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Slashback: Drives, Errors, Copyright
Spin control for some IBM drives? If you are one ofthe people who have the same results with IBM 75GXP hard drives that Sean Kelly did when he posed a recent Ask Slashdot, you may be interested in this report from legLess, who writes: "Pair Networks is swapping out every IBM 75GXP hard drive they have "[b]ased on an amazingly high failure rate." Pair is a big host: 114,000 sites all running on FreeBSD 4.1.1, including cdrom.com and Tom's Hardware. "We currently use and recommend Maxtor drives" they say. Big black eye for IBM."
GNU isn't Linux, either. Amid the stream of recent and upcoming software releases (Suse 7.3, Red Hat 7.2, Qt 3.0), it's sometimes easy for projects with smaller followings or more esoteric goals to get lost. BorrisYeltsin writes: "The Debian HURD iso images are now available from your local ftp.gnu.org mirror. There are 3 iso's available, so get downloading now!" (And read through the recent months' on the HURD Kernel Cousin too.)
Update: 10/16 14:20 GMT by T : Please note that the GNU Project maintains a list of ftp mirrors -- look for one local to you for best results all around :)
Placing warning signs along the road to consumerism brigc writes: "Good interview in the Chronicle of Higher Education with Jessica Litman about changes in the copyright arena since the publication of her book.
For those who were asleep, Litman's book 'Digital Copyright' does a good job of discussing why the copyright process got handed over to the industry and Congress has failed to protect the rights of the public."
Litman's book got a rave review from Michael a few months back; I suggest you check it out, and better yet ask you local library to put it up on display. Libraries have a strong vested interest in not ceding all control to copyright holders forever and ever amen.
It might pay to have a big fat mouth and ask for a refund on defective merchandise, too. anonicon writes: "Here's a heads up to the web site I'm running at http://www.fatchucks.com. I've started both a Corrupt CDs list for people who wish to report 'copy-protected' CDs or find out which ones they are, and an Indie Rec for people who want to recommend independent artists to the public. Thank you."
I was planning on upgrading my own small servers with some of these drives, but have also made the switch to Matrox. I grew up the son of an IBM company man, who had great pride in IBM. This pride was passed down to me, and I've always trusted IBM for quality and dependability when it came to hardware for "Business Machines"... this is not just a black eye for IBM, but an end of an era.
Does anyone else have any anecdotal evidence of IBM drive problems? For all we know, Pair is just damned unlucky.
The copyright holders have always been allowed to stop fair use copying, by contract or by taking technological steps to prevent the copying. Fair use merely prevents them from using section 106 of the Copyright Act to stop copying.
Bah. A few might try. How do you propose they "police" the file-sharing services? Hack the service or its users? Illegal. Threaten other users ("I KILL U IF U SHARE THAT SONG!")? Retarded.
Besides, look at the average person's music taste. Most people base their listening solely on what's popular on the radio. They don't even put much effort into deciding their "favorite" band...what makes you think they're going to put a lot of effort into protecting the band they happen to sorta like this week?
And even if you get a handful of rabid fans, armed with the tools to make a difference, you will have a larger number of bored pricks who will sit there and repost and move and rename and whatever the song constantly...just to fuck with the enforcers.
No, I don't have any faith in humanity...why do you ask?
The problem is simple, as stated a million times. CD's are too fucking expensive. The obvious solution is "stop buying them" rather than "stop sharing the music". I'm not sure this is possible to achieve since music is such a primal and ingrained part of human nature. It would be like asking people to stop breathing or writing or talking.
I make a sizable income, but the cost of a CD runs about half of an hours pay (if you average out a salary over 40 hours per week). A sixteen year old highschool kid slaving over a grill at a burger joint would have to fork over (after taxes) more than three hours of pay. That's a month of bus fare, groceries for several days (for one person) or fast food meals for a couple days. It's the cost of a residential phone line for a month. It's the cost of a month worth of dial-up internet access or an entire year long magazine subscription.
