you'd have to be doing about 1600 kph to create significant phase shifting at 2.4 Ghz
Exactly, the problem is rather signal reflection off buildings, etc.
Thus you have several "copies" or echos of a signal overlaying each other, each with a different path and travel time to the receiver. If you move (drive in a car), the path lengths of these signals shift all the time and the outcoming result is a horrible mess.
Difficult to decode depending on your modulation.
Most of the tests I know where 802.11b is used in cars, it works as long as they have clear line of sight, because the direct signal is stronger than the echos. But as soon as a big truck moves in between you, thats pretty much it.
I've seen similar solutions before, and they are all nice and dandy except for one application: when communicating with businesses. What happens when you order a Widget from Acme, Inc. and Acme sends you your confirmation by e-mail? Your script bounces a question, and Acme's mail server either bounces back at you, making it look like it was spam in the first place, or simply doesn't respond at all.
The system implies that anything not sent by a human being is spam. This is not necessarily the case today. A lot of today's e-mail communications are auto-generated.
The Tagged Message Delivery Agent provides solutions to this problem and more. Basically it's a whitelisting mechanism, if the sender is unknown, the mail is "parked", a confirm request is sent and the mail is delivered upon (human) confirmation.
This leaves problems with auto-generated mails as you describe, but TMDA has more options:
1. you can use a mailadress that is only valid for a certain amount of time
2. you can use a mailadress that is only valid for mail from a specific sender domain/mailadress
So to order something you'd use one of the above and thus avoid sending out a confirmation request. At the same time you can make sure that an adress is valid only for the relationship you intended it for, e.g. if they use it after a transaction is over or sell it to adress harvesters it will not work.
Check it out, it's really a clever concept IMHO. Of course I completely agree that this shouldn't keep us from fighting spam on other fronts, using RBLs and legal means in addition to filters.
I just think whitelisting works far better than content filtering.
A good friend of mine had two rings made for him and his girl (just plain rings, no jewels). Engraved all around on the inside of each ring is a fingerprint of them. In other words, she has a fingerprint of him, and he has a fingerprint of her.
You cannot see the print, only feel them when you wear the ring (like they feel each others hands).
The rings are made of some kind of special alloy (titanium or something, I forgot which), they are light and look rather simple but very pretty.
Of course this guy is an engineer, as you may have guessed.:-)
Want to see a good example of how it works in a good support organization (and IT is always support)? Go to your nearest Air Force base and talk to the pilots and crew chiefs. Sure, the pilots get all the glory, because missions are oriented around flying the aircraft and hitting the target. But the crew chiefs are given tremendous respect, because they are responsible for making sure the aircraft fly properly.
What a nice example. Unfortunately the IT crew does not get any "respect" for making things work properly. As opposed to the pilots, the people who use the IT infrastructure just take it for granted that everything works, think that IT infrastructure is easy and needs no maintenance at all.
Even a car which is a whole lot less complex than any of todays IT infrastructes needs maintenance, people understand that. So where is the recognition that you actually need skilled people to build and run any infrastructure as complex as large IT systems?
One reason your pilots are more aware of this is because their fucking life depends on the ground crew. Guess what, if you'd start to tie managers pay checks to performance of the IT systems the should be responsible for (but never really are being held responsible for), this would change really quick and clean up a lot of bullshitting.
Yeah dude, old Julius Caesar figured this one out too, he called it "bread and games". So in other words, give your people jobs/consumer goods and entertainment and you can pretty much rule as you like.
Interesting to note though, that it was the King of Bhutan who resisted this for so long. Sounds like a good leader to me (tries to do what's in the best interest of his people). So maybe all is not lost for Bhutan.
Hm, I think this is a good comparison, you just have to look at it from another angle.
Consider the "value" you get when buying Windows or a Linux distro. Now consider all the money the vendors/distributors make and how much "value" they provide / are able to produce with that money.
If we assume for a moment that the "value" you get from Windows or Linux is roughly equal, but producing that value for Windows takes 200 times as much money, can we conclude that in the overall production circle, Windows' price/performance ratio sucks big time?
In other words, after raking in so much money, you'd expect the Microsofties to deliver more "value" than that.
