Slashdot Mirror

Everyone should remember that there's been a lots of attempt by the music industry to regulate or shutdown anything that could be considered another version of music distribution.

I found this quote on the net:
Entertainment lawyer Ken Hertz represents Alanis Morissette, who has been involved in digital distribution. He says, "Piracy and loss of artist revenue has never been the issue. The perceived threat to the industry is democratization of distribution--a concept the industry has little control over.

Remember when the RIAA tried to keep anyone from making MP3 players? Despite the continual attempts of the RIAA and other groups to make illegial every alternate flow of music they keep losing ground slowly.

http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-1798138.html? tag=st.ne.1002.thed.1005-200-1798138

The announcement sent shock waves through the online music community. - Jon

The massive number of individual names to be unloaded on Napster's front door could send shock waves through the online music community. - C|Net

"Yesterday, the band's attorney said his firm will deliver close to 60,000 pages of documents to Napster today, asking that the site block all the indidividuals named from its service." - Jon

"The band's attorneys will deliver close to 60,000 pages of documents to the small software company Wednesday afternoon, asking that Napster block all of those individuals from the service." - C|Net

There's also several references to the "chilling effect", paraphrasing the C|Net article. Jon, are you trying to get yourself and slashdot sued?

What's worse, why is slashdot interviewing Metallica? I mean, it would be like Linus asking Bill Gates to take a look at his kernel. Do you really want to stir up a hornet's nest? I see no productive conversation emerging from the interview and it will likely duplicate the answers given on last night's Metallica chat from Artist Direct.

Word is not the worst case here, Excel is even worse -- it has changed in almost every new release of MSOffice.

As for why this happens -- peer pressure, and that's exactly what Pauly talks about. If your client uses it, so will you (or at least you will have to convert to your customer's format before exchanging documents). In the recent past it was not even so much a question of tollerance, rather of no choice. Look at any of the Office Productivity Suites reviews at ZDNet or C|Net -- MS is almost always a clear-cut winner, even though most of the blows and whistles an average consumer will NEVER use (as a side note, wouldn't you think that most users could happily live with functionality of Word 2.0?).

As for what could be done to resolve it, I think that trying (whenever possible) to exchange HTML docs could be one solution, but you loose some control over the layout and won't be able to do any sort of document automation. And when it comes to a 3000+ page document -- you just gotta convince that customer not to use Word for this.

A few people had mentioned TeX and LaTeX, as well as SGML here, but I guess this is not the answer for Pauly, as his customers are not happy with it. OTOH, slowly educating them could help a lot. FrameMaker would be the best choice then: you don't need UNIX to run it (unless you'd want to try to convert your customer completely), get great documents, can convert them into SGML (with FrameMaker-SGML).

Here is a link to another story describing how Chuck D (PUBLIC ENEMY) has taken the side of Napster in this whole debacle. You may also remember that PE dumped their record label a few years ago and was one of the first (if not THE first) major recording artist to release an album using ONLY electronic distribution.

Nice to see Chuck is still FIGHTING THE POWERS THAT BE!


-The Reverend

NOTE: This was rejected as a slashdot front page article, but it seems relevant here:

These guys at Brown University put together a huge (ten story high) tetris game, made out of their library's windows. Damn cool if you ask me!

According to this C|NET article (last paragraph), Lucas is suing him for using the THX sound effect on his album. He apparently *asked* to use it, but was denied (and used it anyway).

Hypocrite!

It's an interesting idea for people who can't use other technologies because of their location, but I doubt it'll have any wide consumer market, when there are so many other established (and more reliable) technologies.

See this related article: Science-fiction staple new entry in high-speed Net (C|Net News.com, 22 Mar 00)

A. Keiper
The Center for the Study of Technology and Society
Washington, D.C.

There is a simple reason why. The AMD EasyNow (which the FishPC is modeled on) looks nothing like the iMac. Go see for yourself: AMD EasyNow Fish PC E-machines e-One and Apple iMac

The Fish PC is clearly modeled on the EasyNow design, but with the iMac color scheme. And that's really the only similarity, and it's been hashed out already in past stories that, design patent or not, nobody can patent a color. You can patent a design that uses particular colors, but not the color itself on any particular type of item.

