Perhaps you can give your in-laws a copy of this article (at threshold 3) to give them an understanding of what can happen when you unleash a 'disabled' person on the world on their own terms.
<tangent> I know of one person in particular with a disability. Her name is Candice. Having been given an oppportunity to speak, shs has shown off her perceptiveness and intelligence. People now listen to her as a *person* not a disability. Yes, it can happen in the real world too. Not just the cyber world. It's just a little bit harder of a hump to get over when you first SEE someone in a wheelchair struggling to get out a word at a time. </tangent>
Obviously, you've managed to get over the hump with your brother in law. now it's time to extend a hand and help the rest of his family over the same hump. What better a legacy for 'espy'?
Obviously, you've never used SSH. It enables X forwarding over secure channels. Hopefully your firewall admin allows ssh outbound. Once you have that, you can ssh to your home machine (possibly through a bastion host/firewall) machine and then open an X windows session. At that point , you can run anything from an xterm to gimp (ghad that would be slow!).
this being said, the music industry could still squeeze more money out of me if they were to embrace this concept instead of fighting it.
yeah, well I think you'll get your wish. The main reason these companies are going after napster despite the massive PR hit they're taking on this is that Napster is a threat to their control of music distribution. Once they manage to figure out a way to keep control of music distribution on the net you'll see them doing the "embrace and extend" thing.
Yeah, but they weren't liable for not cooperating with the DEA's list. They pissed off the DEA, and the DEA went on a witch hunt and nailed their asses on other grounds.
I think that we can really beat the RIAA over the head with their own injunction here. If Napster were to make a best-case effort at denying RIAA handled work from being transmitted on Napster (or at least make them hard to find), I think that we could starve the RIAA into submission.
I'm going on a couple of presumptions here:
Most artists don't make much money off of records. With the exception of a few really lucky bands, they make most of their money off of touring -- which is supported by record sales (more accurately -- by having their music distributed)
I'm going to accept Napster's claim that people who download music are ultimately going to buy more than those who don't. If true, then this means that disallowing RIAA music on Napster will ultimately hurt the RIAA companies in the long run.
If bands can become well known without the confines of RIAA contracts they will probably be happy to do so.
Note of history: about 10 years ago some big label(s) (Polygram comes to mind) attempted to force radio stations to pay them for every play of their music. (I know that this occurred in Canada, I'm not sure if the US was involved as well). Campus radio stations balked, and responded by simply refusing to play anything from the offending labels,
The labels first tried to say that they'd allow free play of small (up and coming) bands, and then finally buckled. Despite their attempts to suck radio stations dry, they needed the airplay that they were asking to get paid for.
Technical boycott: Get a list from RIAA of all of their music titles and artists. Build filters that deny users the ability to share RIAA music listed in the database. Make sure to get both famous and non-famous RIAA artists. Be agressive about it.
It would be best if the list were PD.
This will leave small artists with two choices: RIAA distribution or Napster distribution. My expectation is that this will start to bleed the RIAA companies of their 'farm' bands. If things go well, these companies will see the writing on the wall and start some serious negotiations on this matter.
The hard part in this is that the list would need to be controlled by Napster and should also cut off small RIAA bands. It'll be bad. It'll hurt for a while, but I think that -- in the end -- it would do us all some good.
The actual realaudio announcement is here. They appear to be pretty heavily loaded at the moment.
The transcript follows. The only thing that I've edited out is a couple of uhms and ahs.
Sean:
Hi I'm Sean Fanning. Thank you for being a part of the Napster community and thanks for taking the time to tune in tonight.
When I had the idea of building an internet community to help music fans find MP3s, I didn't think that it would be embroilled in a legal battle, but we are and, as you know, the recording industry has filed a suit to shut napster down -- to shut you down.
Today there was an important hearing in court and the judge ruled against us. We will keep fighting for napster and for your right to share music over the internet.
Hank Berry, Napster's CEO is here to tell you what happened today.
Hank?
Hank Berry:
Thanks Sean.
