Bernhard Warner, would you please specify what kind of computers are being broken? There's are no as a general "email-based worms". Would it be too much to ask for you to point out that this worm only affects Microsoft operating systems? Instead of writing,
The worm spreads by sending itself to e-mail addresses on an infected machine and tries to disable anti-virus and other security software and infect certain files on the hard disk.
you could have said
The worm infects Microsoft operating systems newer than version 3.1. It mails itself to e-mail addresses it finds, tries to disable anti-virus and other security software, and infects files.
Credit should be given where credit is due. Many of those who work on software that is not so full of holes resent the popular equations PC=Microsoft and PC=buggy/insecure. Also, users of newer Microsoft operating systems should be alarmed so that they might defend themselves. Not everyone has time to look up the Symantec warning.
It would also be nice to know what kinds of servers are being defaced.
you say You've misunderstood the idea - you don't have to pay for any email you send if you are sending to someone who has you on their whitelist. And if you email someone for the first time, you only have to pay once if they add you to their whitelist.
The details of my punishment do not concern me as much as the net result. Right now I don't have to pay anything to send mail. Nor do I have to maintain another list or login or whatever. So the net result is that I get to pay for what I do freely now. No thanks, I'd rather make comercial unsolicited email against the law and fine people who send it.
Bulk mail has different rates mostly because the sender pre-sorts the mail and saves some work for the postal-office. It has nothing to do with subsidizing, in fact bulk mail helps subsidize the post office.
Really? Would that be because people have gone to great lengths to get around the post office? The post office cut back it's service and prostituted itself to junk mail. You realize that the government could impose the sorting rules on large mailings and still charge the full postal rate? Did you know that the post used to be served three times a day in many places alowing real business to be conducted by it? Today, real mail takes too long and gets lost in crap that cheapens it's perception.
So what have people done to get around real mail? They pay a minimum of $30 a month for a phone line and $10 a month for dhcp web service. That's enough money to send 100 real letters. Yet this is what people prefer.
Now what is proposed as a solution to spam? Punish the spamers? No, some dumb dumbs have had the bright idea to punish the rest of us. No fucking way. Just outlaw spam and fine those who send it. We should not impose the limitations of the old system on the new.
A private company might have a go at serving mail, if and only if they provide an otherwise feeless access system to it, but that would be an entierly new system and similar have already failed.
think of how much you would get if sending junk mail was free
The 2.3 cents per envelope paid in postage can hardly be the largest cost of real life junk mail. TRANSFAL, bud. You could jack up the costs of email to real life levels and you would get the same amount of email, because it's still cheaper than TV, billboards, radio and all that. In fact it's the only way to reach many people so anoyed with adverts that they no longer watch TV listen to radio and make laws against billboards. They will come and they will pay.
In any case the aproach is completely backward.
I'll pay a stamp for Email when the US government or some private company sets up a system just as good as real life mail. If someone can devise such a system where there are NO ACCESS charges whatsoever and all the work but writing the mail is done for me, a stamp might be a reasonable way to pay. As it is, I pay a private company for wires to my house and a private company on top of that to be able to read the web, and another to host and another to have a name. I do not feel like paying yet another party just to connect to another computer on port 25. No, 1,000 times NO. Paying for each and every email I send would be like having the worst of all worlds for email.
Shame on anyone who thinks a novel system that extracts your money will do anything more than extract money in the long run. Rember paying the cable company for advert free TV? Now you simply pay for TV. Anyone who pays extra for email will simply pay extra for email. In the end, the company running the system will be bought and you will get your censored adverts.
The only real solution is to make spam against the law and fine those who send it. A fine on those who receive it is stupid.
I can imagine what this will really look like. A big pile of stuff piled up on a mat that's too small to hold them all. A hard to place 60 Hz BZZZZZZZ will be heard next to it.
Do you think the makers of those devices are going to use this? They could be using standard battery sizes if they wanted to eliminate all those wires. It's a backward concept anyway. Devices should not be good devices not battery chargers. I've tried very hard to avoid silly devices that use non-standard batteries but I now own four and feel like I'm going backward in time.
A mindless coward writes: Huh? You clearly haven't read the article and decided to jump on the/. propaganda bandwagon.
There's absolutely NO WAY any rational person could draw the conclusion you just did.