Shelling out $17 to $22 for a single CD (that will eventually be obsolete, if not lost, damaged, worn out or otherwise rendered useless to the owner) is rediculous. Look how irate people are if gas is raised by two cents per gallon -- yet they bend over and grease up the old ass cheeks for a DVD or CD without complaint.
Actually, IIRC, Metallica does exactly that; they allow (and I think even encourage) their fans to make and trade concert recordings. They felt (reasonably, IMO) that they had a fan-friendly view of copying and trading songs, and really exploded only when they found out that one of their works in progress was being traded online. That's why they phrased so many of their complaints in terms of protecting their artistic integrity; they felt that the public trading of a song that they hadn't finished yet got in the way of their ability to change it further.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
- "Why work on the Hurd? Go help Linux development"
- "Why work on GNOME? Go help KDE"
- "Why develop Mono? Get Bonobo running."
- "Why another program of this sort. Go help those others."
These people all don't understand two important things:1. These things are actually different. It's as different as your portable cd player to your car cd player. "Hey, why develop another car player? Use a portable instead." And if somebody sometime finds out that microkernels are indeed better for a given task then there actually is a microkernel to use and you don't have to rewrite Linux.
2. It's about choice. You all like to chose which car you buy and go around saying "Why are there Dodges and Chryslers and Volkswagens? They should all go help Mazda." You actually like that. But when somebody presents you with choice here, you all don't want it? I mean, Linux shouldn't have been developed, should it? There was already an OS available and Linus Torvalds should better have written Windows drivers, shouldn't he?
Personally I believe that the best way to do it is to allow free recording of every show that an artist puts out. A devout fan is more likely to BUY a studio album if they can already get a taste of what the band is capable of on stage.
:) There are many other artists like this, Dave is just one of them.
Dave Matthews does exactly that. He allows recorders at his shows and allows his music to be freely traded/swapped/copied/etc. He's ok with people making CD's out of his shows and selling them (including those shows he makes into albums). He's ok with people making MP3s (and other formats) out of his albums and shows and then placing them on p2p services.
Why does he do this? His philosophy is that of a Jazz musician (his music has an element of Jazz to it, btw) (i shouldnt really be singling out jazz, a lot of other types of musicians are the same way). They like their music to be listened to and enjoyed, not the monetary value they get in return. That philosophy is very similar to programmers who contribute to Open Source projects.
You are correct by saying a devout fan buys music - I have all of Dave's CDs
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
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GNU/HURD should indeed be called just GNU, since it's the GNU OS proper; RMS said recently in a mailing-list that although this is the case one should use GNU/HURD whenever there is need to differenciate (e.g. "Debian GNU" would be awkward and misleading, hence GNU/Linux and GNU/HURD). Apart from that, the HURD is indeed GNU (since the kernel is part of the GNU system there is no need to use GNU/HURD, unlike GNU/Linux where there is such a need).
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Usability: how many people have actually tried installing and running GNU/HURD? From the comments, not a lot... Sure, there are still several things missing, but the concept of the HURD is elegant and interesting enough to make it worthwhile... the fundamental servers are already done, many interesting translators are done and others being developed (think for example of the ftp translator... that give system wide transparent FTP, with no modification on any user program...). All the gnu shell and text utils are there, and so is Emacs and hundrends of other programs, including XFree. I wouldn't call this 'useless'...
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Some limitations and shortcomings are still there, and some of them probably give the appearance of a slowdown in development (threads, the 1GB limit for the partitions that the it can handle and the ppp code); this will be hopefully soon solved (I would say very soon). The truth is that, apart from the hardware support - that will be greatly improved with oskit-mach - and some programs that depend on libs that are hard to port everything is available. I can browse the web on GNU/HURD; I can program in GNU/HURD; I can do huge ammounts of important stuff while using GNU/HURD, and all this without even going for HURD specific features that are very intriging and useful (again, servers and translators come to mind... check the GNU/HURD website for info on all this.