As you know, the recording industry has sued Napster in order to shut napster and its users down. Today, in federal court, the Judge issued an order that basically would have the effect of shutting down the Napster service as it currently exists.
We'll be appealing the judges rullings to the Court of appeals and will ask the court of appeals tomorrow morning to stay the judge's order during that appeal process. If we do not get a stay, then we'll have until Midnight Friday to comply with the Judge's order.
Although we strongly and firmly disagree with the judge's decision, we respect and understand the basis for it and we plan to comply.
The judge's rulling, essentially, is this -- that one-to-one non-commercial file sharing violates the law. We'll fight this in a variety of ways to keep the Napster community growing and strong. We'll keep you informed and we will ask for your help. Please check our website for updates and what you can do. We intend to see this through in every venue and in every court. We believe in Napster and we believe in you. We thank you for your support. We've had a lot of great emails and I'd just like to answer a couple of questions and then we'll sign off.
Uhm, the one question that seems to be coming up alot is 'what can I do to help?' What I'd ask you to do is just keep looking at the web site and keep cheking the Napster application. In the next hours we're going to be working, burning the midnight oil tonight. We'll have some ideas about things that you can do and I'll appreciate if you can keep, unh, checking the website and checking the Napster application.
So, thanks for being part of the community. We all really appreciate it, and.. and we hope to be able to keep it alive. So, hang in there with us.
At $11k/unit you can bet your butt that they're not going into home units. They're meant for people who spend hours a day in front of a visualization workstation. This could be things like Molecular modelling for Drug design, General medical imaging ("let's get a 3-D view of that tumor near your optic nerve"), geological modelling, process simulations, etc., etc., etc..
When you've paid $180K for the workstation/compute engine, $11K for a 3-D display that you can actually use for a long period of time is a decent investment.
By 'stereoscopic goggles' I presum you're talking about 'image in goggles' type VR systems
It sounds like you may have suffered from "VR sickness". It can also come from the delay betwen moving your head, and the having the image change. It's rather like sea-sickness. Your inner ear/kinesthetic system says you've moved thisesy, your eyes say you've moved that way and your stomach splits the difference, using your lunch as ballast.
I know of one person who did some masters research on the issue many years ago.
Closed standards only hurt business if there's a reasonable alternative. MPAA has the advantage of holding the video source market hostage.
Even if we were to come out with an O-DVD technology that was light-years beyond regular (closed) DVD, most people won't buy it if they couldn't get the latest Star Wars video on it. In other words, I think that we're going to be stuck with the DVD format for quite some time now. The only real question is will we, the public, have the ability to read and -- more importantly -- write these disks on our own terms?
Actually, it probably uses a 30A plug -- 20A if you're lucky. Even at 30A, you could rewire a clothes dryer or oven circuit to power it. Better yet, though -- just ask any decent electrician to run a new circuit for you.
With half the processors dead, chances are that you could pull the dead boards and coax it to run on a 15A circuit (as long as you didn't have much/anything else on the circuit) Kitchen counter plugs are a good bet, since most building codes require each plug to be on a separate circuit.
The heat issue is real, though. I worked with an SGI crimson once, in a small room with not enough air conditioning to handle the output of the thing. At night we had to close the door to the room, and the temperature would consistently hit ~35C (~95F) (this was in Vancouver, not Phoenix). One night it got so hot that a termal protection fuse blew. It stumped the SGI service guy for a while (he didn't know about the thermal fuse).
Due to bureaucratic heel-dragging, it took almsost 6 months to upgrade the air conditioning in the room.
I don't know why it's power requirements would stop you from using it in a residential neighbourhoood, but chancces are that it's only FCC 15B (industrial) rated. -- I mean, who's going to put an Onyx in their basement?? (OK, put your hand down, I take that back!)
But it would be better than the
sexual tension between Mulder and Scully. Fox was a wuss!
Blame it on Nelson ratings. It's a pretty common belief that consumating the sexual tension on a boy/girl series often results in loss of interest (kinda like in real life).