There is a simple reason why. The AMD EasyNow (which the FishPC is modeled on) looks nothing like the iMac. Go see for yourself: AMD EasyNow Fish PC E-machines e-One and Apple iMac

The Fish PC is clearly modeled on the EasyNow design, but with the iMac color scheme. And that's really the only similarity, and it's been hashed out already in past stories that, design patent or not, nobody can patent a color. You can patent a design that uses particular colors, but not the color itself on any particular type of item.

Shares of Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) fell more than seven points in pre-market trading on Monday after two U.S. newspapers reported that the Justice Department and 19 states are leaning toward asking a court to split up the software giant. The stock traded at 71 on Instinet more than three hours before the opening bell, traders said, compared with Friday's closing price of 78-15/16 on Nasdaq.

does that mean that Gates is no longer the richest man on earth??

Here is a News.com piece on the new feature added to Yahoo Mail: "Yahoo adds spam filter to email, but will it work?"

---------------

AMD currently rivals Intel in marketshare in the notebook PC market, and is currently closer to 20 percent industry-wide, nearly double what you claim they're at and nearly quadruple what they were a short two years ago.

Please get your facts, and then get them straight, before posting.

-A.P.

p.s. - what intel plan? the concept of a "plan" seems to be novel there right now.
--

"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad

AMD currently rivals Intel in marketshare in the notebook PC market, and is currently closer to 20 percent industry-wide, nearly double what you claim they're at and nearly quadruple what they were a short two years ago.

Please get your facts, and then get them straight, before posting.

-A.P.

p.s. - what intel plan? the concept of a "plan" seems to be novel there right now.
--

"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad

CNET has the story, titled "Intel delays Celerons because of manufacturing crunch".

The Santa Clara, Calif.-based chipmaker has delayed the release of 633- and 667-MHz Celeron chips by approximately two months, according to industry sources close to the company.

The story goes on to state:

Computer makers, tiring of Intel chip shortages that have lingered since last October, may well begin to adopt more Athlons.

So, in fairness to "equal time", they're both short.

I'm a fan of the Kodak DC290, which uses compact flash cards for image storage (which I can also swap into my handheld PC). I own a DC265, which is 1.5 years old, takes 1536 x 1024 images, and its output has been fine for print publications (except glossy stuff). The camera came with a 16MB card, which takes about 40 photos at max quality. I bought a 40 meg card and get about 100 photos, which gives me all the storage I need, with no need to carry around 140 floppy disks! (Plus, the average user doesn't need max quality, for web or screen output. I could easily take hundreds of photos at lower quality.)

Kodak owners should join the digita mailing list which is excellent for peer technical support. The DC220, 260, 265, and 290 cameras run the Digita operating system, which allows you to write custom configuration scripts (for example, quickly set your camera for certain lighting conditions you encounter frequently). The only major drawback with the Kodak (and most digitial cameras) is that it cannot go fully manual like the Mavica and has only the standard 3X zoom. But, I gladly trade that for Kodak's many other merits (and I'll buy a zoom lens if it ever becomes really important). Its auto settings and white balancing make it really easy for me to hand this camera to my mom or other helpless person and still get nice photos. The DC290 is currently selling in the $680 range at shopper.com. (dang, my DC265 originally cost $800!)

It uses SmartMedia, which is a tiny plastic card with a smart chip on it. The camera only comes with an 8MB card, but I bought an additional 32MB card for less than $50. I also bought a USB SanDisk SmartMedia reader for $25.

All in all, you can't go wrong with this camera. It's small and light, and my Renewal rechargable batteries last for 100s of pictures. The price may be a bit high for some people, but I easily found some coupons for Accompany.com that gave me 20% off, lowering the price to under $500. A friend just recently bought the same camera from mobshop.com with a 20% off coupon. It also was under $500.

Olympus C2020 Zoom Page
C Net Review

• Zoom - digital or optical? $$ for a optical zoom. I have hardly ever used my digital x2 zoom because it sucks.
• Battery life
• how quickly can the camera take shots? I miss a lot of shots on my current camera because of the low "snap rate".
• Transfer technology. The C30 uses the serial port. Slow, but I haven't found this to be too big of a deal.
• Of course picture quality - don't even consider anything less than 1MP

Hasbro's up and coming games.com site!

