The fairtunes site is interesting for pro-music-sharing info. Fairtunes wants to facilitate payments from napster users directly to the artists, cutting out the RIAA and other middlemen. (About $9000 donated and counting...) They have a database of artists and a slash - based news site.
At this link there's a discussion of a pro-napster song that played on NPR. The author of "The Napster Rap" is Eric Schwartz.
They also have a list of links including "Recording Industry Math & Info" links and "Writings on voluntary payments/tipping".
-- Q: What do you get when a Postmodernist joins the Mafia?
This Princeton FAQ makes the scientists' position a bit clearer, before they received the SDMI letter.
Q. What about the cash prize offered by SDMI?
SDMI did offer a small cash prize to be split among everybody who defeated at least one of the six technologies. However, to be eligible for the prize, researchers had to sign a confidentiality agreement that prohibited any discussion of their findings with the public. The terms of the challenge also allowed researchers to publish their findings if they decided to forgo the cash prize. We decided from the beginning that we were more interested in publishing our results than accepting any share of the cash prize.
Q. Didn't the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) criminalize the study of these kinds of technologies in the United States?
Fortunately, the DMCA did not apply to this challenge, since SDMI granted explicit permission to study their technologies. We are not sure whether it would have been legal to study these technologies outside the context of this challenge. We think the DMCA, by criminalizing some kinds of study of important technologies, represents an "ignorance is bliss" approach to technological copyright enforcement, which will not work in the long run. We lobbied against certain aspects of the DMCA while it was before Congress, and we still consider it to be a seriously flawed law.
Above, we mentioned the important role of analysis in the design of security systems. The main problem with the DMCA is that it hinders this analysis, restricting it in order to provide an extra layer of legal protection for existing copyright systems. But this causes the scientific process to stagnate. Imagine a federal law making it illegal for anyone (including Consumer Reports) to purposefully cause an automobile collision. While this may be a well-intentioned attempt to stop road-rage, it also bans automobile crash-testing, ultimately leading to unsafe vehicles and the inability to learn how to make vehicles safe in general. The situation with the DMCA is analogous.
-- Q: What do you get when a Postmodernist joins the Mafia?
There's always "The Neverending Tale," a web-based text adventure game for kids. (Currently at over 50,000 pages, almost all contributed by visitors from the web). We designed it for kids, and moderate for appropriate content. The design goals are to encourage creativity, cooperation, and interest in reading and writing.
We are actively soliciting programmers to help improve the classroom version, drop me an email if you are interested!
-- Q: What do you get when a Postmodernist joins the Mafia?
I think this is what you're looking for; I just wrote this for somebody and I was thinking of open-sourcing the scripts. Actually, in its current incarnation it is called "Story Story Die", but the idea is, I think, the same.
-- Q: What do you get when a Postmodernist joins the Mafia?
I've seen more elegant code on perlmonks.org than anywhere
else. I've learned a lot there. People submit their craft, and more advanced disciples of perl comment on it and occasionally turn it into beautiful code.
-- Q: What do you get when a Postmodernist joins the Mafia?
Perhaps you are thinking of
Linux: The Complete Reference, published by Walnut Creek CDROM Books, 1997. ISBN 1-57176-199-3. 2032 pages including indeces.
It contains all the HOWTOs and MINI-HOWTOs circa 1997, Linux Installation and Getting Started Guide 2.3 by Matt Welsh, Linux Users' Guide Beta V. 1 by Larry Greenfield, Linux System Administrator's Guide 0.4 by Lars Wirzenius, Linux Network Administrators' Guide 1.0 by Olaf Kirsh, and Linux Programmers' Guide V. 0.4 by Sven Goldt, et al.
It's sitting on my shelf. It has occasionally been more useful than the online HOWTOs, but mostly, it just goes to show how out-of-date a 2,000 page book can become in three years.:-)
-- Q: What do you get when a Postmodernist joins the Mafia?
On the other hand, it's simple for them to encode the URL with better tracking information, rather than the shortest possible domain name that somebody is willing to type. Translating to "I read this ad in the October issue of Wired / Cosmo / whatever" so they can track the "dead tree referer". For marketroid purposes, that is potentially much more valuable, and for privacy reasons, it's potentially more dangerous, since I don't really think Hostess Cakes needs to know that I saw their ad in Cosmo. (To take an impossible example).
-- Q: What do you get when a Postmodernist joins the Mafia?
Hm, I apologize if we're talking apples and oranges- but can't you edit your/etc/aliases file and run 'newaliases' to redirect mail to user@blah to any particular file?