Besides -- Them two sucking face would simply take time away from the plotline. If you want to see pictures of Skully getting boned by a Fox, go hunt down alt.binaries.pictures.nude.celebrity.fake.kinky
and have only watched episodes hoping that I will catch an episode with the 3 slashdot geeks, err Lone Gunmen.
Well, given that the Lone Gunmen are Vancouverite actors, and the show's now being filmed in Los Angeles I wouldn't hold your breath too much. I guess that's part of the reason they decided to spin of the Gunmen. (not that flying them down to LA, from time to time, would be that expensive -- but the Immigration paperwork could be like closing an X file)
If anybody is going to do a good job of porting GL code, it's going to be SGI -- given that they're the original creators of GL to begin with (with OpenGL being the Open Source version).
I forgot -- SGI isn't just a prime partner of Alias/Wavefront, anymore. They're now the friggin OWNERS! All the more reason to follow the SGI lead into the Linux(RedHat) world.
The last I heard, SGI wasn't planning to drop IRIX anywhere near now. The story I had was that they were going for a slightly bifurcated market -- with Linux on the lower end and IRIX on the higher end. As Linux is capable of handling the higher end, they're (supposedly) intending to let the market scale with it.
It's not stupid at all. SGI has been a prime partner for Alias/WaveFront since at least the early '90s (when I first dealt with them). SGI's LINUX servers are coming pre-installed with (you guessed it!) Red Hat.
This is a completely sensical path for both companies. SGI's been eaten away at the low end by Linux boxes, so they run with the GNU stampede that threatens to trample them. Alias is creating a port for their prime high-end partner. Expect Maya to be heavily GL based
BTW: For those who don't remember, the Linux stance isn't SGI's first foray into the low-cost market. Back in 1990 , when they first released the Personal Iris, some people concluded that: if you bought a PI, threw the $3000 moniter out the window and paid for the window you still had the best CPU/$ ratio in the Unix market.
That's what (accidently) launched them into the server market. Up until then they were Graphics Workstation gurus. The speed was just needed to run the display. The new market surprised their top engineers who were heard to mumble: "But, why would anyone want a headless SGI???"
The net. Back in '94, I had my laptop when I was visiting a friend. When I let her know that I could get onto the net with it, she was like "so, can you show me some dirty pictures off the net?"
Even way back when (before it was fully commercialized) it was one of the biggest volume newsgroups (both in terms of MB of data and numbers of subscribers) on the net. But the signal to noise ratio was MUCH higher.
Well, I'm a bit of a data packrat, but I'd kinda expect that you can fill just about any drive in about 6 months. Now, granted, it might take a while to fill 80GB from the net without a high speed connection, but anybody who's going to buy one of these drives is going to have a whole stack of other toys.
If, for example, you're sucking data from your Digital Video Camera, it's not going to take that long before you're choosing which clip to delete to store that latest 'cool' clip.
Back around 1989, my work went from 280MB (2x70 + 140) to 1.7GB (1x 1GB plus a 700MB drive [all 5" full height drives]). I predicted that the drives would be over 75% full within 6 months. This had nothing to do with current data acquisition rates -- The 280MB had lasted a couple of years. It had to do with the fact that the space was available.
Needless to say, I was right. Data expands to fill available space. -- Murphy
Oh, I would definitely go after Nike on this. There are two parts of the equation. One is what <pick your favorite dictatorship> allow companies to do to their workers. The other is what a company (or its contractor) does to their workers.
We speak with every dollar we spend. If we buy Shell Gasoline in spite of their killing peaceful protestors then the next time they have to make the decision, they may go "It didn't hurt us last time, let's try it again".
If, on the other hand, we disuade our school from accepting money to put a Nike logo on the basketball court because of what they're doing to their workers, Nike may actually look at making sure that workers are treated fairly.
Part of the cost of living in a Capital driven society is that we have the opportunity to be responsible for how our money speaks.