3 guesses why they're now starting to crack down on clones, and just one guess what they'll do to all the out there. Hint: Hasbro::WotC::TSR has done it before.

Better snag shareware games while you can, and Napsterize them down to the underground. ;-)

From the CNET Review:

Crash City; Poor Character Recognizer

Unlike Palm OS's easy Grafitti writing program, Pocket PC's character recognizer is inconsistent. We like the fact that you can actually see the letters as you write them on the device's screen, but we wish that the character recognizer would translate written characters into the correct letters.

Although Pocket PC has many helpful Windows similarities, it also inherited one of the OS's most annoying traits: it crashes. Just like good ol' Windows 98, this little OS crashes more often than we'd like. Our machine froze four times in less than three hours.

The thing I really liked about Windows CE was the fact that it was probably the most stable OS that ever came out of the Microsoft stable.

It's a shame that the CNet review says it's crashy, that's will be a real put-off to most people.

The legislation and rulemaking for COPPA was quite contentious, and the FTC is probably going to be much more of a stickler for children's privacy than it has been for Net fraud.

michael wrote that "We've already seen that the FTC refuses to investigate even large-scale privacy fraud on the part of Internet companies, so it seems extremely doubtful that they're going to deploy COPPA Vice Squads to go out and enforce compliance. Unless you're a really big company in really flagrant violation of the law, you have nothing to worry about."

But it's not quite that simple. Actually, the FTC has been conducting sweeps for Net fraud, and I expect they will start doing much the same thing for kiddie privacy. However, while fraud-hunting is challenging because you need to chase down elusive "businesses" that change online locations frequently, playing the sheriff for violations of children's privacy is easier: investigating and confirming violations are simpler since the FTC can go after established companies.

Also, FTC sweeps aside, COPPA may open the door for lots of lawsuits, perhaps even class-action suits. (Are your lawyers listening yet?)

COPPA ought to be taken very seriously, and many companies are scrambling to comply. (See, for instance, this C|NET article, Many Web sites will pay high price for children's data , or this Wired article, Time Running Out on Kid E-mail .)

Not complying by tonight is not a big deal. Not complying by early summer is a problem. If you don't have your act together by August, you're in serious trouble.

A. Keiper
The Center for the Study of Technology and Society
Washington, D.C.

It just dawned on me. Unisys and AccuWeather are competing providers of weather data, such as value added weather radar feeds. So my suspicion is that this may be more than just trying to get huge royalties. It may also be to try and cripple a competitor. I didn't see any mention of this in the CNET article, but I think it's important enough to bring up. It may even be relevant and further show why so many patents are really bad tools to put in the hands of business. It could help explain why they wanted so much from AccuWeather.

I think as long as we're reliving our youth and trying to get ever closer to the first computer; You know, the reptile with fingers . . .

Someone should undertake a project, or post a link to an all-in-one site which hosts emulators, games and software (software whose copyright has run-out of course), for all the old systems we grew up with, and wish we grew up with.

The Altair, ZX81, LISA. Then on to the fabulous 80's, the Tandy CalecoVision (sp?), TRS-80, Apple IIc, ICON, ATARi, Amiga 2000... the list goes on and on. As far back as 1996 I tried to start an all-in-one collection on my BBS but I had a very hard time getting either games that worked with the emulators, or the emulators for the games off of the net.

Funny, that......

You will find that Ada Lovelace (full name Augusta Ada Byron, Lady Lovelace) is mentioned in the article (at the bottom) along with the fact that the ADA programming language was named after her. No mention of Tom Stoppard though.

Napster, universities sued by Metallica

Hm, I like this passage:
And computers are called digital in the Western world because they use the binary system, which is based on the digits 1 and 0.
(From the page entitled It Came From the Deep ).
In my world, the above statement is broken. Computers are called digital because they are not analog, i.e. they work with quantized data expressable as a finite sequence of digits. They are called binary because they use the binary system, with the digits 0 and 1. A computer based on some system with e.g. nine symbols would still be digital, but it would not be binary. Right?

That said, it is not true that "if they don't do everything _legal_ to up their earnings, he stockholders can and will sue." The management of a company is simply not under obligation to explore every possible legal source of revenue. Can I sue Ford because they don't write software, or GM for not owning gold mines ? If I buy Redhat stock and they don't drill for oil, I was not injured in any way because I knew they weren't in the oil business when I bought the stock.