"The United States Postal Service deployed over 900 Linux-based systems throughout the United States in 1997 to automatically recognize the destination addresses on mail pieces. Each system consists of five dual Pentium Pro 200MHz (PP200) computers and one single PP200, all running Linux.
"One of the five Linux boxes has a monitor, keyboard, mouse, CD-ROM and floppy--the other four are headless. Each has 128MB RAM and a 2.5GB hard drive. The mail pieces are scanned at 212dpi at a rate of 12 per second. The binary image is sent to one of the Linux boxes via a custom cable and receiver board. The board packs the bits and uses DMA (direct memory access) to transfer the data over the PCI bus. The receiving computer runs a process that compresses the images and routes them via Ethernet to one of 10 identical processes, two for each CPU, that do the hand-print recognition and machine-print recognition. Those algorithms recognize the text from the image in less than a second and return the ASCII results to a database on a separate computer that looks up the zip code. The slave computers are connected on a subnet with the master which has a second Ethernet card connected to the rest of the computers associated with the scanner. The local network is 10Mbps Ethernet and handles the compressed binary images sent to the slaves and the ASCII results received from the slaves. "
I agree that standardized interfaces to the filesystem would make people much happier- what I wouldn't give in windows for a "hack" that forces all programs to use the same interface for the file-choosing dialog. Does anybody know if one exists?
An infosoup is a great idea but you can't expect the user to issue what amounts to a database request every time they want to edit a document or something.
Why not? If you (the user) don't know quite what you're looking for, you basically have to run a database request to find it.
One solution could be based on the 'precompiled search' paradigm.
In *nix I used to use 'find' all the time. When I learned about 'locate' it made my life much easier. At least when I know the file's name. I do nearly all of my file-choosing in the command-line world because it's standardized. And much faster than messing with the graphical equivalents.
Anyone got any good examples of interfaces for property-rich data without a strict single hierarchy?
Sure. Drill-downs are not (necessarily) heirarchal. Plus, Allow the user to define commonly used shortcuts- containing the attributes to form a search. Such as "This month; refered from banner-ad-show.cgi" and when they select a shortcut, perform a database lookup.
...and what kind of communities do we want online anyway? "Weblogs" and other filtered news fora (including slashdot) have become very popular, for obvious reasons. They fulfil part of the promise of the web to connect and inform people in new and interesting ways. Is this the kind of community we want online? Do you think there is something better?
Weblogs force the reader's attention on only one or a few sources, rather than the tens of thousands of available sources. Dave Winer (of davenet, the weblog of all weblogs) suggests that weblog owners regularly profile other weblogs, however I do not believe that gets at the really interesting content that I'm sure is out there. I have "mindshare" for about five daily sources of information. I definitely do not want to spend my day searching and browsing the web, but I do want to see the best ideas out there. Any ideas for an interface that would deepen the weblog experience to form richer communities?
I believe that Mr. Neilson has registered his views on patents: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/980531.html
"In general, the Web is different from many earlier changes in the business environment in allowing for patents for many of the new business strategies because they are supported by technology. I strongly recommend that companies start treating the Web as their primary strategic business driver such that they can take part in this patent bonanza. The smallest hesitation will allow your competitors to collect the patents on everything you need to survive. Futurism is no longer a luxury: it's a necessary defensive measure to get your patents in place.
Mr. Neilson, I would like to ask- have you read The Cathedral and the Bazaar, and if so do you believe that the open source software movement can make a commercial or social change in the "marketplace of ideas", and finally, if so, how can you reconcile the open-source coder's desire to collaboratively trade ideas and code against the business strategy of definsively patenting all potentially useful intellectual property?
NSI/internic's stock is through the roof- $258 per share and the company is worth nearly 9 billion dollars.
This is going to change eventually when investors realize any company with a brain is transfering their domains away from Internic. Want to assist in this process?
A proposal:
register NSIsucks.com; write HOWTO instructions for switching to any of the other registrars; put up a signup page for people who have transferred their domains; put up a press area for when the business press comes to visit.
Publicize nsisucks.com in tech and ISP media (letters to the editor, press releases). When we get enough buzz there (because they already know the truth about NSI) notify the business press that we have 100,000 former NSI customers who have switched to other registrars.
At this point I have registered two domains through NSI/internic and two domains through register.com. It is the difference between night and day.
Now that the Internic database has been opened up (by federal order) I have transferred one domain's registrar from NSI to register.com, which took some hoop-jumping but it was worth it. (I believe the hoops were mandated by the NSI in their agreement with the feds to open up the registry process). I had to sign some papers in front of a notary at my credit union, which took ~10 minutes of my time. A week later, the domain is AWAY from NSI's sticky fingers.