As for XML - it *IS* an open standard.
God, I hate newbies.
Let me help you, again, with my reasoning. ASCII is open to, but programs to manipulate characters may or may not be. Witness Notepad, a dinky closed source editor with much room for improvement. The author said that writing functions to deal with XML was difficult, so sad C# does not come to his rescue. Just as VIM and KDE's advanced editor are superior to Notepad, free XML libraries will be superior to non-free ones.
Be nice to newbies, trolls and dumb animimals. They might be brighter than you, might come around and can be put to useful work in anycase.
Don't bitch about Windows if you're not using at least Windows 2000.
My box at work was w2k with office XP. It had none of those features for me. I could not set them, and those who knew better would not. The file permision jazz was a GUI joke and I doubt that it was part of the file system. All I ever saw was the dumbo c: nightmare with d: and e: and the desktop was the root directory and all that other confusing mubmo jumbo that programs have to work around and CLI did not fill in the blanks or auto complete. Given the rate and method of adoption of reasonable file manipulation by M$, I doubt they will ever have a reasonable system until they go over to free software and abandon the mess they have made.
Imagine simplicity and control. Simplicity being that the OS sees IDE device 1 as/dev/hda, 2 as b, 3 as c and 4 as d always. Then imagine that partitions on the drives are always simply numbered so that the fisrt and second partitions are hda1 and hda2 respectivly with virtual partitions treated trasparently the same way as real partitions. Now imagine being able to put those disks anywhere in your file system just as you please by modifying a single text file. Set once and forget it, until you need some space, then modify without problem. Yes, this system was intended for anyone who owns a computer to be able to manipulate with ease.
Instead of a silly c:\windoze\users\me\desktop\my_documents which sometimes gets written to and sometimes not depending on what program you are running, you have a home directory that everything writes to because you don't normally have permision to write elswhere./home/me, that's me. I could mount a whole 100 gig hard drive to be/home and then another 100 gig drive as/home/me, no problem, 100 gigs for me and 100 gigs for my friends. Did I mention that each file and directory has individual read/write/execute flags for each group user/group/world, that can be set recursively?
Sounds like visual basic programmers are complaining or something.
Yeah, that ugly green text on a white background is a dead give away, har har har!
His complaints point to why free software works better. In the free software world you start with a library of functions and can share your improvements which last forever. In the closed software world, you pay for a library that gets tossed out when it's time to be sold another one. Before you get to move onto the next big closed source fad, you get to waste your time working around the faults of the tool you bought, and no one but the folks in your own particular company benifit from your work. It's a sad, sad song.
However, this all-blue default color on XP is kind of 60's psychedelic, it gets on my eyes soon enough.
Dude, it's the BSoD. I know it seems profoundly clear under the influence but you will have your doubts later. Get some sleep.
Seriously, this article was a Windoze love in. How can anyone who likes XP diss KDE and QT as "clunky"? Oh wait, he snears at all the interfaces but BeOS, which he does not use, and XP which he praises to the stars: Best interface, "most logical" and then he describes how prety he thinks it is. If that's not enough to make you sick try this:
The best usability I get is from Windows XP. This is the only reason I keep WinXP still as my main operating system.... I found that the best DE on integration (see: the DE that requires you LESS to open a terminal window) is Windows, hands down. Everything can be configured with a GUI and when there is not a preference panel for something, there is always the registry, even when you want to enable the most weird hacks on applications found or your system.... Windows XP would be my second best regarding UI responsiveness. It is already very responsive, a huge (and I mean HUGE) improvement on multitasking/multithreading over the Win9x codebase, but it is not as good as in BeOS. The user can get a lot of freezing... I found Windows XP and MacOSX to be the most stable environments... Technology: Windows and X11 don't have many of these cool features, in fact X11 is the least powerful of all. [then give XP highest numerical rating!]... For Windows, well, MFCs,.NET and Win32 are really powerful APIs which let you do the same thing in many different ways... Final Rating: Windows XP 8.55 MacOSX 8.33 BeOS 8.22 KDE 6.72 Gnome 6.61
Shallow useless gloss. All the virtues of all other systems are cited as faults and all of XPs faults are smothed over or even listed as virtues in the most disgusting and self contradictory manner possible. What distro did he use to get all of those awful KDE and Gnome crashes? Why is it that my experiences don't match his? Hmmmm. If he likes BeOS so advanced, why does it not score highest? Why include it at all? "I include the BeOS in this comparison not because I consider it an OS with a bright future..." Oh, I know, because not many people are familiar with it or will bother to try it so he thinks he can troll at will. Has this dope ever worked with another OS as his "main system"? Has he ever gotten away from the default settings in KDE or Gnome or done anything to match those leet windoze registry hacks he brags about? Poop, X can be tortured into anything but something makes me think he would have praised M$'s offerings regardless of what they were. What a whore.