The helplesness theorum is an invitation to let companies ride roughshod over us. It's a self-fulfilling prophesy. If we don't act until it's too late to help, that's one definition of helpless. Apathy on the part of the population is what the greedy and evil hope for.
If you don't think that the little guy's money and actions can shape a society, then take a look at the history of open source. It's all about speaking with your keyboard and your wallet
Yeah, they can. And when allocating newsprint to newspapers, the government can do whatever they want, too.
It's still a censorship issue.
As merger-mania continues and the clout of companies sometimes exceeds that of small governments, their ability to 'do what they want' becomes more ominous. I have seen the the coverage of majour issues strongly warped in the dominant newspaper in the area by pressure from large businesses affected by the {,would be} news.
At some point people really do need to stand up and say something about such pressure. This is what hardocp did. They did it a lot sooner than many other people. I have to applaud them for that. I also applaud him for giving the background to his anger. It allows us to make a reasonable judgement on why he's saying what he is.
That's why I'll encourage people to read things like the Marxist-Lennist Journal. It's not that they are less biased than the Globe and Mail, but they don't pretend to be unbiased. They say "We're gonna give you the leftist spin on this", and then they do precisely that. Far easier to apply counter-spin that way.
Smoke on the water, flames licked at the sky. No-one yelled fire; no-one wondered why
He had a +1 karma boost (probably from having lots of moderated-up posts). When he posted the rather sleazy comment, he forgot to check the 'No score +1 bonus' box. Now he's paid for it by being moderated down (and taking the associated karma hit). You can tell karma-boosted posts by the lack of a interesting/ insightful/ etc. explanation. (like on this one, presuming that I don't get moderated down for being offtopic).
This isn't really an article about a brave new Open Source world. It's about yet another OS beachhead. The real question is: Is this beachhead going to hold? So far, so good.
Long coding to get paid more is a very short-sighted way of looking at the world. People who produce clean code really fast (and sometimes carry their modules with them wherever they go) are the ones who get paid $100/hour. People who take a long time to produce buggy code work late and get paid $15/hour.
Slashdot Mirror
<tangent>
I know of one person in particular with a disability. Her name is Candice. Having been given an oppportunity to speak, shs has shown off her perceptiveness and intelligence. People now listen to her as a *person* not a disability. Yes, it can happen in the real world too. Not just the cyber world. It's just a little bit harder of a hump to get over when you first SEE someone in a wheelchair struggling to get out a word at a time.
</tangent>
Obviously, you've managed to get over the hump with your brother in law. now it's time to extend a hand and help the rest of his family over the same hump. What better a legacy for 'espy'?
Obviously, you've never used SSH. It enables X forwarding over secure channels. Hopefully your firewall admin allows ssh outbound. Once you have that, you can ssh to your home machine (possibly through a bastion host/firewall) machine and then open an X windows session. At that point , you can run anything from an xterm to gimp (ghad that would be slow!).
Yeah, but they weren't liable for not cooperating with the DEA's list. They pissed off the DEA, and the DEA went on a witch hunt and nailed their asses on other grounds.
I'm going on a couple of presumptions here:
- Most artists don't make much money off of records. With the exception of a few really lucky bands, they make most of their money off of touring -- which is supported by record sales (more accurately -- by having their music distributed)
- I'm going to accept Napster's claim that people who download music are ultimately going to buy more than those who don't. If true, then this means that disallowing RIAA music on Napster will ultimately hurt the RIAA companies in the long run.
- If bands can become well known without the confines of RIAA contracts they will probably be happy to do so.
- Note of history: about 10 years ago some big label(s) (Polygram comes to mind) attempted to force radio stations to pay them for every play of their music. (I know that this occurred in Canada, I'm not sure if the US was involved as well). Campus radio stations balked, and responded by simply refusing to play anything from the offending labels,
Technical boycott: Get a list from RIAA of all of their music titles and artists. Build filters that deny users the ability to share RIAA music listed in the database. Make sure to get both famous and non-famous RIAA artists. Be agressive about it.The labels first tried to say that they'd allow free play of small (up and coming) bands, and then finally buckled. Despite their attempts to suck radio stations dry, they needed the airplay that they were asking to get paid for.
