Slashdot Mirror

these new "awesome technologies" I imagine will be performance related, and maybe a little quality related. But as you mentianed, they most likely don't even get deal with the actualy video compression side of it. judging from the muhahahaha part, i would think they are really trying to be the "cool" pirate video guys..

sounds to me that mayo is actually a fully new codec, not merely a hacked m$ one. from the WSJ article:
Mr. Rota is busily working on a completely legal implementation of the DivX idea that won't use Microsoft technology at all.

Everyone I know who has DSL had trouble with the installation phase. Some had trouble with the installers keeping appointments, others had to have multiple visits, and some had reliability problems that started with the install and continue to this day. Opinion writer Holman Jenkins in today's Wall St. Journal, in a piece titled "How a Telecom Meltdown Will Cause the Next Recession" (if you can get yourself a copy, I recommend reading the whole piece. If you subscribe to the WSJ online, here's a link to the story.) had this to say about DSL: "Verizon, formerly New York Tel and now merged with Bell Atlantic and GTE, has been pretending since May to get my high-speed DSL working. Why do I begin to suspect Verizon only wanted to stall me from signing up for Time Warner's competing cable modem access?"

That's the telco model of information pricing. The telcos had to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into the era of cheap communications and free content.

The basic problem with micropayments is that all the enthusiasm for them is on the collecting side, not the paying side. Contrast this with credit card acceptance, which consumers actually want.

On the web, there are are only two (non-porno) pay sites that do significant business. The Wall Street Journal and Consumer Reports. Both had top reputations in the print world. Everybody else who's tried it has bombed, including MTV. So pay-per-view is the wrong answer. Kale is way off base on that. His "ISP tax" idea is even worse. That sounds like something the RIAA would come up with.

This is somewhat old news... I'm surprised it's taken so long to be mentioned on Slashdot. In fact, it was mentioned months ago in the Wall Street Journal!

Here's some sites:
http://divx.ctw.cc/
http://divx.vcdguide.com/
http://www.divx-digest.com/

A Google search on DivX ;-) will also prove fruitful. Don't forget the smiley, lest it be confused with Circuit City's failed format!

;-)

That's right, a realistic positioning of Linux would be far more useful, even if it has to point out some of Linux's shortcomings to help IT managers plan its proper deployment.

Hey, even Linus himself admits that Linux still has limitations.

The WSJ ran an article this morning that had a less happy veneer. The high points were that the FBI was claiming Carnivore was classified information, and that thoguh they'd submit it for evaluation, it would not become public knowledge in any form whatsoever. The article is here at http://interactive.wsj.com/articles/SB965861735609 205665.htm

And here are relevant excerpts:

"The Federal Bureau of Investigation declined to give to Congress details of its Carnivore Internet surveillance system, telling a member of a House oversight committee that some of the documents he requested include classified information and others are the subject of a pending lawsuit seeking their release"

"...the bureau wrote that it is "not presently in a position" to provide documents he requested. "There remains substantial public misunderstanding and misinformation about the system," wrote John Collingwood, assistant director for public affairs."

"...the Justice Department has been negotiating such a review with the University of California at San Diego's Supercomputing Center, said Tom Perrine, the center's manager of security technologies."

and my favorite:

"Mr. Perrine said that part of the FBI's challenge using Carnivore is conducting Internet wiretaps under U.S. laws that predate the Internet. "Carnivore is probably the best program and the most privacy-protective program that [the FBI] could have written given the lack of guidance in law from Congress," he said."

Think about it - long live napigator and gnutella et al...

It is interesting that I keep bumping into people who feel that simply because they learned how to program (which anyone can learn on their own) outside of school, then school is somehow useless.

Computer science programs vary widely across the board. At my girlfriend's college half of the junior and senior curriculum is stuff like Intro to C++ and Creating Applications in Visual Basic. While at my school the sophomore classes are Compilers & Translators (last semester we implemented the Unix utility "make" and wrote a Lisp to C translator and they were both due the same week) and Systems & Networks (create your own RPC program and protocol). Also before graduation each student has to work on a senior project which involves shipping a live product to a company. Now with this education I am currently pulling down a decent amount while interning which by current reckoning is as much as most people in industry are making now after a few years of real world experience.