Re:it's easier than that if you use free software.
on
Family Tech Support
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· Score: 1
you should know that winME is the single worst OS to run...worse than 3.11, worse than dos; it's just plain evil.... At least have the decency to install win98se (if the thing won't run xp).
No, I really don't know which M$ OS is worse than other M$ OS. I've used 3.1, 95, 98, NT and w2k and they all seemed about the same. Why Dell put ME on that laptop is anyone's guess. My outline to fix the problem, when there is one, is outlined above.
it's easier than that if you use free software.
on
Family Tech Support
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· Score: 3, Insightful
If they can't put it together themselves after you tell them what parts to get and install an OS on their own, just let them buy the Dell and deal with their tech support department.
I hate doing that as much as I hate watching my mom buy a $500 break job. It happens but like a patient Vorgon, I do nothing.
Yet the picture you and the story presents is incomplete. There is a middle ground between boobs and people who bother to assemble PCs in their spare time. Also, barring failure of the machine itself, there's no reason an old PC can't live on for decades usefully serving ordinary needs.
Most people can tell the difference between an extension chord and the box with blinking lights and fans. My mom is in this group.
Her current computer could serve her for the rest of her life. I've only had one computer fail due to hardware failure. My oldest computer was an XT clone purchased in 1988. It was working when I finally dissasembled it in 2000. My next oldest machine is a 66MHz 486 and it's still running as a fanless gateway. My baby girl tried to kill it this morning by repeatedly pressing the reset button but most of it survived. My mom has better sense. Her computer is a rooten-tooten Dell lap top with an extra large screen she bought two years ago. I don't know what kind or processor is in it, but it's more than enough to run email. When the Windoze ME dies, I'm going to take the time to install Debian on it.
I'll go through the costs associated with her options and I'm sure Debian will be the winner. I'll let her call Dell and get their advice. I'll call a CompUSA and see what they have. I imagine either of those options will lead to an OS "upgrade" of one kind or another for no less than $250, weeks of waiting, multiple hours of my time spent digging up Windoze drivers and the sure knowledge that it will flake out again in two years. Chances are Dell does not "support" it anymore. The Debian option will only cost me a few hours of time and the cost of a pccard modem to replace the nasty winmodem. With a periodic apt-get update and upgrade, I'm sure I'll never have to fool with it again but that I could remotely if I had to. Which option would you chose?
Maybe because it came from Steve Forbes, you're assuming that the costs will be high. They needn't be much more than the cost of registering the item in a database. Maybe $10 every ten years, or less.
It's not what it costs the publisher, it's what the information is worth to you. People already spend the equivalent of a life savings on higher education. Eternal copyrights will move a larger chunk of that money to publishers. Publishers will also be able to extort more money from public university students. It's already happened in technical journal publishing and the practice will continue to expand given the powers granted in the name of "unimportant" publications such as movies and music. I don't care who said it or what their intentions are, the consequenses are clear and beter deals can be had.
[paying to maintain copyright extensions] would be a simple and effective way for the First Branch to respond
Too bad it's not a good way to respond. Consolidated publishing will simply pass the cost of renewal to the reading public. Too large a body of information is owned by too few people for too long a time frame. They have the power, thanks to the DMCA, and now the technology to put us on the road to Tycho.
The only real solution is the original one, reasonably time limited protection of publication 14 to 28 years. The costs of publishing have only decreased since that original deal was made and so the incentives should have decreased since. How absolutly absurd it is that Einstine's orginal papers are still protected by copyright! What use are 100 year old technical publications beside historical research?
