....

---
Destiny-land.
The happiest blog on earth.

We need Larry Lessig to write this email! He's the one law professor who is most up-to-date with the damage that the DMCA, RIAA, CARP and others are doing daily and can articulate it in a way that most non-/. folks will understand. He has taken on Jack Valenti (head of the MPAA) directly in debates and run circles around their theories and ideas.

-info

COPYRIGHT LAW IS ABOUT CONTROL

First off IANAL, and I suspect YANAL either.. so let's ask someone who IS a lawyer -

Hmm, according to Lawrence Lessig, who is not only a lawyer, but a copyright lawyer, copyright "protects copyright owners from unfair competition. It has never been a way to give copyright holders perfect control"

So I'd guess you're wrong when you say that copyright is about control. Unfair competition is about profits.

From news.com.com:

Jerry Sanders, chief executive of computer chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices, also conceded he had not read the states' proposed sanctions ...

"You've never checked to this day whether what Mr. Gates told you...was true in the remedies," Gutman challenged. Sanders agreed he had not read the states' proposals.

From the Register:

And in written testimony to the court, Sanders quotes from AMD's annual report: "If we fail to retain the support and certifications of Microsoft, our ability to market our processors could be materially adversely affected." (Remember, this is a witness for Microsoft.)

Back to news.com.com:

Gates' appearance next week would be his first in-person appearance at the trial. In the main portion of the trial, Gates appeared in a videotaped deposition. In portions of that videotape, Gates repeatedly answered questions with "I don't know" and "I don't recall." His statements were frequently contradicted by e-mails he had sent and received, and he frequently claimed no recollection of the messages.

Even Business Week, in a generally flattering review of Gates' testimony, leads with:

Is Bill Gates Doing Himself Any Favors?
He's poised and confident on the stand, a far cry from his deposition during the antitrust trial. But maybe he shouldn't be there at all

Good old news.com.com again:

During cross-examination Wednesday, states' attorney Steven Kuney brought up the issue of Windows XP Embedded, a version of Windows made for gas pumps and other machines that contains the core elements of Windows but doesn't necessarily contain browsers or messaging software, depending on how it is configured.

Kuney asked Gates if Windows XP Embedded could be installed on PCs. Gates responded, "You could configure it for that."

But Gates said he didn't know of anyone who had done such a thing, later acknowledging that one reason is because Microsoft doesn't license XP Embedded for that purpose.

Back to the Register:

One of the exhibits in the previous stages of the Microsoft antitrust trial included an email from one Chris Jones, recommending to Bill Gates that the binding of IE into Windows should be such that users would find running rival browsers "a jolting experience." At the time many people, not least of them the Department of Justice, seemed to think that this and other associated exhibits were all about the anticompetitive tying of IE into Windows in order to destroy Netscape. But apparently not - MS Windows exec Chris, taking the stand yesterday, put forward an explanation of almost patentable novelty.

What he meant, he said, was that the experience would be jolting for good reasons if it occurred because of the "great innovations" that integration of IE brought to Windows. So presumably you could think about the new versions of IE Microsoft was designing as being truly wondrous, and that users would therefore find use of the comparatively stone age rival products truly unpleasant.
...
Another interesting point was brought up by States' attorney Kevin Hodges, who established that the proposed MS-DoJ settlement had less teeth to it than appears at first glance. Under this deal PC manufacturers will have the right to install rival companies' software, but it's still feasible for Microsoft to bar them from running Netscape when the computer is first turned on. Jones seems to have argued that as IE was a part of Windows, Microsoft didn't have to give OEMs the right to run Netscape. (So much for Microsoft allowing competition on the desktop.)

Now from Wired:

Several companies, as well as the nine states, argue that Microsoft adopted open technology standards only to make them proprietary later, forcing many to use Microsoft products. Sutherland said he did not study any records of Microsoft's conduct.

"You did not take into consideration Microsoft's past conduct in these proceedings?" Schmidtlein asked.

"Only as background," Sutherland said, adding that he didn't find it relevant.