Instalation and packaging is pure Debian, so nobody should have major problems (always keeping in mind that it's still being developed).All in all I'm very pleased with the status of it and the possibilities it gives (and the ones that are to follow).
Try it; get involved; you could just come to like it.
The day after everyone does this there will be an RIAA complaint that file sharing programs have now completely halted CD sales, and the RIAA will spend every last penny on legislating it's profits back.
Right now the RIAA's arguments about P2P decreasing sales don't hold much water, since CD sales keep increasing. If CD sales significantly slowed the RIAA would be able to push through more anti-fair use laws more easily (as much as the RIAA likes corruption, they like money more, and bribes are more expensive than inconclusive statistics).
The only way to really hurt them would be to stop buying their CDs and stop using and/or downloading gnutella, MusicCity, etc. Download indy music from the band's website or mp3.com or something. If you have a website, put up a list of indy bands you like and where to get their music. That way if the RIAA tries to blame something, they can only blame their competition. And their own stupidity.
Unfortunately 95% of the RIAA's customers don't care about stuff like this and just want their $18 Britney CDs.
I wish this shortsightedness were limited to slashdotters.. It's amazing the number of times that people don't understand the importance of actually being *interested* in what you're doing. =)
I couldn't have said it better.
What happened to giving credit where credit is due? RMS claims the name of a system should be GNU/Linux because you can't run Linux without GNU tools. You sure as shit can't run the HURD without a microkernel - so it should be the Mach/HURD.
Take the example of my best friend. He owns TWO copies of every Metallica CD up to the Napster fiasco. One copy of every cassette tape up to then. 4 or 5 posters, up to then. 5 or 6 T-shirts. A baseball cap. He was The World's Biggest Metallica Fan, all caps, in stereo. He was also the second-biggest Napster user I ever met. Then came the Napster Fiasco, and he got banned for an mp3 of No-Leaf Clover, found on his machine, *ripped off his own legitimate CD and not available for downloads*. Result?
;-) Second, he dropped Metallica cold, and hates their guts today, Lars in particular. He gets a grim satisfaction from anti-metallica sites like killmetallica.com. He is now one of the biggest Metallica HATERS I know. There is no evidence that his Napster use ever cost them a dime, and he must have spent hundreds on them over the years. Would have spent hundreds more if he'd remained a fan. Now, nothing.
Well, first he hacked his way out of the ban like any self-respecting music fan.
Talk about your Operation: Footbullets.
This is not about fan's respect. A fan who likes a band is MORE likely to share its music. Metallica was all in favor of tape trading back in the day, when they were little. We haven't forgotten, Lars, even if fame has made you forget. Face it - this is about money, and about destroying those fair-use rights that cut in on corporate profit. Nothing more, nothing less.
-Kasreyn
P.S. Doubly ironic, they banned him for a reallu sUxx0r song like No Leaf Clover, when there were also mp3's of Master of Puppets, Orion, One, etc...
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
Linux was not devised to be GNU; therefore it is not GNU. Nevermind the fact that it contains components from GNU. Other operating systems contain GNU components, and yet they are not GNU either.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Musical taste is something that's so damn personal, that stating that every record made has only 3 good songs on it is total bullshit.
I don't know about that... Billy Joel's Piano Man album seemed to suck pretty much sucked universally with the exception of the title track. Even BJ himself hated The Bridge. Oh, and how could you forget the great Bomb, which both bombed and sucked. You mean you never heard of them? Their album cover was plastered in the movie Demolition Man. And then there's your favorite and mine, the song Detachable Penis, and we didn't really care about any of the other songs on that particular album, because that was the song that we played in our cd players in our dorm rooms in college. Did I hear someone say, "Vanilla Ice"?
Okay, I'm exaggerating a bit. You see my point though. There are plenty of bad albums and songs. And it turns out that I own a large number of them. (This may or may not be your problem).
There's a larger question that's greater than just the quality of the songs on latest CD. Who exactly owns our culture, anyway? Us or the RIAA?