Stop and consider the common mode failure: plastic or rubber failed in every case. What does that tell you about your plastic CD or tape substrate and the readers? Cermaic and glass last all else returns to dust sooner than later. The infamous NPR archive tape case, where ultra expensive tapes failed well before anyone expected is a case in point. You might be able to make a special ceramic CD, but the reader would fail and have to be reconstructed. The best prospects for long term data survival is still human readable monuments.
I find it absolutely fascinating that people use the graph of the percentage of society in manufacturing as proof of off-shore production, when it proves nothing of the sort. Take a look at a factory floor 30 years ago, and take a look at it today: It's called mechanization
No, you need to look at manufacturing outlook as a percentage of the GDP and on it's own. It's been contracting for 30 years. Some of it was due to improvements abroad, the rest is due to foreign state subsidies.
Jesus, you'd think people had never lived through a recession before.
For some of us, recession has been the story of our careers. I've got training out the ying-yang, and have been doing it since my first degree in 1989. BA, BS and most of a MS. Work experience as I could find it, the last being 2 years with a fortune 500 company. Know what? It's worthless.
Christ, if you think this is bad, thank God that we weren't alive during the Great Depression.
In 3 years this will all seem idiotic, but that won't stop the idiots from doing the same thing during the next cyclic downswing.
First a general rule, troll: When your neighbor loses a job, it's a recession. When you lose a job, it's a depresion. I don't have to lineraly extend my future more than a few months or so to know that I will soon lose my the rest of my savings, my house and hopes of a good education for my 15 month old daughter.
It's been idiotic for 30 years or so, or have you not been watching US manufacturing capacity go down the tubes? Those who do, know and those who know get hired. With all of that contraction, US industry has not done much hiring in the last 20 years. They are out of people, out of knowledge and out of luck as those who know retire. There ARE people elsewhere who HAVE been making things and they do know what they are doing. This trend will only accelerate as more and more big dumb companies decide to "outsource" their manufacturing and knowledge base. Bill Clinton's "Service Economy" was the dumbest thing ever. It depends on control of intelectual property that will increasingly be foreign. Even military dominance will fade with knowledge.
A good start to solving the problem would be to STOP TRADING WITH SLAVE ECONOMIES SUCH AS CHINA. We would have to convince our friends in Europe and elswhere that it's in their best interest to not train and fund their future masters. Otherwise, we all lose.
I want to net-enable my car. Someone tell me how this RJ45 device will allow that. My car doesn't even have an RJ45 port...
When you connect this to your car's serial output it will have an RJ45 plug. If you hook that plug to your home network, you could talk to your car. Of course, the car manufacturer would have to do all this because they generally won't tell anyone how to talk to their onboard computers.
Netmedia? Siteplayer Development Kit (SDK), $100? VB controls?
It looks awfully M$ and not very honest. It's not a $30 does everything toy, it's a $100 develpment kit that might require a $250 OS and periodic "upgrades". Then again, maybe not. They might provide full documentation and standard interfaces. It's nice of them to sell singles but the M$ leanings hurt their credibility.
Why would you have to register the computer? It's called a "copyright levy" in the article, and a "levy" is "levied" at sale.
You register it so you can prove you paid your tax. The implications should be clear, so let me walk you through again. The concept is that you have to pay a tax because it could be used for copyright violation. It's a tax on a press that might be misused. You don't think this will remain a one time thing, do you? Once you have people thinking that they should pay it once, they will pay again and again. Once you have people paying regularly, you have established a licensing system where your computer can be taken for "misuse" and computer freedom is dead.
Slashdot Mirror
You have not seen many schemes, have you? Did you even read this one?
The worm spreads by sending itself to e-mail addresses on an infected machine and tries to disable anti-virus and other security software and infect certain files on the hard disk.
you could have said
The worm infects Microsoft operating systems newer than version 3.1. It mails itself to e-mail addresses it finds, tries to disable anti-virus and other security software, and infects files.
Credit should be given where credit is due. Many of those who work on software that is not so full of holes resent the popular equations PC=Microsoft and PC=buggy/insecure. Also, users of newer Microsoft operating systems should be alarmed so that they might defend themselves. Not everyone has time to look up the Symantec warning.
It would also be nice to know what kinds of servers are being defaced.
The details of my punishment do not concern me as much as the net result. Right now I don't have to pay anything to send mail. Nor do I have to maintain another list or login or whatever. So the net result is that I get to pay for what I do freely now. No thanks, I'd rather make comercial unsolicited email against the law and fine people who send it.