Most of the actual programming syntax I have learned has been on my own time (I know C, C++, Java, Perl, Javascript, VBScript, SmallTalk and VisualBasic). There are various aspects of software engineering and database design I would not have learned without school, either because I would never have come across them while simply hacking or because they would have been too much work and not enough fun to learn on my own. Things like how and why a database should be normalized, how to design and implement grammars, using lex and yacc, how to create a requirements document from informal specifications and then converting the requirements document to a design document with data models and UML diagrams, compiler design and implementation details, various methods of dynamic memory allocation, proper object oriented design and implementation of neural networks. All these things I have learned in school and I still have over a year to go. Before I graduate I plan to take classes in AI (I'm interested in creating Internet Agents), advanced software engineering and next generation database technology (such as OO databases). The things I will learn in these classes are things that I would probably never have come across if I was simply hacking at code and buying O'reilly books to learn what I needed about CS.

Some kids at my school like reminding the freshman students who make comments like yours that our graduates don't use tools but instead make the tools that others use. The language designers, compiler writers and internet architects of this world are college educated. If all you want to do is go out and hack code a college degree is perhaps overkill (then again it widens your marketability - I have been offered positions working on compilers for strongARM chips using C/assembly as well as doing server side integration using Java, XML, Perl, & SQL) but realize this, what seperates usually seperates a Computer Scientist from Code Monkey is usually a college degree.

First of all I'd like to clear up what seems like a misconception of the original poster. Banner ads and affiliate programs are a drop in the bucket compared to the costs of running a website. After investigating the Net scene last year when I was planning to start a website I noticed that dotcomms could be divided into eCommerce sites, pay service sites and banner ad sites. Most of the successful non-eCommerce had either been sold to larger parties (e.g. Slashdot to Andover then Andover to VA Linux, Hotmail to MSN) to offset the cost or become pay services (JenniCam) simply because banner ads couldn't cut it. heck, even rusty has incorporated kuro5hin . So even now information (non-eCommerce) websites with sizable traffic (i.e. need expensive servers, bandwidth and maintanence) cannot survive on banner ads and affiliate programs indefinitely. There is more exposition on how dotcomms cannot survive on ads alone on ZDNet

The entire everything is free idea on the Net is based around the loss leader concept. Give away stuff to gain market share then make the revenue by exploiting the marketshare. Unfortunately this is the rub, few sites have anyway to make up the revenue lost by undercharging or giving away content or product. This is now being felt by the rash of layoffs and also the large number of dead or dying dotcomms which include cdnow.com, drkoop.com, toysmart.com, boo.com, foofoo.com, reel.com, apbnews.com, etc. The surviving information/nonE-commerce sites (especially independent or pseudo-independents like slashdot) will eventually have two choices
1.)Get bought out by a larger company who either wants the site for goodwill purposes (AOL owns Winamp.com which never make back the $20 million they spent on it, VA Linux owns Freshmeat, Slashdot and freeCode.com which will make just enough to hold their own or slightly less) or want to exploit the user base in a way the original site could not (e.g. MSN buying Hotmail so that logging out of hotmail redirects you to MSN.com).

2.) The second option is to become like the only sites to actually turn a profit on the Net on information, pr0n. Charge for premium membership and giveaway just a enough to entice members. The Wall Street Journal already does this with no ill-effects.

3.) The third option is to close down. Which off course is not an option many are willing to make. Of course, if this keeps up the Net will eventually mirror the real world with it's homogenized Walmarts, Starbucks' and Barnes & Nobles' being frequented by the many while independents close up shop and die. Only a short while ago everyone espoused the beauty of the Net and how everyone could be their own publisher but with the death of websites daily (linsight.com, reel.com, toysmart.com, boo.com, drkoop.com, peabody.com, and soon cdnow.com) are we not headed for a Net that is controlled by the few? For instance VA Linux via Andover already controls Freshmeat, slashdot, and a bunch of other frequently visited open source sites and is estimated to draw 50 percent of open source/linux traffic on the Net.

