And spread the word. It's all very well a few thousand geeks boycotting them but for it to really hurt we need to explain it (in suitably gentle terms) to the normals.
I'm liking these shirts http://www.cafepress.com/mojocrash as a conversation starter - although I give it about two days before Sony have them taken down.
We need to find a way to communicate just how outrageous this is to the people who form the bulk of Sony's market - i.e. NOT US.
It's just reminded me of a 6502 debugger I wrote over 20 years ago that could step back as well as forwards. It was a bit slow because it actually did store the state of anything that changed during the execution of any instruction. It also didn't handle changes to hardware state or calls to OS functions that had side effects. Oh, and it needed tons of memory:)
In spite of all those things it was still extremely useful. As they say though, the devil's in the detail. Getting it to work in a general purpose way and reasonably quickly is a hell of an achievement.
Bleedingly obvious and written in sufficiently pompous style that you feel obliged to read the whole thing just to verify that there really is nothing there that hasn't been common knowledge for the better part of the last decade.
Of course in those days people actually built their sites using static HTML...
1) The picture wasn't necessarily displayed in the browser 2) TBL was developing the browser himself so maybe he asked for the image/to use/ as test data.
...is these guys. They do a Linux based sixteen channel system. I think that, as standard, it only archives for a week, but I guess you could just put a bigger drive in it.
Hmm. At the moment we buy many, many CDs at work and rip them onto our MP3 server as soon as they arrive for ease of listening in the office. Under this system the listener / purchased CD ratio is preserved, our enjoyment is enhanced and more CDs are sold.
Now, let's assume that someone will find a way of creating faithful digital copies of even these protected disks. If we can't rip our own purchased CDs but can find ripped copies on the 'net what are we going to do? I suppose we might continue to buy the originals while obtaining our MP3 copies from the 'net, but we might just forget about buying the originals.
This could be a huge own goal for the record companies. At least I hope it will be.
The fact that the Internet and associated protocols where designed with redundancy in mind hasn't / won't guarantee that any particular manifestation of the Internet at any particular point in time will actually be redundant. As other posters have commented there is still redundancy, but it's now commercial strength redundancy rather than military strength and falling all the time.
Fujitsu are the ones for us. Big stack of them. In the last two years we've lost something like eight Fujitsu drives of various vintages (ranging from brand new to about three years old) and only one non-Fujitsu drive (an IBM that I think was physically abused).
I've been thinking of asking Fujitsu for some sort of compensation, but I assume they'd offer replacement drives and, quite frankly, I don't want them.
I'm currently working on one of the drivers and have made pretty reasonable progress reverse engineering the data format. I'm working on the fine details of all the non-image communication that passes between the camera and the host now. Anyone who's interested is welcome to lend a hand...
I wasn't aware that people had actually been frightened off by DMCA/UCITA -- do you have any references for this? Not doubting you; just hadn't heard about it. Vista Imaging do claim (here and here) that they don't want to release a driver because of their proprietary image encoding format (which they style as 'compression' -- it's actually a moderately novel way of encoding a chrominance sub channel in the luminance data without increasing its size). Obviously I'd be interested to hear about any legal problems, and also interested to hear how they might affect me, given that I'm in the UK.
I think it's clear that the right thing to do with the Usenet archive is to make it
accessible to all
immutable
From a social point of view one of the most important attributes of Usenet compared with, say, the web, is its historical completeness. The archive as a whole is the most far reaching exercise in collaborative authorship (by several orders of magnitude) that society has ever seen and it must be preserved.
Like many geeks I'm broadly pro-Google and am still reasonably confident that they will do the 'right thing' with respect to creating an acceptable UI for their copy of the archive, but it's wrong, and I suspect that they might well agree as much, for any commercial interest to be the sole guardian of such an important historical document.
My aims for Dela would be to develop the software and protocols that will make it possible to maintain a distributed, redundant archive of all existing and new usenet posts. This archive will be open, extensible but immutable. The sofware that supports the archive will, of course, be free in every sense.
I don't doubt that the technology for Dela will be interesting and challenging, but the real point is to preserve the history.
For Bobby compliance I'd be inclined to look at the BBC's Betsie or our own Patsie which will shortly be available under some free license, most probably GPL.
Quite a lot of work has been done on this in the UK, particularly for vision impaired users of sites. We do a lot of work for local and central government in the UK and the majority of our clients now ask us for screen reader friendly versions of their sites.
One simple but surprisingly effective solution is to post-process the HTML through, for example, a CGI script that strips out the majority of the formatting information and allows page colours and text size to be modified.
One freely available CGI script that does this is the BBC's Betsie and another will be our own Patsie which will shortly be available under some free license, most probably GPL.
Betsie's great but it doesn't work on the infernal IIS, which unfortunately we have to accomodate from time to time, so we're developing Patsie to rectify that.
This really is excellent news. Presumably when speed limits are applied automatically the police will scale down their enforcement efforts accordingly -- they won't have the budget to pay for traffic cars because they won't be able to harvest motorists for revenue -- when that happens anyone who disables the speed control gear in their car will have free reign of the highway! Yippee!
Oh good grief. Why "obviously the pages were fast compared to Java servlets"? Without any corroborating evidence it sounds rather as if you've swallowed the MS bait hook line and sinker.