Really? Would that be because people have gone to great lengths to get around the post office? The post office cut back it's service and prostituted itself to junk mail. You realize that the government could impose the sorting rules on large mailings and still charge the full postal rate? Did you know that the post used to be served three times a day in many places alowing real business to be conducted by it? Today, real mail takes too long and gets lost in crap that cheapens it's perception.
So what have people done to get around real mail? They pay a minimum of $30 a month for a phone line and $10 a month for dhcp web service. That's enough money to send 100 real letters. Yet this is what people prefer.
Now what is proposed as a solution to spam? Punish the spamers? No, some dumb dumbs have had the bright idea to punish the rest of us. No fucking way. Just outlaw spam and fine those who send it. We should not impose the limitations of the old system on the new.
A private company might have a go at serving mail, if and only if they provide an otherwise feeless access system to it, but that would be an entierly new system and similar have already failed.
The 2.3 cents per envelope paid in postage can hardly be the largest cost of real life junk mail. TRANSFAL, bud. You could jack up the costs of email to real life levels and you would get the same amount of email, because it's still cheaper than TV, billboards, radio and all that. In fact it's the only way to reach many people so anoyed with adverts that they no longer watch TV listen to radio and make laws against billboards. They will come and they will pay.
In any case the aproach is completely backward.
I'll pay a stamp for Email when the US government or some private company sets up a system just as good as real life mail. If someone can devise such a system where there are NO ACCESS charges whatsoever and all the work but writing the mail is done for me, a stamp might be a reasonable way to pay. As it is, I pay a private company for wires to my house and a private company on top of that to be able to read the web, and another to host and another to have a name. I do not feel like paying yet another party just to connect to another computer on port 25. No, 1,000 times NO. Paying for each and every email I send would be like having the worst of all worlds for email.
Shame on anyone who thinks a novel system that extracts your money will do anything more than extract money in the long run. Rember paying the cable company for advert free TV? Now you simply pay for TV. Anyone who pays extra for email will simply pay extra for email. In the end, the company running the system will be bought and you will get your censored adverts.
The only real solution is to make spam against the law and fine those who send it. A fine on those who receive it is stupid.
I can imagine what this will really look like. A big pile of stuff piled up on a mat that's too small to hold them all. A hard to place 60 Hz BZZZZZZZ will be heard next to it.
Do you think the makers of those devices are going to use this? They could be using standard battery sizes if they wanted to eliminate all those wires. It's a backward concept anyway. Devices should not be good devices not battery chargers. I've tried very hard to avoid silly devices that use non-standard batteries but I now own four and feel like I'm going backward in time.
One poor sap turned himself in. How many others are laughing away with even more than he got?
There's absolutely NO WAY any rational person could draw the conclusion you just did.
As for XML - it *IS* an open standard.
God, I hate newbies.
Let me help you, again, with my reasoning. ASCII is open to, but programs to manipulate characters may or may not be. Witness Notepad, a dinky closed source editor with much room for improvement. The author said that writing functions to deal with XML was difficult, so sad C# does not come to his rescue. Just as VIM and KDE's advanced editor are superior to Notepad, free XML libraries will be superior to non-free ones.
Be nice to newbies, trolls and dumb animimals. They might be brighter than you, might come around and can be put to useful work in anycase.
My box at work was w2k with office XP. It had none of those features for me. I could not set them, and those who knew better would not. The file permision jazz was a GUI joke and I doubt that it was part of the file system. All I ever saw was the dumbo c: nightmare with d: and e: and the desktop was the root directory and all that other confusing mubmo jumbo that programs have to work around and CLI did not fill in the blanks or auto complete. Given the rate and method of adoption of reasonable file manipulation by M$, I doubt they will ever have a reasonable system until they go over to free software and abandon the mess they have made.
Instead of a silly c:\windoze\users\me\desktop\my_documents which sometimes gets written to and sometimes not depending on what program you are running, you have a home directory that everything writes to because you don't normally have permision to write elswhere. /home/me, that's me. I could mount a whole 100 gig hard drive to be /home and then another 100 gig drive as /home/me, no problem, 100 gigs for me and 100 gigs for my friends. Did I mention that each file and directory has individual read/write/execute flags for each group user/group/world, that can be set recursively?