PS: This post is not trying to bash VA Linux but instead is mentioning the fact that already in the real world almost everything is in the hands of a few corporate entities (the same company that sells Marlboro cigarettes sells Post Cereal and Kraft foods, Disney owns ABC television and Miramax films, AOL owns CNN and Time)and the Net was supposed to be haven away from that where opposing views and opinions were only a mouse click away. I am not sure we should be celebrating the death of that...

Generally The Wall Street Journal has fairer news reporting that this piece (which nobody has discussed yet).

I was particularly appalled at this:

The volume of input and the passions of the various camps aren't business as usual at the Copyright Office. Even hackers themselves are taking aim. When General Counsel David Carson checked the office's e-mail repository a few months ago, he was surprised to find 57 e-mails -- some obscene -- attacking the new copyright law as too corporate-friendly and demanding that the Copyright Office take steps to fix it. He found what he believed to be the source of the e-mail blitz on Slashdot.org, a Web site popular with computer programmers.

"Spam all round, boys!" someone dubbed Anonymous Coward urged on the Slashdot site. "Let's make sure we Hormel them with fury!" Mr. Carson, a longtime copyright lawyer who once defended porn purveyor Larry Flynt before the Supreme Court, says, "I was appalled."

Well, I was one of those who wrote to comment on the DMCA provisions. And my comment was published, as part of the legal comment procedure that Slashdot encouraged the public to use. I don't recall any comments on Slashdot that encouraged spamming or obscenity directed against the Copyright Office, and as one of the commenters I respectfully decline to characterize my comment as "Spam" or as "obscene" (more like "tepid").

One might assume from Mr. Carson's (edited) response that he did not welcome comments from the public via e-mail, instead of via the tortuous process of PDF documents or snail mail. But one might remind Mr. Carson that he is a public servant bound to serve the public and not (just) the lobbyists and corporations who have been speaking out regularly on this issue.

Now, it appears to me that The Wall Street Journal in characterizing our comments as from "hackers" is also attempting to dismiss them. I would remind, respectfully, this great newspaper that it too has an obligation, to report the truth, especially when it has a financial interest in the matter (on the other side).

Finally, I was quite disappointed in reading the reported reaction of the Registrar of Copyright to our comments. 'At a recent hearing in Washington, Ms. Peters told a panel of librarians that, while they have "legitimate concerns," she fears that the broad exceptions they want could "eviscerate the very protection that Congress intended."'

If this concern is accurate and a complete response to our comments, then we might as well pack it in and not bother to follow the law and submit our honest comments. Because it is true, the DMCA does attempt to take away our fair use and First Amendment rights, and no amount of tinkering to try to satisfy the objections of librarians is going to solve that. The Registrar should communicate this to the Librarian of Congress, who should report exactly that to Congress, that he is unable to solve the problem that Congress has tossed in his lap to make the DMCA make sense.

Slashdot deserves an apology from Mr. Carson and The Wall Street Journal. If not, Mr. Carson should be fired and Slashdot editors should simply ignore WSJ articles in the future.

It is interesting to note, that as of this article in the Wall Street Journal there have been no responses from actual representatives of either company. Though efforts are being made to cover up what Mr. John Daniels calls an "truthful lie," many, including Mr. James Beam and myself, believe that the truth should be told to the masses. According to local and remote sources, including Mr. Andrew Ralph Stone, and Miss Lander, there has been a move in RedHat's company policy. Instead of trying to discover new ways to improve Linux, they have decided to buy as many companys that actually produce a thing known as a "Saleable Product," before the entire Red Hat stock crumbles. No one at Red Hat responded to these claims, but Mr. Joseph Cuervo was heard to mutter, "Gotta protect the investments!"

Oh yeah... and since when has Linux been a language? :-)