It would be best if the list were PD.
This will leave small artists with two choices: RIAA distribution or Napster distribution. My expectation is that this will start to bleed the RIAA companies of their 'farm' bands. If things go well, these companies will see the writing on the wall and start some serious negotiations on this matter.
The hard part in this is that the list would need to be controlled by Napster and should also cut off small RIAA bands. It'll be bad. It'll hurt for a while, but I think that -- in the end -- it would do us all some good.
The transcript follows. The only thing that I've edited out is a couple of uhms and ahs.
Sean:
Hank Berry: Sean: Thanks.- genetically modified food on every dinner table,
- (the SF nightmare of) genetically modified soldiers in every army,
- genetic therapy for a variety of illnesses (e.g, Genetic treatments to regrow severed spinal tissue),
- Genetic testing of babies for 'defects' (inc. heart disease, ALS, wrong sex, wrong hair color, too short, etc.)
- Gene splice designed bacteria generating otherwise rare hormones
- genetically engineered 'live' vaccines (harmless but carrying critical marker proteins to sensitize the body to the 'dangerous' target microbe)
etc.When you've paid $180K for the workstation/compute engine, $11K for a 3-D display that you can actually use for a long period of time is a decent investment.
It sounds like you may have suffered from "VR sickness". It can also come from the delay betwen moving your head, and the having the image change. It's rather like sea-sickness. Your inner ear/kinesthetic system says you've moved thisesy, your eyes say you've moved that way and your stomach splits the difference, using your lunch as ballast.
I know of one person who did some masters research on the issue many years ago.
Even if we were to come out with an O-DVD technology that was light-years beyond regular (closed) DVD, most people won't buy it if they couldn't get the latest Star Wars video on it. In other words, I think that we're going to be stuck with the DVD format for quite some time now. The only real question is will we, the public, have the ability to read and -- more importantly -- write these disks on our own terms?
With half the processors dead, chances are that you could pull the dead boards and coax it to run on a 15A circuit (as long as you didn't have much/anything else on the circuit) Kitchen counter plugs are a good bet, since most building codes require each plug to be on a separate circuit.
The heat issue is real, though. I worked with an SGI crimson once, in a small room with not enough air conditioning to handle the output of the thing. At night we had to close the door to the room, and the temperature would consistently hit ~35C (~95F) (this was in Vancouver, not Phoenix). One night it got so hot that a termal protection fuse blew. It stumped the SGI service guy for a while (he didn't know about the thermal fuse).
Due to bureaucratic heel-dragging, it took almsost 6 months to upgrade the air conditioning in the room.
I don't know why it's power requirements would stop you from using it in a residential neighbourhoood, but chancces are that it's only FCC 15B (industrial) rated. -- I mean, who's going to put an Onyx in their basement?? (OK, put your hand down, I take that back!)
That reminds me, I'd better go pay my power bill today.
Besides -- Them two sucking face would simply take time away from the plotline. If you want to see pictures of Skully getting boned by a Fox, go hunt down alt.binaries.pictures.nude.celebrity.fake.kinky
(not that flying them down to LA, from time to time, would be that expensive -- but the Immigration paperwork could be like closing an X file)
If anybody is going to do a good job of porting GL code, it's going to be SGI -- given that they're the original creators of GL to begin with (with OpenGL being the Open Source version).
I forgot -- SGI isn't just a prime partner of Alias/Wavefront, anymore. They're now the friggin OWNERS! All the more reason to follow the SGI lead into the Linux(RedHat) world.
The last I heard, SGI wasn't planning to drop IRIX anywhere near now. The story I had was that they were going for a slightly bifurcated market -- with Linux on the lower end and IRIX on the higher end. As Linux is capable of handling the higher end, they're (supposedly) intending to let the market scale with it.