Yeah, that ugly green text on a white background is a dead give away, har har har!
His complaints point to why free software works better. In the free software world you start with a library of functions and can share your improvements which last forever. In the closed software world, you pay for a library that gets tossed out when it's time to be sold another one. Before you get to move onto the next big closed source fad, you get to waste your time working around the faults of the tool you bought, and no one but the folks in your own particular company benifit from your work. It's a sad, sad song.
However, this all-blue default color on XP is kind of 60's psychedelic, it gets on my eyes soon enough.
Dude, it's the BSoD. I know it seems profoundly clear under the influence but you will have your doubts later. Get some sleep.
Seriously, this article was a Windoze love in. How can anyone who likes XP diss KDE and QT as "clunky"? Oh wait, he snears at all the interfaces but BeOS, which he does not use, and XP which he praises to the stars: Best interface, "most logical" and then he describes how prety he thinks it is. If that's not enough to make you sick try this:
The best usability I get is from Windows XP. This is the only reason I keep WinXP still as my main operating system. ... I found that the best DE on integration (see: the DE that requires you LESS to open a terminal window) is Windows, hands down. Everything can be configured with a GUI and when there is not a preference panel for something, there is always the registry, even when you want to enable the most weird hacks on applications found or your system. ... Windows XP would be my second best regarding UI responsiveness. It is already very responsive, a huge (and I mean HUGE) improvement on multitasking/multithreading over the Win9x codebase, but it is not as good as in BeOS. The user can get a lot of freezing ... I found Windows XP and MacOSX to be the most stable environments ... Technology: Windows and X11 don't have many of these cool features, in fact X11 is the least powerful of all. [then give XP highest numerical rating!] ... For Windows, well, MFCs, .NET and Win32 are really powerful APIs which let you do the same thing in many different ways ... Final Rating: Windows XP 8.55 MacOSX 8.33 BeOS 8.22 KDE 6.72 Gnome 6.61
Shallow useless gloss. All the virtues of all other systems are cited as faults and all of XPs faults are smothed over or even listed as virtues in the most disgusting and self contradictory manner possible. What distro did he use to get all of those awful KDE and Gnome crashes? Why is it that my experiences don't match his? Hmmmm. If he likes BeOS so advanced, why does it not score highest? Why include it at all? "I include the BeOS in this comparison not because I consider it an OS with a bright future ..." Oh, I know, because not many people are familiar with it or will bother to try it so he thinks he can troll at will. Has this dope ever worked with another OS as his "main system"? Has he ever gotten away from the default settings in KDE or Gnome or done anything to match those leet windoze registry hacks he brags about? Poop, X can be tortured into anything but something makes me think he would have praised M$'s offerings regardless of what they were. What a whore.
No, I really don't know which M$ OS is worse than other M$ OS. I've used 3.1, 95, 98, NT and w2k and they all seemed about the same. Why Dell put ME on that laptop is anyone's guess. My outline to fix the problem, when there is one, is outlined above.
I hate doing that as much as I hate watching my mom buy a $500 break job. It happens but like a patient Vorgon, I do nothing.
Yet the picture you and the story presents is incomplete. There is a middle ground between boobs and people who bother to assemble PCs in their spare time. Also, barring failure of the machine itself, there's no reason an old PC can't live on for decades usefully serving ordinary needs.
Most people can tell the difference between an extension chord and the box with blinking lights and fans. My mom is in this group.
Her current computer could serve her for the rest of her life. I've only had one computer fail due to hardware failure. My oldest computer was an XT clone purchased in 1988. It was working when I finally dissasembled it in 2000. My next oldest machine is a 66MHz 486 and it's still running as a fanless gateway. My baby girl tried to kill it this morning by repeatedly pressing the reset button but most of it survived. My mom has better sense. Her computer is a rooten-tooten Dell lap top with an extra large screen she bought two years ago. I don't know what kind or processor is in it, but it's more than enough to run email. When the Windoze ME dies, I'm going to take the time to install Debian on it.