If you look at it from an economic or business model point of view (which should be the analysts job, no?), under the Microsoft business model it costs 200 times as much to produce something of the same value. So I say it's about time analysts devalued MS, since they are 200 times less efficient than the Linux distro vendors (who manage to produce the same output for less).
I realize that the math is slightly flawed, since there are some hidden development costs in Linux that do not enter this calculation. But the basic argument still holds true.
I think your argument is only partly correct. Government imposes regulations on individuals and corporations in many areas, sure. But the topic of reimbursement is not mentioned at all in the article, you just assume the author says they should not be reimbursed, where in fact he just doesn't discuss that part at all.
IMHO, government as a representative of the common interest has every right to impose regulations, if it deems them necessary for the common good. That is what democracy is all about. Wether the possible expenses caused by these regulations have to be covered by an individual, group or society as a whole and to what extent is a completely different issue and could well differ on a case-by-case basis.
The main point of the article is that common interest should outweigh individual interest. Not always, but it should be more balanced. The articles assessment is that it's currently out of balance favouring (big) corporate interests and I think that assessment is correct.
Since you asked: How is it any different from seeing a new toy that a friend, co-worker, or even complete stranger has and deciding you might want to buy one? Who was the first person you ever saw with a Palm Pilot? Did they tell you how much it costs and where you can get one? How's that any different?
The difference is that these companies did not spend 5 million $ to promote their product. Consider they'll be selling 50000 of these phones. We'll each one of them just got 100$ more expensive just so they can break even with their marketing expense.
I would rather have a real friend tell me about a product he likes or maybe a review on Toms hardware or Anandtech, for free. I would rather have a genuine free review like that, because the item is truly cool and 100 bucks cheaper. That's what I want.:-)
Yeah, but they used to be purely biological nodes in a network. Now they've become BORG nodes. And just like the BORG, this amplification gives them the ability to do more (faster, better, more efficient, etc.).
Resistance is futile. You too will want a cellphone one day (your kids certainly do).
Hype, another way to do the math
on
What, Me Worry?
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· Score: 2
Exactly. Consider the following comment from the article: Harris figures Americans tend to trust what they read more than Europeans, who know a misleading statement when they see one.
Now, applying the same insightful reasoning as above, we get: If your readers are European, to get the same amount of attention you have to hype things more out of proportion (while making it sound real at the same time).
That essentially seems to sum it up. The statement lends itself to other fun implications and conclusions which I will avoid here, I'm not trying to start an offtopic flame war.:-)
Hm, here in Germany, WC3 was on sale for 37-39 Euros in several retail stores, from the day it came out. That is very cheap for a new commercial game, as other (PC-only) games average at 45-50 Euros when they come out, a difference of almost 20%. How much is it elsewhere?
In addition, having a Mac and a Wintel-PC, I can now play it on either, without paying more. So I am effectively getting 2 games for the price of one. This is the first time I can remember getting a major game for two platforms for one price. All the others I know/own I had to pay twice (or the game wasn't available for a second platform at all).
IMHO, this is a very good deal and it has yet to be beat. I can understand Wintel-only owners complaining though, if they have the feeling they have to pay for the Mac development too. But honestly I would think that this happens either way, the main game development costs get paid by the Wintel market, after all the graphics etc. are the same on the Mac. And a game like WC3 is so popular it would be worth developing for the Mac alone.
I don't think it takes longer either, if their project managers know their job they coordinate 2 teams working at the same time.
Note, I don't think there is a way around this problem. The article almost seems to suggest Google should allow people the opportunity to remove listings from the index. I don't know if that is feasible, but it is a thought.
A thought others had and solved long ago: For individual pages:
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX,NOARCHIVE"> And if WYSIWYWG web authoring software doesn't make this feature easily accessible to it's dumb users, is that Googles fault? I think not. The NOINDEX meta tag has been around longer than Google, it was already supported by Altavista even before Google existed.
Along the same line, if the NYT webmaster is to dumb to know about the robots exclusion standard, they should probably fire him or get him educated. But in any case they should stop whining. The search engine operators certainly give them more than plenty of options to control the indexing/archiving of their content, even though they could simply consider it public and not care at all.
After all, do they have any control over their printed issue? Oh gosh, someone could actually collect all these printed newspapers and after 50 years come back with something the NYT said in a nasty article and would rather have forgotten!
Summary: if you publish you should expect people to read and remember. Why is this even news?