The responsibility of the mangement to the stockholders is merely to not fail to do something a stockholder would naturally expect without telling them first. You can't start a company with a nice looking published business plan and have a real secrete plan of paying yourself a salary to do nothing until the company folds.

There would be no reason to uphold a suit against Amazon for failing to pursue the patent, especially if they had declared publicly that they were not going to pursue software patents. A good court would hold that the stockholders can sell their stock if they don't like it. A good court would see itself as a protector of the stockholder from deceit and neglience. The market will take care of incompetence; the court just has to assure the information is not kept from the market.

Think about it this way: the ability of stockholders to take their money and run makes the stockmarket a very efficient judge of business strategies. Do you really think that a judge and jury can do a better job ? Resort to the courts may be justified when extreme and rare plots and colusions attempt to hender the efficiency of the market.

There existed no reasonable expectation that Amazon should have a business plan based on the bureaucratic incompetence of the PTO. Amazon could have choosen to explicitly deny themselves that path.

But they didn't. Jeff Bezos and his company have choosen a business plan which has as a primary feature the denial of my freedom. Their plan is make sure no one else (including me) can make a one-click shopping site, and they plan to live off of this government enforced monopoly. If that doesn't make Amazon the Antichrist, it at least puts them on the same team.

I loose freedoms every time the PTO gives out a patent, but much of the time I at least get something back -- a business that would not have been worth trying without the monopoly guarantee is attempted, bettering the economy on the whole. However, Jeff Bezos and Amazon are just a tax. If we did not award business method and software patents, someone still would be selling books online with one click, and I would still have a tiny piece of freedom that Jeff Bezos wants from me.

• March, 2000 - $133 million towards people being able to receive health benefits of the advancements in pharmaceuticals
  
• October, 1999 - $7.7 million towards New York State public libraries for internet access and technical training/information
  
• September, 1999 - $1 billion for the Gates Millenium Scholarships to pay for 1,000 college students' tuition, room, and board
  

In yesterday's article on RReed someone posted a link to cnet which had at the bottom a link to this cnet item which states:


The story cited people close to the Microsoft case as saying the government is considering a proposal that would force Microsoft to grant royalty-free licenses to Internet Explorer, opening the programming code to customers and computer makers.


EOT

The Congressional representatives from Washington (who reap alot of financial campaign benefit from Microsoft support, BTW) will use their political power to try to minimize damage to the "home team", so to say. So I'm not surprised that Of course attorneys are going to try NOT to hit Microsoft too hard -- there's way too much money and power on the table.

A structural breakup works because securities law forces each of the so called baby bills to maximize profit individually -- even at the expense of other M$ operations. While the gov't attorneys wonder if "breakup plans, such as dividing Microsoft into an operating-system company and a software applications company, might be ineffective in breaking the company's lock on the market for personal-computer operating systems.", I personally don't see any other way.

Anyway, I hope that Judge Jackson understands things well enough to see that unless a breakup is the remedy, M$ will attempt to go on with business as usual, like was mentioned in a C/NET Article on Monday -- bundling as usual in Windows ME (Millenium Edition's new name).

My hope is that the judge chooses the remedy, then implements it in a way that will minimize the risk of it being overturned.

IMHO This doesn't have to be a win-lose for anyone -- the M$ stockholders could benefit, each M$ division would be free to innovate, and yet the playing field for the rest of the world would still be more level than it is now.

Here in the UK there is (in my experience) considerable dissatisfaction with MS products. Maybe it's because of things like that unremovable "Network Neighborhood" icon ...

Give Tweak UI a try. This handy little utility lets you customize things in Windows, including whether Network Neighborhood appears on your desktop. You can also reduce other Windows annoyances like the animated "Click here to begin" message that bumps into the Start menu when you log in. I highly recommend Tweak UI for anyone stuck using Windows.

http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-200-1679693.html? tag=st.ne.1002.thed.1003-200-1679693

The review of NS6 at c|net said that the ability to change the chrome will be enabled in the final version (slated for late this year). I too think the default chrome is ugly, but I can deal with it because this is a beta release. I also wish I could find how to get it to start without the sidebar.