Think about this:
Everything about the vietnam war is history with the exception of the copyrights on the songs. Your parent's will still be paying for Lenon's "Imagine" for the next 55 years, if they live that long. Yet, it's probably one of the most culturally significant pieces of their lives. It's like a "Black fly in your chardonnay"...
I hate the idea of copy-protected CDs (and personally I will not buy them) but I have a feeling we won't have a choice. Boycotting them won't work (try boycotting any chain, etc) it is HIGHLY unlikely that numbers of bought CDs will drop in any significant amount. (Just as they haven't dropped due to Napster, Gnutella, whatever).
Actually....
So quickly we forget the details. It's kinda sad in a way.
I remember seeing something on CNN in early 2000 right when the Napster lawsuits were filed and/or aired to the general public as a whole. The news went something like this:
"The RIAA has filed a lawsuit against Napster, the online music-sharing service, due to it's ability to facilitate piracy of music and potential to cripple sales.
"In other news, CD sales this quarter are up almost 20%, a near-record quarter for the music industry."
The teeny little smirk of irony that the guy let slip through spoke volumes for those that saw it.
Very shortly afterwards, hundreds of people started boycotting the RIAA by refusing to purchase CDs released by RIAA member labels. Everyone was outraged by the total ridiculousness of the charges in the lawsuit and by God they were going to DO something about it!
And you know what? It worked. Unfortunately, because it was such a grassroots and spontaneous choice by hundreds and even thousands of individuals, nobody bothered to tell the MEDIA that people were boycotting the RIAA. And so it backfired on us.
Whatsernutz, the RIAA's Head Hatchetwoman... er... spokeswoman, that is, pointed to CD sales in 2001 being down even further than usual to points much lower than in the past two to three years as proof that Napster and other music-sharing services ARE hurting the industry. Never mind the fact that the major player - Napster - has been stopped cold, with no way to trade anything over it. Never mind that online music piracy has been reduced, effectively, to that of pre-Napster levels. CD sales are slipping. They know why, and can even truthfully say that it's because of Napster. They just haven't bothered to tell anyone that, hey, it's because we SUED Napster that they're slipping. The cause is Napster, but not in the way that they want everyone to think.
And nobody's bothered to point this out to the Media, the courts, or the world at large.
So you say that it's highly unlikely that a boycott would do any good. I say that you're right, but not for the same reasons. Boycotts are USELESS if the public isn't made aware of them. The number of CDs purchased in the past year HAS dropped significantly, and as of right now, it's only filling their ammo bins. We need someone to step up and tell people that the reason CD sales are slipping is because the people who buy the majority of music aren't buying anymore in protest. And it needs to be someone famous - or at least vaguely well-known - and respected.
Just some food for thought for all of ya.
You thought that this sig was what you think that I thought you wanted me to think. I think.
What makes you think NVIDIA's proprietary driver is "part of the Linux OS"? It doesn't interop properly (DRI) with the Free drivers and it isn't even available for most ports of the Linux kernel!
Project GNU set out to build a system with certain (legal and technical) properties. Every distro I'm aware of that relies on the Linux kernel uses almost everything ever contributed to Project GNU to build a system that indeed has those properties. To conceal the origin of your system is a dishonest attempt to prevent others from feeling any responsibility for contributing to a project they may benefit from, by keeping them ignorant of the very existence of the project.
The name is about origin and who to help, not about control. It can't be, because giving control back to all the users and developers is the highest ethic of Free Software.
What is so frigging hard to understand? We have the "right" (I thought they *were* rights, but whatever the permission is called...) to format-shift. We have the right to time-shift. They (for now) have the right to make it hard for us to do these things.
Mutual exclusivity aside, until the Supremes do something about it, we still have fair-use rights.
What we don't have is the right to distribute copies. There's a big difference. I don't care if 90% of burner owners use them with illegal MP3's. That doesn't mean I do, or that I should be further deprived of my fair-use rights.
GTRacer
- Stop the insanity!
Defending IP by destroying access to it? That makes sense, RIAA/MPAA. Go to the corner until you can play nice!