The ACL implementations of all the major Unix vendors (Sun, HP, SGI, IBM, DEC/Compaq etc.) are unfortunately completely incompatible with each other despite a POSIX draft (and I won't even mention Windows ACLs). In addition the commands/library calls to use/change ACLs all have different names and options.
So unless you have a completely homogenous network there is currently no way to my knowledge that you can use ACLs across machines via NFS.
As already mentioned, ACLs give users working in groups more flexibility to share file access, rather than having the admin create a new group for each new permutation. They don't really enhance security.
While I agree completely that IPsec is the best way to go if you have admin access to both machines, consider an example where I just want to FTP some data to my server from a foreign machine (like from a clients site).
I certainly don't have the option of using IPsec in this case, but downloading an sftp-capable client to connect to ftp via stunnel is possible.
Please. Why doesn't anyone built something new and different? Why sure Mr. Dvorak, give me some of your cash and I'll build you something new and different.
The answer is: it doesn't pay to build something new and different if people don't want to buy it. And at least give Apple credit for trying, unlike some other companies I could mention who are simply copycats.
Why do I even bother to write this? As I said, -1 redundant.
For User Interfaces I can recommend Apple's Human Interface Guidelines. While not exactly a book and Apple oriented, it gives awesome insights into good UI practice and principles.
If you work with a Unix shell: one of the best references that I found: O'Reilly's Unix Power Tools. Some stuff may be outdated, but it's packed to the brim with useful, hands-on info and it's a very good bang for the buck.
Here's a paper from Ericcson that gives more detail about triangulation accuracy. Essentially the best you get is something like 100 meters in urban areas, depending on the method.
It also depends on the equipment used, but I assume that mobile phone network operators install that extra equipment anyway for location based services.
It's more complicated than that though. Think about a 4-lane highway where on some lanes the traffic is moving slowly (maybe because it's stacking back from a turnoff) and some moving very fast (like special lanes for cabs or cars with 2 or more drivers, etc.).
Or think of a side street with a delivery truck blocking the way, two cars are waiting and standing but two bicyclists are moving past fast and another pedestrian is walking. Would the system be able to tell that the street is completely blocked for cars and re-route you? I doubt it.
The location accuracy of phones is way to bad to be able to distinguish that. The best they can go for would be very broad traffic patterns and trends or very extreme conditions (like a highway being completely blocked). With the low accuracy it would actually be hard to tell wether a phone is in a car, on a bike, on rollerblades or even a fast-moving pedestrian. All this being in the city of course, but cities are most interesting because thats where most of the traffic is.
Another question would be wether the GSM antenna arrays can actually perform triangulations of all these phones all the time, or wether they'd only do that if there is an incoming or outgoing call.
It's definitely a neat idea. It would enable the mobile phone companies to generate some extra revenue by selling the traffic info.
1. I don't know if such a converter exists, but in any case it would probably be cheaper to simply buy 2 firewire cards (1 home, 1 work) or one firewire PCMCIA card.
2. There are about half a dozen utilities and scripts that will copy the songs back. Check the iPod sites like www.ipoding.com or www.ipodhacks.com for details.
And by the way: I absolutely don't understand why copying the files back to your computer should be a copyright issue. There a several legitime circumstances under which there is an absolute legal need to be able to copy the files back:
I recently "upgraded" from a Nomad Jukebox to an iPod, so copying the files back from the Jukebox to be able to transfer them to the iPod was a very real and legitimate requirement.
The iTunes approach of having a "mirror image" of the iPod on HD is just not realistic for people with older Macs that only have 6 GB of HD when their iPod has 10 GB.
And what about someone upgrading their Mac (and switching from OS 9 to OS X) but keeping their iPod?
After all, if one just wants to copy songs from someone else (illegally), there is always the option of mounting the pod as HD, plain copy the files, copy them to the HD at home and then adding them again via iTunes.
So this is no copy prevention at all, just a big inconvenience and Apple should get rid of it IMHO.
They are not laundering money. To quote from the article: "Fraud investigators at my credit card company say that since they got their money back they are not interested in further investigation."
And they're not actively destroying evidence either, I'd assume, they just keep these records for a limited time.