As far as learning a new UI...not really. All UI's have gone through some amount of convergence. Because Mozilla's source code is ~95% identical across all platforms, a greater amount of UI convergence is to be expected. As far as I've read about XUL, even the menubar can be changed. This is obviously not intended for browser use, but an allowance for application design in general. If skinners want to abuse this, then don't use their skins.

There have been some skins made for the milestone releases. Check out http://www.mozillazine.org/chromezone/. I tried installing the Navigator Classic chrome, but NS6 just crashed.

Let's hope someone at Netscape realizes how ugly the default chrome is, and changing it is enabled in PR2.

He [DN, the CIO] did build one giant infrastructure-perhaps that investment will pay off when the company scales.

Please do yourself a favor and take corporate finance. Until you do, here's the rule of thumb you learn on the first day of class: What kills a business in the short term is cash flow, what kills a business in the long term is capital budgeting (i.e. long-term assets).

Any investment needs to return, in cold hard cash, the amount invested plus the cost of capital (which, in this case, includes the expected return on investment for the venture capitalists, which is NOT SMALL). In other words, the $5M they've pissed away on Sorcerer (I've heard it's more than that, but I'll be charitable) is something where if they don't actually make, over less than two years, $25M from it, they will be making a losing investment.

If it won't pay off until the company scales, re-evaluate the project when the company scales. Invest the money now in something that will have a quicker return if possible. Linuxcare has an immense staff for it not to have "scaled."

Another point of any investment is that it reduces one's choices of other investments. In other words, given the revenues they had, they'd probably have been much, much, much better spending the money in acquiring more sales staff or increasing the efficiency of the sales staff they have.

The CEO was a sharp mind, but extremely poor manager and brought all the old bad IBM stuff with him. He brought in the CIO sight unseen because of his paper credentials.

Actually, that's not true (about the sight unseen). As far as the management goes, he was brought in by the board, who had a long, hard look at his past. Evidently, they felt he was an appropriate match.

The ex-CEO got nailed before for revenue recognition issues and as a result Linuxcare has been crawling with auditors since day one.

Everyone who files for an IPO is crawling with auditors. The prior history of Fernand was common knowledge when he was hired. Yet, the management hired him anyway to legitimize their IPO. That's how it was spindoctored when he was hired. So amusing to see it go the other way later. "Oh, we didn't know." Yeah right.

So, should talking to an auditor be a firing offense? Because one of Linuxcare's IT staff was fired for apparently that. Which brings up the interesting question of what she could possibly have said that might have made that much of a difference...unless it involved things like, oh, employee emails being sniffed by the IT staff, or things that might actually get a company in a great deal of legal hot water. Or perhaps she was talking about the numerous reports of racist, sexist and (in San Francisco!) homophobic remarks from current IT management, leading the auditors to believe that the employee relations were, um, weak.

I am told that the internal morale situation is on a real upswing.

That's the beauty of scapegoating -- you can temporarily improve morale by getting rid of one person and spindoctoring it so that people who don't know better believe it. And geeks, being generally naive about people, unfortunately tend to.

Over the years, the LC founders have shown that when things get in the shit, they'll do whatever it takes to fix the situation.

You mean over ONE year, don't you? The company hasn't been around more than a year. Its formal introduction to the world was 13 months ago at Linuxworld. As for the sentiment, there was a time when I believed that and got burned by my faith.

I think Linuxcare has a chance, but not given the course they've apparently chosen to take. The next round of scapegoating will likely be the last.

PS - "fix the situation" in this case means "get the investors their money back as quickly as possible" - quite possibly to the detriment of other stockholders, such as the Linux geeks that are the pillars of the organization.

_Deirdre

d. can't find webgear cards anywhere online!

See http://shopper.cnet.com/shopping/search/results/1, 102 14,0-1257,00.html?tag=st%2Esh%2E1257%2Esbsr&qt=web gear&cn=&ca=1257. At least a few online stores--including a few such as TechStore, Inc. that claim realtime inventory--seem to have WebGear equipment in stock. Good luck.

Paul allen started transmeta. Its his venture capital. Here is the proof ... its an old c|net article, but it shows my point.

--jay

I had trouble hitting the download page provided by the original thread. If you're experiencing the same problem, just go to Cnet, and download the small 200k setup file from Cnet.com.