You can configure an Airport fine using FreeBase. Windows only unfortunately, but I suppose you're more likely to have a box that will run Windows than a spare Mac.
Slashdot Mirror
And spread the word. It's all very well a few thousand geeks boycotting them but for it to really hurt we need to explain it (in suitably gentle terms) to the normals.
I'm liking these shirts http://www.cafepress.com/mojocrash as a conversation starter - although I give it about two days before Sony have them taken down.
We need to find a way to communicate just how outrageous this is to the people who form the bulk of Sony's market - i.e. NOT US.
And the other meaning of 'craft' is pluralised normally - as in 'arts & crafts'. I've no idea why - just thought I'd point out the typo though :)
is 'craft', not 'crafts' :)
It's just reminded me of a 6502 debugger I wrote over 20 years ago that could step back as well as forwards. It was a bit slow because it actually did store the state of anything that changed during the execution of any instruction. It also didn't handle changes to hardware state or calls to OS functions that had side effects. Oh, and it needed tons of memory :)
In spite of all those things it was still extremely useful. As they say though, the devil's in the detail. Getting it to work in a general purpose way and reasonably quickly is a hell of an achievement.
...this yet?
No, they're saying that CDs /do/ use magnetism - perhaps it's a typo for HD.
They're also saying that each cell can record a byte when it's clear from the context that they're talking about a bit.
Presumably it's a declaration of intent :)
You must be familiar with that school of web design?
The EduVision site is available in German, English and Swahili.
:)
No it isn't. Only the English link works. Quality fact checking as ever
Bleedingly obvious and written in sufficiently pompous style that you feel obliged to read the whole thing just to verify that there really is nothing there that hasn't been common knowledge for the better part of the last decade.
Of course in those days people actually built their sites using static HTML...
1) The picture wasn't necessarily displayed in the browser /to use/ as test data.
2) TBL was developing the browser himself so maybe he asked for the image
It's not HTML, it's HTTP. And they haven't patented part of the specification they've patented a use of the specification.
...is these guys. They do a Linux based sixteen channel system. I think that, as standard, it only archives for a week, but I guess you could just put a bigger drive in it.
Now, let's assume that someone will find a way of creating faithful digital copies of even these protected disks. If we can't rip our own purchased CDs but can find ripped copies on the 'net what are we going to do? I suppose we might continue to buy the originals while obtaining our MP3 copies from the 'net, but we might just forget about buying the originals.
This could be a huge own goal for the record companies. At least I hope it will be.
The fact that the Internet and associated protocols where designed with redundancy in mind hasn't / won't guarantee that any particular manifestation of the Internet at any particular point in time will actually be redundant. As other posters have commented there is still redundancy, but it's now commercial strength redundancy rather than military strength and falling all the time.
I've been thinking of asking Fujitsu for some sort of compensation, but I assume they'd offer replacement drives and, quite frankly, I don't want them.
ATM had a rather cool CCTV security system that's Linux based.
I wasn't aware that people had actually been frightened off by DMCA/UCITA -- do you have any references for this? Not doubting you; just hadn't heard about it. Vista Imaging do claim (here and here) that they don't want to release a driver because of their proprietary image encoding format (which they style as 'compression' -- it's actually a moderately novel way of encoding a chrominance sub channel in the luminance data without increasing its size). Obviously I'd be interested to hear about any legal problems, and also interested to hear how they might affect me, given that I'm in the UK.
- accessible to all
- immutable
From a social point of view one of the most important attributes of Usenet compared with, say, the web, is its historical completeness. The archive as a whole is the most far reaching exercise in collaborative authorship (by several orders of magnitude) that society has ever seen and it must be preserved.Like many geeks I'm broadly pro-Google and am still reasonably confident that they will do the 'right thing' with respect to creating an acceptable UI for their copy of the archive, but it's wrong, and I suspect that they might well agree as much, for any commercial interest to be the sole guardian of such an important historical document.
My aims for Dela would be to develop the software and protocols that will make it possible to maintain a distributed, redundant archive of all existing and new usenet posts. This archive will be open, extensible but immutable. The sofware that supports the archive will, of course, be free in every sense.
I don't doubt that the technology for Dela will be interesting and challenging, but the real point is to preserve the history.
How did this get here? Slash bug or finger trouble?
One simple but surprisingly effective solution is to post-process the HTML through, for example, a CGI script that strips out the majority of the formatting information and allows page colours and text size to be modified.
One freely available CGI script that does this is the BBC's Betsie and another will be our own Patsie which will shortly be available under some free license, most probably GPL.
Betsie's great but it doesn't work on the infernal IIS, which unfortunately we have to accomodate from time to time, so we're developing Patsie to rectify that.
This really is excellent news. Presumably when speed limits are applied automatically the police will scale down their enforcement efforts accordingly -- they won't have the budget to pay for traffic cars because they won't be able to harvest motorists for revenue -- when that happens anyone who disables the speed control gear in their car will have free reign of the highway! Yippee!
Oh good grief. Why "obviously the pages were fast compared to Java servlets"? Without any corroborating evidence it sounds rather as if you've swallowed the MS bait hook line and sinker.
I know it's a bit trite, but the source is there if you want to add those features yourself.