But all this doesn't matter and here's why:
If the merchant can't provide a valid customer signature with the credit card info, the entire risk of the transaction is with the merchant. Anyone who ever worked in e-business knows this is standard credit card company policy. They get their money back and it's the merchant who ends up being frauded.
Which, by coincidence, has lead many online merchants to check the billing address listed with your credit card record, or even stricter only ship to that billing address. Because this info is harder for simple scamsters to obtain (though not impossible, stealing your wallet will do, but then the card is usually blocked completely).
So the conclusion of this whole lame story is that the merchant of these rifle scopes loses a lot of money because they are not careful enough about their shipping addresses. And they will likely go out of business if they keep this up.
Big deal. Personally I think they deserve it, for stupidity even more than for helping possible terrorists if you ask me.
20-25% ? Nah. In Germany it's 17%. But considering that the 10 GB iPod for example is about 120 $ cheaper in the US (compared to Germany) and sells for 500$ that still leaves a gap of 35$. For the Macs this is usually even more as already observed.
Now you may say I shouldn't complain about 35$ with a product price of about 500, but in other industries (e.g. cars for example) manufacturers actually lower their price for countries with higher taxes so the price after tax is about the same.
Because if they didn't, people would just drive over the border into a neighboring EU country and buy their car cheaper there, which they actually do as soon as its worth it.
This trade-in deal stinks, just as former offerings of this kind did, just as Apples price policy in Europe always did (not their products though). They're not really known for being a bargain and I guess they have no intention to change that. Sigh.
They certainly seemed to have invented a nice tech gadet. However (I don't know about you) but I don't see how it should help much with carnivore, at least from the article. Doesn't give much tech detail. It seems better suited to control access to data on smart cards or something like that (e.g. "chip that destroys itself during unauthorized access attempt").
So what is this story all about? Media whoring and fundraising? Problem: we have invetented this cool technology, which noone is going to understand because it's a little complex and "people" (replace with "reporters" or "managers" as you see fit) are stupid. So how are we going to get some attention (and as a result, more funding)?
Solution: we apply our gadget to some area where it doesn't really fit in (just sort of will do), but which will result in loads of attention because we'll get connected with the latest buzzwords and issues.
Actually it would be an interesting project in itself to put up more machines: a Mac, a Windows box, and the various Unix/Linux GUIs (maybe one KDE and one Gnome for starters, everyone knows CDE suxs;-) ).
Then wait and see which one gets the most attention and watch how they are used by kids who have no prior exposure to any computer GUI.
That should tell us something about intuitive GUIs.
Hm, let's see. If I buy a computer, I get better performance each year for the same price. Ditto with cars (essentially).
Translated to Music containers we have:
- same performance for the last 15 years (CD stereo quality)
- rising prices (about twice as much as I used to pay for a vinyl album 15 years ago)
All this while the price for recording/mastering has been constantly dropping (digital equipment becomes cheaper and better), the price for CD manufacturing has been constantly dropping, transportation and storage is less (smaller size and weight) and cheap new flexible distribution mechanisms (Internet,CD burners etc.) have become available. (and btw. the quality of the content certainly hasn't improved either)
Now please tell me, where the fsck does all the extra money go? Video clips? Marketing drones?
Yeah right...
Truth is: the music industry's complaining is simply pathetic. Where is the innovation? Why can't I go to a record store, walk up to a big jukebox machine, listen to some songs and mix-n-match my own sampler to have it burned to a Audio CD on the spot, with individual prices for the songs (from different artists)?
And would I want to pay more for that? Of course not! I expect our world to improve, so I want more quality for a cheaper price. In other business areas companies have no problem delivering both and if the music industry can't deliver that then it's about fscking time they went out of business and were replaced with another business model.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly, the problem is rather signal reflection off buildings, etc.
Thus you have several "copies" or echos of a signal overlaying each other, each with a different path and travel time to the receiver. If you move (drive in a car), the path lengths of these signals shift all the time and the outcoming result is a horrible mess.
Difficult to decode depending on your modulation.
Most of the tests I know where 802.11b is used in cars, it works as long as they have clear line of sight, because the direct signal is stronger than the echos. But as soon as a big truck moves in between you, thats pretty much it.
The system implies that anything not sent by a human being is spam. This is not necessarily the case today. A lot of today's e-mail communications are auto-generated.
