Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Favoritism, Alternacy, Moo
Speak of the devil -- Arrgh writes: "PC Magazine has posted a more favourable review (4 out of 5 stars) of the Zaurus--they had none of the sync problems Walt Mossberg wrote about."
Give money to these guys, please. Jeff Gerhardt of the American Open Technology Consortium writes after the post about this "GeekPAC" on Slashdot.
"Although the last 24 hours was one hell of a pain in the ass, at 4:00 am we were through with that second draft and in large measure due to the constructive comments from the /. community. Yes I got a lot of nutty emails about how I should be working on more important issues like global warming and ending "greed" (can you believe that one??? how the hell can we do that.), but for the most part the comments were well thought out. As a whole I think that the whole /. community should be proud.In particular I have pages of operational suggestions and contact names across the US. The suggestion that has tickled me the most is a suggestion for a fund raising methodology for the "PAC" organization. This came from a couple guys who were debating the idea between the two of them, until it really solidified into a plan. And, we are going to do it. The plan is simple and uses the thing we love so much, technology.
We will set up a series of paypal account links, having created a category for every House or Senate member that appeals to our overall goals and objectives. If then there is a news item about an issue and one of these "good guy" politicos does something to help the cause, the PAC will write a 2-3 sentence quote that will happen to have the paypal link included inside the quote. Media sites will then be able to include the link as a part of the quote, because afterall its news right (wink wink)!!!!
This would then facilitate the people _out there_ to throw a buck at the good guy as a impulse purchase to show gratitude. It need some refinement, but I think it provides portals an opportunity to provide a political opportunity to their communities, without looking too overtly political in the process."
No more Portable Monopoly. Dr.Jones writes "...well, not really. It seems Portable Monopoly is being forced to give up their web address 'Due to legal issues with Hasbro over the usage of the word "monopoly"'. Fortunately, they will have a new site up next week (Triton Labs), and they're still on target to ship the lighting kit next month. Seems like a bit of a stretch on Hasbro's part though."
Not as much of a stretch maybe as Parker Brothers claiming the word clue.com.;)
Do cows wake up and smell the Rosen? prostoalex writes: "Newsfactor has a story on Hillary Rosen expressing dissatisfaction with Gateway's ad campaign. Who would have thought?"
... and routing around it. With a nice detailed followup to a recent Ask Slashdot post, Dr. Zowie writes: "For those who want to use alternative DNS roots but are stuck behind port-80 proxies, a simple solution may exist, thanks to several folks who wrote in to suggest it. Section 5 of RFC 2068 gently deprecates using relative URI's in HTTP requests, and in fact most web clients generate absolute URI's even though relative URI's are allowed by the standard. My ISP's not-quite-transparent proxy directs outbound port 80 packets correctly if (and only if) there's a relative URI in the request. A little 10-line local proxy that munges absolute URI's into relative URI's before emitting them to the ISP seems to solve the problem for now: I can retrieve all the nice goodies that most of you can't at www.dev.null, , www.computer.geek, and paradox.null.
Oh, and if you live near the Colorado front range and aren't a purist about routing, Peak to Peak is a pretty good outfit for dialup and DSL service. Their tech support is extremely accessible and quite good (though our views differ on the correctness of payload-switched routing)."
Update: 04/12 06:41 GMT by T : Richard Sexton writes: "While it's great to see your continued coverage of Open Roots can I just put in a quick plug for ORSC? We're older and have way more tlds.
The coordination amongst Open Roots takes place at IRON; for lack of a better term, it's the Open IANA."
Kissing and making nice. panker writes "Sun had previously given JavaRanch a cease and desist order because of a trademark issue. Sun is now backing down and being friends. Slashdot covered the first half of this issue earlier."
- Requires: 64MB RAM; 30MB free hard drive space; Microsoft Windows 98, 98SE, 2000 Professional, Me, NT 4.0 SP6, or XP
So they managed to get it working with practicallly every version of Windows, but they haven't even got anything to work with Linux, which it runs?[!] That's pretty absurd."The Gateway commercial is fun, but their Web site is nothing but a gateway to misinformation," Rosen said.
Wait... I thought the RIAA website was the gateway to misinformation. I mean, they were the ones that tried to claim that making backup copies of CDs you have purchased was illegal, and they were just being really nice by not prosecuting you for it... I'm so confused.
"What the hell does that have to do with Congress? Are they now in the business of deciding what business models are viable or not?"