And again from news.com.com:

But under questioning from the states' lawyer, Sutherland acknowledged that he knew little about Microsoft's past anti-competitive conduct and had no experience with the kind of Web-based services at issue in the case.
...
Sutherland said any company that wants to compete in the telecommunications business must make its technologies work seamlessly with other companies' services.
...
Under questioning from states' attorney John Schmidtlein, however, Sutherland conceded he had no direct experience with Web-based messaging and was only part of a small group at Qwest that is studying the possibility of getting into the business of Web-based messaging.

He also admitted the group was formed less than a month ago--nearly two months after Microsoft named him as a witness in the antitrust case.

"My intention is to offer the court an understanding of how the communications world works," Sutherland told the judge. "My testimony is not specific to Microsoft's behavior on the Windows desktop."

As someone said, if this represents the level and quality of Microsoft's legal team's trial prep, you have to wonder how much they're getting paid.

Normal radio stations aren't charged per listener, simply because you can't count listeners. I'm not sure about fancy satellite radio and stuff like that, though.

incorrect. taken from this article (and many others if you Google a bit)

Goldsmith's dream could be short-lived, however. On Feb. 20, the Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel (CARP), a body appointed by the U.S. Copyright Office, ruled that under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), Internet radio stations must pay the record labels a fee of 0.14 cents per song, per listener. Traditional radio stations would pay 0.07 cents per song, per listener

they do pay fees, just half that of whats being asked of internet radio

TechTV is owned by Vulcan Inc., the Bellevue, Washington-based investment organization of Microsoft co-founder Paul G. Allen.

Hmmm... is TechTV objective? Do they also have Apple and Open Source programming?

The Screen Savers also feature a lot of Microsoft bits. But they throw a lot of other bits in there too. They did a week of shows mostly dedicated to Linux. They do "alteratips" which are tips for mostly MacOS X and Linux (although, like the Windows tips, they're pretty light-weight). They do on-air help calls for Linux and Mac issues on occasion. The show hosts occasionally grumble about Microsoft and its faults (technical and political/marketing). Tux appears in the background often. OSX's strengths are lauded. Linux is often portrayed as an OS people already enjoy, and the viewer might like to try out too. And for their daily tech news, they often quote articles from Slashdot.

Of course, that's not to say all of TechTV is as enlightned. Sometimes TechTV Live and Cyber Crime have articles with viewpoints and/or quotes that make me cringe.

In all, Paul Allen seems to have a fairly wide focus despite his involvement in Microsoft. And TechTV seems to harbor an environment that allows a reflection of a wide degree of the IT industry.

"In their latest report, in the Nov. 24 issue of Science, the group describes machining 200-nanometer-high mounting posts on a nickel substrate. By using a series of coatings and chemical treatments, the ATPase molecules can be made to stick to the tops of the posts, and tiny nickel propellers, about 750 nm in length and 150 nm in diameter, are made to bond to the tops of the shafts. Immerse them in a bath of ATP and other chemicals and the tiny props begin to spin."

So you see even a very advanced genetically engineered machine such as this requires a ultralow-throughput step (in this case, e-beam lithography; often atomic force microscopes are used as well). Also it's important to note their yield rate ("5 out of the first 400").

But this article shows that there's hope for nanomachines that work in vivo, although military technologies like enhanced reflexes or strength are probably far off, since the former requires playing with the brain (ultracomplicated) and the latter muscles (would require hordes of nanomachines). For ex vivo machines in the wild -- crawling in the ground, etc. -- there is a need for a power source. Solar is a possibility but then all the well-known limitations of that come into play.

With all these limits, I think it's way too early to worry that the MIBs are going to come to your university and drag you away or whatever Reynolds was getting at.

As long as the RIAA continues to treat music like product instead of art, and bands as corporate chess pieces instead of artists, nothing will change. Some fans will rebel, some will complain, but most will just keep taking it up the ass.

Thank you.

How rigorous. Usability pundit picks pet criteria and decides that these are the top HCI labs. Those interested in the real state of the field instead of opinion might take a look at the more rigorous listings available:

Top Research Labs by Topic, 1978 and 1997

Where Researchers Want to Work

BusinessWeek's Top 20 US Research Labs

Google Cache of 1999 US News ranking of User Interaction Grad Schools

MIT Technology Review Corporate R&D Scorecard (Requires subscription)

HCI Academic Article Imapct Rankings

I think that few of the people on avant garde of HCI research take Jacob Neilsen very seriously. He is a usability specialist, not a interface researcher.