The Tagged Message Delivery Agent provides solutions to this problem and more. Basically it's a whitelisting mechanism, if the sender is unknown, the mail is "parked", a confirm request is sent and the mail is delivered upon (human) confirmation.
This leaves problems with auto-generated mails as you describe, but TMDA has more options:
1. you can use a mailadress that is only valid for a certain amount of time
2. you can use a mailadress that is only valid for mail from a specific sender domain/mailadress
So to order something you'd use one of the above and thus avoid sending out a confirmation request. At the same time you can make sure that an adress is valid only for the relationship you intended it for, e.g. if they use it after a transaction is over or sell it to adress harvesters it will not work.
Check it out, it's really a clever concept IMHO. Of course I completely agree that this shouldn't keep us from fighting spam on other fronts, using RBLs and legal means in addition to filters.
I just think whitelisting works far better than content filtering.
Of course these are servers, not desktop machines. Nevertheless they take a bite out of the MS market.
You cannot see the print, only feel them when you wear the ring (like they feel each others hands).
The rings are made of some kind of special alloy (titanium or something, I forgot which), they are light and look rather simple but very pretty.
Of course this guy is an engineer, as you may have guessed. :-)
What a nice example. Unfortunately the IT crew does not get any "respect" for making things work properly. As opposed to the pilots, the people who use the IT infrastructure just take it for granted that everything works, think that IT infrastructure is easy and needs no maintenance at all.
Even a car which is a whole lot less complex than any of todays IT infrastructes needs maintenance, people understand that. So where is the recognition that you actually need skilled people to build and run any infrastructure as complex as large IT systems?
One reason your pilots are more aware of this is because their fucking life depends on the ground crew. Guess what, if you'd start to tie managers pay checks to performance of the IT systems the should be responsible for (but never really are being held responsible for), this would change really quick and clean up a lot of bullshitting.
Easy as pie.
Yeah dude, old Julius Caesar figured this one out too, he called it "bread and games". So in other words, give your people jobs/consumer goods and entertainment and you can pretty much rule as you like.
Interesting to note though, that it was the King of Bhutan who resisted this for so long. Sounds like a good leader to me (tries to do what's in the best interest of his people). So maybe all is not lost for Bhutan.
Consider the "value" you get when buying Windows or a Linux distro. Now consider all the money the vendors/distributors make and how much "value" they provide / are able to produce with that money.
If we assume for a moment that the "value" you get from Windows or Linux is roughly equal, but producing that value for Windows takes 200 times as much money, can we conclude that in the overall production circle, Windows' price/performance ratio sucks big time?
In other words, after raking in so much money, you'd expect the Microsofties to deliver more "value" than that.
If you look at it from an economic or business model point of view (which should be the analysts job, no?), under the Microsoft business model it costs 200 times as much to produce something of the same value. So I say it's about time analysts devalued MS, since they are 200 times less efficient than the Linux distro vendors (who manage to produce the same output for less).
I realize that the math is slightly flawed, since there are some hidden development costs in Linux that do not enter this calculation. But the basic argument still holds true.
IMHO, government as a representative of the common interest has every right to impose regulations, if it deems them necessary for the common good. That is what democracy is all about.
Wether the possible expenses caused by these regulations have to be covered by an individual, group or society as a whole and to what extent is a completely different issue and could well differ on a case-by-case basis.
The main point of the article is that common interest should outweigh individual interest. Not always, but it should be more balanced. The articles assessment is that it's currently out of balance favouring (big) corporate interests and I think that assessment is correct.
How is it any different from seeing a new toy that a friend, co-worker, or even complete stranger has and deciding you might want to buy one? Who was the first person you ever saw with a Palm Pilot? Did they tell you how much it costs and where you can get one? How's that any different?
The difference is that these companies did not spend 5 million $ to promote their product. Consider they'll be selling 50000 of these phones. We'll each one of them just got 100$ more expensive just so they can break even with their marketing expense.
I would rather have a real friend tell me about a product he likes or maybe a review on Toms hardware or Anandtech, for free. I would rather have a genuine free review like that, because the item is truly cool and 100 bucks cheaper. That's what I want. :-)
Resistance is futile. You too will want a cellphone one day (your kids certainly do).
Harris figures Americans tend to trust what they read more than Europeans, who know a misleading statement when they see one.
