They pay a pittance to some collection agency and in return operate legally, not in violation of russian copyright law.
My brother has a small record label in Germany, he distributes some albums with exclusive DJ tracks. These albums are available on allofmp3 and he isn't happy about it. He knows that the artists receive nothing from that fictional russian collection agency.
If any download site ever was piracy, allofmp3 is. Their story sounds compelling, but it's a lie, plain and simple.
(I don't know if one can fool Google's Usenet archive with a faked article date, though.) All those articles are in the paranoid conspiracy discussions, so that's where I'd file this topic, as well.
One thing I really don't get is that there is virtually no public outcry in the US. At least none that we here in Europe hear much about, except from the usual suspects who criticized Bush ever since he's in office and before.
I mean, Nixon resigned for breaking the law, the public grilled Clinton for weeks just because he was unfaithful to his wife, yet the Bush Jr. government appears to be firmly in place/despite/ all this obvious cronyism.
Even the Republican media outlets should see the cronyism by now. Why do they still defend this government?
Dark times for democracy.
(Then again, Berlusconi in Italy is cronyism of its purest form and German Ex-Chancellor Schröder's appointment to a new job in a shady Russian corporation is highly questionable, so we have little to feel better than you Americans.)
this is why (most) modern music has become "disposable" because it's been manufactured as something that justs goes on in the background while you are doing something else.
Every generation complains about the music that the following generation prefers. Every single one in history.
There will be classic popular tunes of the 200x decade that people will still listen to in 2050, just like we still listen to Elvis and the Beatles today. But not everything in current charts will survive this long. But it's the same with 1950s pop music. Look at the old chart hits of the 1950s and you will note that only few of those pop tunes and artits of that era survived music history.
Throwaway, easy-to-consume music existed in the 1950s, as well, and it's forgotten today.
Three fellow software developers and I run a small company since 2001. We have employees and freelancers working for us by now, so we do buy and upgrade desktop computers every now and then. We're not Coca Cola's IT budget, sure, but we do spend a bit of money on hardware. We have Macs, Windows PCs and Linux PCs on our desktops, with Linux on about half of them.
I never ever had any problem buying a Linux-friendly desktop PC from our computer suppliers. Ok, we don't buy from Dell etc., we buy from a local computer store here in Hamburg called Comptronic. And this shop isn't specialized on Linux, most likely they sell 99% Windows computers. But when I ask them to make sure it runs Linux, they do make sure to choose the right parts and we don't pay the Windows tax.
It's a regional company, they sell (plain vanilla) hardware to businesses since several years and we are loyal customers. Really good service, we get replacements on the spot if something breaks, sometimes in less than an hour after the phone call. We have also bought several Linux-ready servers from them over the years and I'm more than happy with what we got from them.
So I see no conspirancy here.
If we, as a rather small company, have no problem buying Linux-ready PCs for a good price, a bigger company than us should be even more interesting as a customer for a computer supplier. If you want, say, 150 Linux-ready desktop computers plus three years of service for your business next month, several suppliers like the one we use will be more than eager to provide this to you.
I wrote a program that made a statistical analysis of the party platform for the upcoming German national elections. The Phrasinator is able to write new nonsense texts based on the original material.
It's more satire than science, making fun of political blabla.
The idea is more than 20 years old and based on an old article by Bryan Hayes, "A progress report on the fine art of turning literature into drivel".
This "new method" by Edelman and his colleagues sounds rather similar. I'm really curious what they did to improve it.
I would love to have an e-ink display for my computer, so that I could use it to read long texts. Even if e-ink is not fast enough for GUI stuff (I guess), it might make a good secondary display on the desktop.
Where are the end-user products? The only thing I've heard of so far is the mystical ebook-reader from Sony, available in Japan only.
According to this report, the Berlin Fire Department's central radio dispatching system broke down at 0:04, including the backup system. The whole system was replaced a year later.
The breakdown was a whole series of unfortunate bugs of several systems. There's more detail in an article in c't issue 13/2000.
With the system missing, the fire department used fully manual dispatch via radio, pen and paper, but without their infrastructure, they were completely overwelmed.
Without the central dispatching system, the reginal fire departments were given several false information. In Germany's bigger cities, the fire departments also operate several ambulances, so this isn't just about fires, but also about regular injuries.
According to the article, one single fire was visited by 20 fire engines, unaware of each other's dispatch. Sometimes the police used riot control water cannons to extinguish fires, some injured people people were brought to the hospital by police staff long before the firemen's ambulances were able to arrive, in two incidents, victims had to wait 30 or 60 minutes for an ambulance to arrive. In another case, the neighbours of a small house used their garden hoses trying to control a fire that began small but wouldn't die during the two hours they waited for the fire engine to arrive.
Helpless, the fire department sent some fire engines and ambulances "on patrol" starting at 2:00 and told them to look for fires and act on their own without the central dispatch.