Actually, register.com made a mistake, and typed in my credit card number incorrectly. When I called their 800 number, I spoke to a human in three minutes, she apologized for their error, and fixed it in another three minutes.
I will be changing the one remaining domain to register.com shortly.
The funniest thing is I've been getting ads from NSI for discounted registration. Ha. They want me to register for ten years. Ha ha. --
FWIW I think the GPL story was perfectly appropriate, and there was even some good discussion brought up here. It's too bad people are getting hot and bothered. Lots of readers had a bad monday I guess.
That doesn't excuse swearing and personal attacks. Some people have no manners.
Yep- I've used the Datapro Master View CS-106 with no problems. It controls six computers with one box, or up to 216 computers with three levels of cascading. It has switches on the box or a keyboard shortcut (ctl-alt-shift [1-6] return)
Presently, register.com is not accepting registrar transfers. In the very near future, register.com will allow domain name registrar's to be transferred. More information and procedures for transferring registrars will be announced.
This page seems to only be available to people who have registered domains with register.net.
No, this isn't precisely what you were asking, but I think it's relevent:
Phil Greenspun and Jin Choi wrote a server uptime monitoring tcl script which queries (your|my|any) web-server every 15 minutes and sends an email if the server seems to be down.
http://uptime.arsdigita.com/uptime/
Just sign up with an email address and a URL, and you're good to go.
The tcl code is free and open-source, although he says, "The software is pretty simple. The hard part is keeping a relational database up and running 7 days/week, 24 hours/day." It's basically a live demo for Greenspun's book on databases, which uses AOL's server for some reason. It makes a cool live demo, anyway.
I was thinking recently that this service hosted redundently on 5 or 10 sites on different routes across the country (world?) could make a useful service, a personalized "internet weather report" for the total cost of keeping 5 to 10 servers up and running. I can't imagine they would use much bandwidth.
I know of a few companies that will monitor your network for $50/mo. but they do not tell you what networks are slow reaching your site, so far as I know.
here in Ithaca NY, I use Support Services Alliance (SSA), which provides me with Major Medical ($2200 deductable) and provides various business services like legal searches for small businesses. Total cost, $89/mo. plus $15/year.
I thought the message boards were too similar to simply be a coincidence!
It seems Andover has been using Slash code for their bulletin boards for at least a week. I happened to look at the andover news site (www.andovernews.com) and their message board had the nearly exact same look and feel as Slashdot (threaded), down to the "Anonymous Coward" for people who post without an email address.
Hm... Promise us you won't begin to use "leverage" as a verb, OK?
I noticed that Andover now has a press release on their front page as well. Andover sounds pretty stuffy in comparison. (http://www.andovernews.com/cgi-bin/news_story.pl? 3159,topstories)
Congrats Rob and Hemos! I hope we will get to see the geek side of Andover.net as well.
Slashdot Mirror
At this link there's a discussion of a pro-napster song that played on NPR. The author of "The Napster Rap" is Eric Schwartz.
They also have a list of links including "Recording Industry Math & Info" links and "Writings on voluntary payments/tipping".
--
Q: What do you get when a Postmodernist joins the Mafia?
Q. What about the cash prize offered by SDMI?
SDMI did offer a small cash prize to be split among everybody who defeated at least one of the six technologies. However, to be eligible for the prize, researchers had to sign a confidentiality agreement that prohibited any discussion of their findings with the public. The terms of the challenge also allowed researchers to publish their findings if they decided to forgo the cash prize. We decided from the beginning that we were more interested in publishing our results than accepting any share of the cash prize.
Q. Didn't the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) criminalize the study of these kinds of technologies in the United States?
Fortunately, the DMCA did not apply to this challenge, since SDMI granted explicit permission to study their technologies. We are not sure whether it would have been legal to study these technologies outside the context of this challenge. We think the DMCA, by criminalizing some kinds of study of important technologies, represents an "ignorance is bliss" approach to technological copyright enforcement, which will not work in the long run. We lobbied against certain aspects of the DMCA while it was before Congress, and we still consider it to be a seriously flawed law.
Above, we mentioned the important role of analysis in the design of security systems. The main problem with the DMCA is that it hinders this analysis, restricting it in order to provide an extra layer of legal protection for existing copyright systems. But this causes the scientific process to stagnate. Imagine a federal law making it illegal for anyone (including Consumer Reports) to purposefully cause an automobile collision. While this may be a well-intentioned attempt to stop road-rage, it also bans automobile crash-testing, ultimately leading to unsafe vehicles and the inability to learn how to make vehicles safe in general. The situation with the DMCA is analogous.