Now, applying the same insightful reasoning as above, we get:
If your readers are European, to get the same amount of attention you have to hype things more out of proportion (while making it sound real at the same time).
That essentially seems to sum it up. The statement lends itself to other fun implications and conclusions which I will avoid here, I'm not trying to start an offtopic flame war. :-)
In addition, having a Mac and a Wintel-PC, I can now play it on either, without paying more. So I am effectively getting 2 games for the price of one. This is the first time I can remember getting a major game for two platforms for one price. All the others I know/own I had to pay twice (or the game wasn't available for a second platform at all).
IMHO, this is a very good deal and it has yet to be beat. I can understand Wintel-only owners complaining though, if they have the feeling they have to pay for the Mac development too.
But honestly I would think that this happens either way, the main game development costs get paid by the Wintel market, after all the graphics etc. are the same on the Mac. And a game like WC3 is so popular it would be worth developing for the Mac alone.
I don't think it takes longer either, if their project managers know their job they coordinate 2 teams working at the same time.
A thought others had and solved long ago:
For individual pages: <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX,NOARCHIVE">
And if WYSIWYWG web authoring software doesn't make this feature easily accessible to it's dumb users, is that Googles fault? I think not. The NOINDEX meta tag has been around longer than Google, it was already supported by Altavista even before Google existed.
Along the same line, if the NYT webmaster is to dumb to know about the robots exclusion standard, they should probably fire him or get him educated. But in any case they should stop whining. The search engine operators certainly give them more than plenty of options to control the indexing/archiving of their content, even though they could simply consider it public and not care at all.
After all, do they have any control over their printed issue? Oh gosh, someone could actually collect all these printed newspapers and after 50 years come back with something the NYT said in a nasty article and would rather have forgotten!
Summary: if you publish you should expect people to read and remember. Why is this even news?
So unless you have a completely homogenous network there is currently no way to my knowledge that you can use ACLs across machines via NFS.
As already mentioned, ACLs give users working in groups more flexibility to share file access, rather than having the admin create a new group for each new permutation. They don't really enhance security.
While I agree completely that IPsec is the best way to go if you have admin access to both machines, consider an example where I just want to FTP some data to my server from a foreign machine (like from a clients site).
I certainly don't have the option of using IPsec in this case, but downloading an sftp-capable client to connect to ftp via stunnel is possible.
As always, ymmv, depends on what you want to do.
And this one should therefore be -1, redundant.
Please. Why doesn't anyone built something new and different? Why sure Mr. Dvorak, give me some of your cash and I'll build you something new and different.
The answer is: it doesn't pay to build something new and different if people don't want to buy it. And at least give Apple credit for trying, unlike some other companies I could mention who are simply copycats.
Why do I even bother to write this? As I said, -1 redundant.
If you work with a Unix shell: one of the best references that I found: O'Reilly's Unix Power Tools. Some stuff may be outdated, but it's packed to the brim with useful, hands-on info and it's a very good bang for the buck.
Here's a paper from Ericcson that gives more detail about triangulation accuracy. Essentially the best you get is something like 100 meters in urban areas, depending on the method.
It also depends on the equipment used, but I assume that mobile phone network operators install that extra equipment anyway for location based services.
It's more complicated than that though. Think about a 4-lane highway where on some lanes the traffic is moving slowly (maybe because it's stacking back from a turnoff) and some moving very fast (like special lanes for cabs or cars with 2 or more drivers, etc.).
Or think of a side street with a delivery truck blocking the way, two cars are waiting and standing but two bicyclists are moving past fast and another pedestrian is walking. Would the system be able to tell that the street is completely blocked for cars and re-route you? I doubt it.
The location accuracy of phones is way to bad to be able to distinguish that. The best they can go for would be very broad traffic patterns and trends or very extreme conditions (like a highway being completely blocked). With the low accuracy it would actually be hard to tell wether a phone is in a car, on a bike, on rollerblades or even a fast-moving pedestrian. All this being in the city of course, but cities are most interesting because thats where most of the traffic is.
Another question would be wether the GSM antenna arrays can actually perform triangulations of all these phones all the time, or wether they'd only do that if there is an incoming or outgoing call.
It's definitely a neat idea. It would enable the mobile phone companies to generate some extra revenue by selling the traffic info.