I'll go through the costs associated with her options and I'm sure Debian will be the winner. I'll let her call Dell and get their advice. I'll call a CompUSA and see what they have. I imagine either of those options will lead to an OS "upgrade" of one kind or another for no less than $250, weeks of waiting, multiple hours of my time spent digging up Windoze drivers and the sure knowledge that it will flake out again in two years. Chances are Dell does not "support" it anymore. The Debian option will only cost me a few hours of time and the cost of a pccard modem to replace the nasty winmodem. With a periodic apt-get update and upgrade, I'm sure I'll never have to fool with it again but that I could remotely if I had to. Which option would you chose?
It's not what it costs the publisher, it's what the information is worth to you. People already spend the equivalent of a life savings on higher education. Eternal copyrights will move a larger chunk of that money to publishers. Publishers will also be able to extort more money from public university students. It's already happened in technical journal publishing and the practice will continue to expand given the powers granted in the name of "unimportant" publications such as movies and music. I don't care who said it or what their intentions are, the consequenses are clear and beter deals can be had.
Too bad it's not a good way to respond. Consolidated publishing will simply pass the cost of renewal to the reading public. Too large a body of information is owned by too few people for too long a time frame. They have the power, thanks to the DMCA, and now the technology to put us on the road to Tycho.
The only real solution is the original one, reasonably time limited protection of publication 14 to 28 years. The costs of publishing have only decreased since that original deal was made and so the incentives should have decreased since. How absolutly absurd it is that Einstine's orginal papers are still protected by copyright! What use are 100 year old technical publications beside historical research?
Stop and consider the common mode failure: plastic or rubber failed in every case. What does that tell you about your plastic CD or tape substrate and the readers? Cermaic and glass last all else returns to dust sooner than later. The infamous NPR archive tape case, where ultra expensive tapes failed well before anyone expected is a case in point. You might be able to make a special ceramic CD, but the reader would fail and have to be reconstructed. The best prospects for long term data survival is still human readable monuments.
No, you need to look at manufacturing outlook as a percentage of the GDP and on it's own. It's been contracting for 30 years. Some of it was due to improvements abroad, the rest is due to foreign state subsidies.
I'm glad someone is hiring. What do you do?
For some of us, recession has been the story of our careers. I've got training out the ying-yang, and have been doing it since my first degree in 1989. BA, BS and most of a MS. Work experience as I could find it, the last being 2 years with a fortune 500 company. Know what? It's worthless.
Christ, if you think this is bad, thank God that we weren't alive during the Great Depression.
That's comming, stupid. Root cause analysis
First a general rule, troll: When your neighbor loses a job, it's a recession. When you lose a job, it's a depresion. I don't have to lineraly extend my future more than a few months or so to know that I will soon lose my the rest of my savings, my house and hopes of a good education for my 15 month old daughter.
It's been idiotic for 30 years or so, or have you not been watching US manufacturing capacity go down the tubes? Those who do, know and those who know get hired. With all of that contraction, US industry has not done much hiring in the last 20 years. They are out of people, out of knowledge and out of luck as those who know retire. There ARE people elsewhere who HAVE been making things and they do know what they are doing. This trend will only accelerate as more and more big dumb companies decide to "outsource" their manufacturing and knowledge base. Bill Clinton's "Service Economy" was the dumbest thing ever. It depends on control of intelectual property that will increasingly be foreign. Even military dominance will fade with knowledge.
A good start to solving the problem would be to STOP TRADING WITH SLAVE ECONOMIES SUCH AS CHINA. We would have to convince our friends in Europe and elswhere that it's in their best interest to not train and fund their future masters. Otherwise, we all lose.
When you connect this to your car's serial output it will have an RJ45 plug. If you hook that plug to your home network, you could talk to your car. Of course, the car manufacturer would have to do all this because they generally won't tell anyone how to talk to their onboard computers.
Siteplayer Development Kit (SDK), $100?
VB controls?
It looks awfully M$ and not very honest. It's not a $30 does everything toy, it's a $100 develpment kit that might require a $250 OS and periodic "upgrades". Then again, maybe not. They might provide full documentation and standard interfaces. It's nice of them to sell singles but the M$ leanings hurt their credibility.
You register it so you can prove you paid your tax. The implications should be clear, so let me walk you through again. The concept is that you have to pay a tax because it could be used for copyright violation. It's a tax on a press that might be misused. You don't think this will remain a one time thing, do you? Once you have people thinking that they should pay it once, they will pay again and again. Once you have people paying regularly, you have established a licensing system where your computer can be taken for "misuse" and computer freedom is dead.