Yes. They've been in that business for more than a century, and they are getting deeper into it every day. They call it 'regulation'.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
It's like you're revising "Cooking for Dummies." The right person to do that is a good cook who knows how to talk to bad cooks. But by Mossberg's logic, you should hire somebody who can't cook and who doesn't want to learn. Then you end up with a manual on microwave and can-opener operation, padded out with complaints that fresh ingredients are overrated commodities.
Perhaps Mossberg's sync issues really do represent some design flaw in the Zaurus. But we'll never know for sure. All we have from Walter is the silly assertion that Sharp "doesn't care about synchronization". Not likely, but I guess it's the best explanation he could come up with, given his resources.
Isn't it interesting that an industry that makes its money screwing talented people over, raping their artistry for every shred of marketable value and willfully manipulates our culture to further those ends (What, you think the Back Street Boys got where they are on talent?) sees nothing wrong with bitching about another industry making money at their expense?
Hasbro would win if this went to court for two good reasons.
First of all, there is a Game Boy version of their board game, a "portable Monopoly" if you will. This shows that the word Monopoly as it applies to their trademark has already been introduced into this particular industry and confusion is both possible and likely.
Secondly, during part of their "we've invented this great thing that's ready to go but we aren't releasing it for several months for no apparent reason" phase, the Portable Monopoly website used the same mint green color as Monopoly boards and the Rich Uncle Pennybags character. While it was intended as a joke, it was obviously a reference to Hasbro's Monopoly even though their product had nothing to do with it.
Either of these facts would defeat Portable Monopoly's "good faith" claim in court.
The commercial offers a free "Sundown" MP3 download on the company's Web site and urges viewers to burn it onto a CD or load it into an MP3 player.
And Hilary Rosen says this:
The Gateway commercial is fun, but their Web site is nothing but a gateway to misinformation,
Now, I'm just a well-educated engineer, but to me, it would seem that Gateway's web site is a gateway to legally downloadable free music. What illogic does it take to see otherwise? Rosen continues:
No one has proposed anything that would 'prevent all digital copying.'
No, just all digital copying not specifically blessed by Ms. Rosen/Fritz Hollings/etc. Some people don't like the idea of being told that they can't copy music they created or others have made freely available.
If Gateway truly believed that illegal copying hurts all artists and labels who make the music we enjoy, they'd be working with us to find a solution to the piracy problem,
Well, either they don't believe that illegal copying hurts the music industry, or they see their efforts to promote music that can be distributed freely as a solution to the "piracy problem," making restricted works less appealing for download (and less likely to be purchased). The "my way or the highway" attitude isn't very polite.
the RIAA has energized its campaign in Congress with a letter to the House Judiciary Committee requesting that legislators further address widespread digital piracy.
Ok, one letter in favor of the Hollings bill, thousands and thousands opposed. That'll win 'em over...
The letter claims piracy has caused "serious damage to those who make and market music."
Right, and the solution is to cause serious damage to those who make and market music without giving over control to the RIAA. Does the RIAA expect us to believe that the RIAA is the only source of music in the world? Or that nobody in the entire world WANTS their music distributed freely? Does anyone even still believe that the issue is piracy and not control over the music industry? Can Ms. Rosen make it any more obvious?
After some intelligent comments, Yankee Group media and entertainment analyst Ryan Jones produced this gem:
Certainly, digital media has hurt the record industry, there's no doubt about that.
Yup, no doubt that digital media is bad for the record industry, those DIGITAL CDs aren't generating any revenue, and nobody would buy a CD when they can hunt around online for songs of questionable quality. And VCRs have killed the movie industry, the internet has killed the publishing industry, etc. Damn technology, why can't you be profitable!
But who knows whether it was the economy, the fact that they weren't putting out hit records, or whether it really was digital downloads," Jones said.
Wow, ya think the lack of hit records and a downswinging economy could hurt record sales? No, couldn't be, people always put crappy music ahead of food and utilities...
I'm sure I'm not the only one wondering this. How can I get .null et al domains to display on my web browser?
Thanks.
Actually... this is interesting, because according to several sites, including this one:
e ma rk/nolonger/list.html
http://www.mycounsel.com/content/intelprop/trad
Hasbro does NOT own a trademark on the word "Monopoly". It's a generic term now.
So I don't know what Hasbro is smoking.. obviously trying to intimidate, knowing full well they don't have a legal leg to stand on.