1. I don't know if such a converter exists, but in any case it would probably be cheaper to simply buy 2 firewire cards (1 home, 1 work) or one firewire PCMCIA card.
2. There are about half a dozen utilities and scripts that will copy the songs back. Check the iPod sites like www.ipoding.com or www.ipodhacks.com for details.
And by the way: I absolutely don't understand why copying the files back to your computer should be a copyright issue. There a several legitime circumstances under which there is an absolute legal need to be able to copy the files back:
I recently "upgraded" from a Nomad Jukebox to an iPod, so copying the files back from the Jukebox to be able to transfer them to the iPod was a very real and legitimate requirement.
The iTunes approach of having a "mirror image" of the iPod on HD is just not realistic for people with older Macs that only have 6 GB of HD when their iPod has 10 GB.
And what about someone upgrading their Mac (and switching from OS 9 to OS X) but keeping their iPod?
After all, if one just wants to copy songs from someone else (illegally), there is always the option of mounting the pod as HD, plain copy the files, copy them to the HD at home and then adding them again via iTunes.
So this is no copy prevention at all, just a big inconvenience and Apple should get rid of it IMHO.
They are not laundering money. To quote from the article: "Fraud investigators at my credit card company say that since they got their money back they are not interested in further investigation."
And they're not actively destroying evidence either, I'd assume, they just keep these records for a limited time.
But all this doesn't matter and here's why:
If the merchant can't provide a valid customer signature with the credit card info, the entire risk of the transaction is with the merchant. Anyone who ever worked in e-business knows this is standard credit card company policy. They get their money back and it's the merchant who ends up being frauded.
Which, by coincidence, has lead many online merchants to check the billing address listed with your credit card record, or even stricter only ship to that billing address. Because this info is harder for simple scamsters to obtain (though not impossible, stealing your wallet will do, but then the card is usually blocked completely).
So the conclusion of this whole lame story is that the merchant of these rifle scopes loses a lot of money because they are not careful enough about their shipping addresses. And they will likely go out of business if they keep this up.
Big deal. Personally I think they deserve it, for stupidity even more than for helping possible terrorists if you ask me.
Now you may say I shouldn't complain about 35$ with a product price of about 500, but in other industries (e.g. cars for example) manufacturers actually lower their price for countries with higher taxes so the price after tax is about the same.
Because if they didn't, people would just drive over the border into a neighboring EU country and buy their car cheaper there, which they actually do as soon as its worth it.
This trade-in deal stinks, just as former offerings of this kind did, just as Apples price policy in Europe always did (not their products though). They're not really known for being a bargain and I guess they have no intention to change that. Sigh.
So what is this story all about? Media whoring and fundraising?
Problem: we have invetented this cool technology, which noone is going to understand because it's a little complex and "people" (replace with "reporters" or "managers" as you see fit) are stupid. So how are we going to get some attention (and as a result, more funding)?
Solution: we apply our gadget to some area where it doesn't really fit in (just sort of will do), but which will result in loads of attention because we'll get connected with the latest buzzwords and issues.
Problem solved.
Then wait and see which one gets the most attention and watch how they are used by kids who have no prior exposure to any computer GUI.
That should tell us something about intuitive GUIs.
Translated to Music containers we have:
- same performance for the last 15 years (CD stereo quality)
- rising prices (about twice as much as I used to pay for a vinyl album 15 years ago)
All this while the price for recording/mastering has been constantly dropping (digital equipment becomes cheaper and better), the price for CD manufacturing has been constantly dropping, transportation and storage is less (smaller size and weight) and cheap new flexible distribution mechanisms (Internet,CD burners etc.) have become available.
(and btw. the quality of the content certainly hasn't improved either)
Now please tell me, where the fsck does all the extra money go? Video clips? Marketing drones?
Yeah right...
Truth is: the music industry's complaining is simply pathetic. Where is the innovation? Why can't I go to a record store, walk up to a big jukebox machine, listen to some songs and mix-n-match my own sampler to have it burned to a Audio CD on the spot, with individual prices for the songs (from different artists)?
And would I want to pay more for that? Of course not! I expect our world to improve, so I want more quality for a cheaper price. In other business areas companies have no problem delivering both and if the music industry can't deliver that then it's about fscking time they went out of business and were replaced with another business model.