--
Q: What do you get when a Postmodernist joins the Mafia?
We are actively soliciting programmers to help improve the classroom version, drop me an email if you are interested!
--
Q: What do you get when a Postmodernist joins the Mafia?
I think this is what you're looking for; I just wrote this for somebody and I was thinking of open-sourcing the scripts. Actually, in its current incarnation it is called "Story Story Die", but the idea is, I think, the same.
--
Q: What do you get when a Postmodernist joins the Mafia?
--
Q: What do you get when a Postmodernist joins the Mafia?
It contains all the HOWTOs and MINI-HOWTOs circa 1997, Linux Installation and Getting Started Guide 2.3 by Matt Welsh, Linux Users' Guide Beta V. 1 by Larry Greenfield, Linux System Administrator's Guide 0.4 by Lars Wirzenius, Linux Network Administrators' Guide 1.0 by Olaf Kirsh, and Linux Programmers' Guide V. 0.4 by Sven Goldt, et al.
It's sitting on my shelf. It has occasionally been more useful than the online HOWTOs, but mostly, it just goes to show how out-of-date a 2,000 page book can become in three years. :-)
--
Q: What do you get when a Postmodernist joins the Mafia?
--
Q: What do you get when a Postmodernist joins the Mafia?
Hm, I apologize if we're talking apples and oranges- but can't you edit your /etc/aliases file and run 'newaliases' to redirect mail to user@blah to any particular file?
Surely you're just testing if we're awake. Elsewise-- who do you think stamps all those bar-codes on our mail? Bloody elves???
Anyway, the USPS uses Linux, according to Linux Journal issue 52:
"The United States Postal Service deployed over 900 Linux-based systems throughout the United States in 1997 to automatically recognize the destination addresses on mail pieces. Each system consists of five dual Pentium Pro 200MHz (PP200) computers and one single PP200, all running Linux.
"One of the five Linux boxes has a monitor, keyboard, mouse, CD-ROM and floppy--the other four are headless. Each has 128MB RAM and a 2.5GB hard drive. The mail pieces are scanned at 212dpi at a rate of 12 per second. The binary image is sent to one of the Linux boxes via a custom cable and receiver board. The board packs the bits and uses DMA (direct memory access) to transfer the data over the PCI bus. The receiving computer runs a process that compresses the images and routes them via Ethernet to one of 10 identical processes, two for each CPU, that do the hand-print recognition and machine-print recognition. Those algorithms recognize the text from the image in less than a second and return the ASCII results to a database on a separate computer that looks up the zip code. The slave computers are connected on a subnet with the master which has a second Ethernet card connected to the rest of the computers associated with the scanner. The local network is 10Mbps Ethernet and handles the compressed binary images sent to the slaves and the ASCII results received from the slaves. "
An infosoup is a great idea but you can't expect the user to issue what amounts to a database request every time they want to edit a document or something.
Why not? If you (the user) don't know quite what you're looking for, you basically have to run a database request to find it.
One solution could be based on the 'precompiled search' paradigm.
In *nix I used to use 'find' all the time. When I learned about 'locate' it made my life much easier. At least when I know the file's name. I do nearly all of my file-choosing in the command-line world because it's standardized. And much faster than messing with the graphical equivalents.
Anyone got any good examples of interfaces for property-rich data without a strict single hierarchy?
Sure. Drill-downs are not (necessarily) heirarchal. Plus, Allow the user to define commonly used shortcuts- containing the attributes to form a search. Such as "This month; refered from banner-ad-show.cgi" and when they select a shortcut, perform a database lookup.
Weblogs force the reader's attention on only one or a few sources, rather than the tens of thousands of available sources. Dave Winer (of davenet, the weblog of all weblogs) suggests that weblog owners regularly profile other weblogs, however I do not believe that gets at the really interesting content that I'm sure is out there. I have "mindshare" for about five daily sources of information. I definitely do not want to spend my day searching and browsing the web, but I do want to see the best ideas out there. Any ideas for an interface that would deepen the weblog experience to form richer communities?
"In general, the Web is different from many earlier changes in the business environment in allowing for patents for many of the new business strategies because they are supported by technology. I strongly recommend that companies start treating the Web as their primary strategic business driver such that they can take part in this patent bonanza. The smallest hesitation will allow your competitors to collect the patents on everything you need to survive. Futurism is no longer a luxury: it's a necessary defensive measure to get your patents in place.
Mr. Neilson, I would like to ask- have you read The Cathedral and the Bazaar, and if so do you believe that the open source software movement can make a commercial or social change in the "marketplace of ideas", and finally, if so, how can you reconcile the open-source coder's desire to collaboratively trade ideas and code against the business strategy of definsively patenting all potentially useful intellectual property?
hm... There's always nsi--sucks.com or nsibites.com or I-hate-nsi.com.