---------------

I can't wait to get home to try it on my linux box and see how it rates...

btw, off-topic rant. I'm currently pissed as hell at Netscape for forcing longtime netscape web users to change their username just so they can merge all of their account IDs with the same bloated name space as AOL. That means, stupid usernames like joe235753 for example... :( I had "weave@netscape.net" and now they want to force me to give it up. So much for my "lifetime e-mail address."

Have you heard a single musician or writer complaining about how the Internet is going to put him/her out of a job?

The news.com article on this is at http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-200-1629387.html? tag=st.ne.1002.thed.1003-200-1629387 . It's not much more informative than the Declan McCullagh article at the moment, but News.com has a habit of updating their articles so they may give some more insightful analysis in a bit.

It's been done. See the CNN story.

Crispin
--------
CTO, WireX
Immunix: Free Security Hardened Linux OS

Crispin
--------
CTO, WireX
Immunix: Free Security Hardened Linux OS

Perhaps that's a little too broad. How about an all-encompasing computer-oriented news page like the almost forgotten c|net?

Er. That's not much better, it seems. What sayeth of something that deals almost entirely with open source-related news? No, wait, you're already here.

Unfortunate though it may (or may not) be, Linux has the most attention these days. Not just in the media, but in the minds of users. You want more BSD news? Submit more of it. Or start getting your fix from a BSD-specific page.

Point is, if you don't like Slashdot, try to change it. If you can't change it, find somewhere else. If you can't find somewhere else, grab the code and create something more to your liking. If you can't do that, hire someone who can. If you can't afford to, perhaps your desired news isn't as important to the world as you might think.

As an aside, I really don't see your reason for concern. Slashdot never claimed to be business-oriented. And if there's a real-world computer issue that involves money, there's someone out there attached to it like a leech, sucking it for all the juicy bits it has, and printing them. Try PC Week if you want to see what "real-world" business uses today. Me, I want to know what they'll be using tomorrow.

The current list isn't as good as C|net's top 10 list from 1999 which contains a 1993 USENET hoax by Joe Skaggs (sp? Is it a word?).
Joe Skaggs has been hoaxing the mainstream media for years and is one of NYCs most loved and hated citizens. Here's a retrospective of some of his hoaxes going as far back as the sixties. My favorites are dog meat soup, the geraldo hoax and coma cocoon

Anyhow, a quick Altavista search is all that it took to get these (and more) - From the CIAC at the DOE (boy we love those gov'ment acronyms): History of Virus Hoaxes.

Must be a slow "news-for-nerds" day.

Forget free.be.com, just click here.

Americas:
http://www.zdnet.com/ - Ziff-Davis, North America
http://download.cnet.com/ - CNET/Download.com, California
ftp://.beoscentral.com/pub/ - BeOS CentralJohnson City, TN
http://freebe.nerdygirls.com/ - Oak Ridge, TN
ftp://www.beforever.com/pub/beforever /freebe/ - BeForever, Omaha, NE
ftp://mirrors.rochester.rr.com/pub/be/ - RoadRunner.Com, Rochester, NY
ftp://ftp.be.com/pub/beos/ - Be, Inc. San Jose, CA

Europe/Australia:
ftp://mirror.aarnet.edu.au/pub/beos/ - AARNet, Brisbane, Australia
ftp://ftp.beeurope.com/pub/ - BeEurope, Paris, France
ftp://ftp.worldonline.fr/ - World Online, Paris, France
ftp://ftp.gigabell.net/pub/beos/ - Gigabell.Net, Frankfurt, Germany
ftp://ftp.ph-freiburg.de/pub/m irrors/ftp.be.com/beos - P.H. Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany
http://www.computerchannel.de/download /beos/ - ComputerChannel, Hamburg, Germany
ftp://ftp.xtdnet.com/pub/ - XTDNet, Karlsruhe, Germany
ftp://ftp.zdf.de/pub/ - Neues-3Sat Online, Mainz, Germany
http://pcteor1.mi.infn.it/beos/ - Univ. of Milan, Milan, Italy
ftp://dl.xs4all.nl/pub/ - XS4All, Amsterdam, Netherlands
ftp://ftp.sunet.se/pub/os/BeOS/ - SUNET, Uppsala, Sweden