This is a completely sensical path for both companies. SGI's been eaten away at the low end by Linux boxes, so they run with the GNU stampede that threatens to trample them. Alias is creating a port for their prime high-end partner. Expect Maya to be heavily GL based
BTW: For those who don't remember, the Linux stance isn't SGI's first foray into the low-cost market. Back in 1990 , when they first released the Personal Iris, some people concluded that: if you bought a PI, threw the $3000 moniter out the window and paid for the window you still had the best CPU/$ ratio in the Unix market.
That's what (accidently) launched them into the server market. Up until then they were Graphics Workstation gurus. The speed was just needed to run the display. The new market surprised their top engineers who were heard to mumble:
"But, why would anyone want a headless SGI???"
Back in '94, I had my laptop when I was visiting a friend. When I let her know that I could get onto the net with it, she was like "so, can you show me some dirty pictures off the net?"
news:alt.binaries.pictures.nude
Even way back when (before it was fully commercialized) it was one of the biggest volume newsgroups (both in terms of MB of data and numbers of subscribers) on the net. But the signal to noise ratio was MUCH higher.
If, for example, you're sucking data from your Digital Video Camera, it's not going to take that long before you're choosing which clip to delete to store that latest 'cool' clip.
Back around 1989, my work went from 280MB (2x70 + 140) to 1.7GB (1x 1GB plus a 700MB drive [all 5" full height drives]). I predicted that the drives would be over 75% full within 6 months. This had nothing to do with current data acquisition rates -- The 280MB had lasted a couple of years. It had to do with the fact that the space was available.
Needless to say, I was right.
Data expands to fill available space. -- Murphy
We speak with every dollar we spend. If we buy Shell Gasoline in spite of their killing peaceful protestors then the next time they have to make the decision, they may go "It didn't hurt us last time, let's try it again".
If, on the other hand, we disuade our school from accepting money to put a Nike logo on the basketball court because of what they're doing to their workers, Nike may actually look at making sure that workers are treated fairly.
Part of the cost of living in a Capital driven society is that we have the opportunity to be responsible for how our money speaks.
The helplesness theorum is an invitation to let companies ride roughshod over us. It's a self-fulfilling prophesy. If we don't act until it's too late to help, that's one definition of helpless. Apathy on the part of the population is what the greedy and evil hope for.
If you don't think that the little guy's money and actions can shape a society, then take a look at the history of open source. It's all about speaking with your keyboard and your wallet
It's still a censorship issue.
As merger-mania continues and the clout of companies sometimes exceeds that of small governments, their ability to 'do what they want' becomes more ominous. I have seen the the coverage of majour issues strongly warped in the dominant newspaper in the area by pressure from large businesses affected by the {,would be} news.
At some point people really do need to stand up and say something about such pressure. This is what hardocp did. They did it a lot sooner than many other people. I have to applaud them for that. I also applaud him for giving the background to his anger. It allows us to make a reasonable judgement on why he's saying what he is.
That's why I'll encourage people to read things like the Marxist-Lennist Journal. It's not that they are less biased than the Globe and Mail, but they don't pretend to be unbiased. They say "We're gonna give you the leftist spin on this", and then they do precisely that. Far easier to apply counter-spin that way.
He had a +1 karma boost (probably from having lots of moderated-up posts). When he posted the rather sleazy comment, he forgot to check the 'No score +1 bonus' box. Now he's paid for it by being moderated down (and taking the associated karma hit).
You can tell karma-boosted posts by the lack of a interesting/ insightful/ etc. explanation. (like on this one, presuming that I don't get moderated down for being offtopic).
This isn't really an article about a brave new Open Source world. It's about yet another OS beachhead. The real question is: Is this beachhead going to hold? So far, so good.
Long coding to get paid more is a very short-sighted way of looking at the world.
People who produce clean code really fast (and sometimes carry their modules with them wherever they go) are the ones who get paid $100/hour. People who take a long time to produce buggy code work late and get paid $15/hour.