--
NSI/internic's stock is through the roof- $258 per share and the company is worth nearly 9 billion dollars.
This is going to change eventually when investors realize any company with a brain is transfering their domains away from Internic. Want to assist in this process?
A proposal:
register NSIsucks.com; write HOWTO instructions for switching to any of the other registrars; put up a signup page for people who have transferred their domains; put up a press area for when the business press comes to visit.
Publicize nsisucks.com in tech and ISP media (letters to the editor, press releases). When we get enough buzz there (because they already know the truth about NSI) notify the business press that we have 100,000 former NSI customers who have switched to other registrars.
Watch NSI's stock tank.
--
At this point I have registered two domains through NSI/internic and two domains through register.com. It is the difference between night and day.
Now that the Internic database has been opened up (by federal order) I have transferred one domain's registrar from NSI to register.com, which took some hoop-jumping but it was worth it. (I believe the hoops were mandated by the NSI in their agreement with the feds to open up the registry process). I had to sign some papers in front of a notary at my credit union, which took ~10 minutes of my time. A week later, the domain is AWAY from NSI's sticky fingers.
Actually, register.com made a mistake, and typed in my credit card number incorrectly. When I called their 800 number, I spoke to a human in three minutes, she apologized for their error, and fixed it in another three minutes.
I will be changing the one remaining domain to register.com shortly.
The funniest thing is I've been getting ads from NSI for discounted registration. Ha. They want me to register for ten years. Ha ha.
--
I expect they meant "principals," as in "necessary people to run the company," not "principles" as in "beliefs and values."
It's a nice lawyerly word, don't you think?
--
FWIW I think the GPL story was perfectly appropriate, and there was even some good discussion brought up here. It's too bad people are getting hot and bothered. Lots of readers had a bad monday I guess.
That doesn't excuse swearing and personal attacks.
Some people have no manners.
*sigh*
--
Even better. M. Genitalium lives in the human genital tract and lungs.
The researchers suggest that 111 of the genes perform unknown functions.
"M. Genitalium causes no known disease."
*gulp*.
--
Slashdot is currently performing an interview with the technical director of the National Federation for the Blind. They are the folks suing AOL for non-compliance with the ADA. If anybody would know how to use a computer without a mouse, it would be a blind person.
Maybe some of the discussion there is relevent, and maybe some of the blind people in that discussion would like to contribute to this discussion.
--
See here for more info.
ack.
How can I change my registrar to register.com?
Presently, register.com is not accepting registrar transfers. In the very near future, register.com will allow domain name registrar's to be transferred. More information and procedures for transferring registrars will be announced.
This page seems to only be available to people who have registered domains with register.net.
No, this isn't precisely what you were asking, but I think it's relevent:
Phil Greenspun and Jin Choi wrote a server uptime monitoring tcl script which queries (your|my|any) web-server every 15 minutes and sends an email if the server seems to be down.
http://uptime.arsdigita.com/uptime/
Just sign up with an email address and a URL, and you're good to go.
The tcl code is free and open-source, although he says, "The software is pretty simple. The hard part is keeping a relational database up and running 7 days/week, 24 hours/day." It's basically a live demo for Greenspun's book on databases, which uses AOL's server for some reason. It makes a cool live demo, anyway.
I was thinking recently that this service hosted redundently on 5 or 10 sites on different routes across the country (world?) could make a useful service, a personalized "internet weather report" for the total cost of keeping 5 to 10 servers up and running. I can't imagine they would use much bandwidth.
I know of a few companies that will monitor your network for $50/mo. but they do not tell you what networks are slow reaching your site, so far as I know.
here in Ithaca NY, I use Support Services Alliance (SSA), which provides me with Major Medical ($2200 deductable) and provides various business services like legal searches for small businesses. Total cost, $89/mo. plus $15/year.
I thought the message boards were too similar to simply be a coincidence!
? 3159,topstories)
It seems Andover has been using Slash code for their bulletin boards for at least a week. I happened to look at the andover news site (www.andovernews.com) and their message board had the nearly exact same look and feel as Slashdot (threaded), down to the "Anonymous Coward" for people who post without an email address.
Hm... Promise us you won't begin to use "leverage" as a verb, OK?
I noticed that Andover now has a press release on their front page as well. Andover sounds pretty stuffy in comparison. (http://www.andovernews.com/cgi-bin/news_story.pl
Congrats Rob and Hemos! I hope we will get to see the geek side of Andover.net as well.