I wasn't affected (I don't live in Berlin), so I just report this second hand. But considering that this was new year's eve with several wild parties and firecracker incidents and Berlin being Germany's largest city, we were lucky that no really big fire or emergency occured that night.
We're already having problems finding decent applicants for our job posting (*) who know enough Perl. Which is frightning, because we do pretty standard web application development stuff. Most of this kind of work is now done in PHP, but few people want to learn from there and get proficient in Perl.
What a shame. Perl was my start into this business and it served me well. And that's just 9 years ago.
Yes, we did post an English summary of the job on jobs.perl.org, but all of the applicants coming from there did not even read the basic requirements.
(If you are interested: Please don't apply unless you consider yourself fluent in German. Oh, and yes, we did hire an American citizen recently. He speaks German.:-)
Actually, I have seen this the other way round. I (German) once had to work with an Asian developer living in England. When talking with him on the phone, his English sounded crude and I had the impression he didn't even know English.
Then we agreed to switch to instant messaging. And we went along fine. His written English was great, while his spoken English was unbearable.
One of our clients is an online company and we are doing their development and administration while they are doing the business plan and business development stuff.
Their mails aren't as bad as in this article, but still, I'm surprised how many mistakes highly educated, tech-savvy business people make when dealing with e-mail. We agreed that I will give them a brief seminar on the pitfalls of e-mail:
Topquoting, fullquoting, exclamation marks, trojans (and how they work), chain letters, nigerian and order fraud, etc.
This article is perfect fodder for me. Thanks NYT.
Is there any definitive information on the actual resolution the gmini uses on the TV out? Is the TV out resolution the same as it uses on its own display or is it higher?
Thanks for the mini-review. The one thing I have been missing in reading about this device is anyone mentioning the quality of the TV-out. The gmini has a very small-resolution screen. But how is the resolution on the TV? Could you tell me something about that?
> It turns out it got stuck on the Lifetime > network, so it really was in a state of > distress.
I had a TV (also by Toshiba, coincidently) that would crash when it showed the local community channel. When that happened, it did not accept any key presses on the remote or on the TV set itself, so I couldn't change the channel anymore.
Basically, my TV forced me to watch the horrible Hamburg community channel.
I complained to Toshiba and it turned out that this channel aired a non-standard Teletext that had the ability crash this particular TV's teletext decoder.
The newest Zaurus, at $600 or so, is probably a much better option. It will even run X-windows apps with a little work and recompilation.
Then you can have mine, if you wish. The Zaurus is the most expensive completely useless toy I ever bought.
Will recompiling the apps you need for the Zaurus cost you more than $1200 in billable time? It's unlikely.
I did spend way more than that time trying to get OpenZaurus / OPIE running on that thing. It still doesn't really run. OZ / OPIE is highly unstable. The official Zaurus Linux distribution comes with a rather useless set of PIM applications, so that doesn't cut it.
I use Linux on a daily basis and administrate several servers, some of them using funky hardware. But I haven't been able to install Linux in a satisfying configuration on the Zaurus.
I would exchange the Zaurus for an x86 compatible PDA any day, running standard Debian.
Yes, I know that the Zaurus can be used with ARM Debian. But now try to connect a mouse, a keyboard or similar devices on it...
I'm still looking for a simple, straightforward solution to sharing calendar, address and todo data. Basically, I want a shared version of the Palm Desktop application.
I looked at phprojekt, phpgroupware, opengroupware and others, but for some reason, all of these are feature monsters that also include a webmail client, timetables and other things not needed, and all of them sport horrible UIs.
I bought the SL5500 in Europe. Adding CF/SD cards, an IR keyboard, a WLAN card (which cannot be used while using a CF harddisk) makes the whole PDA experience clunky and extremely expensive. Also, I found both the original Linux distribution and the alternative Opie for the Zaurus a pain to use.
Overall, I paid less for my JVC microlaptop than the combined cost of a Zaurus with the added devices you describe would have cost me. The Zaurus gives me a very limited Linux experience. The Linux applications aren't very stable, both the original distribution and the alternative OPIE didn't convince me. My microlaptop can run any Linux app I want, has 386 MB of Ram, a 20 GB harddisk. Granted, it has only half the battery time, but I can live with that.
I still prefer my old greyscale PalmPilot's addressbook to the applications that the Zaurus provides. Usability of the Zaurus is very limited from my experience, both keyboard and pen input. It's true that the never Zaurus has a better keyboard, but so do these x86 PDA-sized computers described in the article.
Again, I consider my Zaurus one of the more stupid things that I bought so far. I mainly use it to browse news sites through WLAN while sitting on the toilet. Now that's an expensive toy.
I also travel by train a lot. On German speed trains, you now see lots of people using laptops. You could start lan parties with the people you just met on the trip.
It's funny how often people in the train approach me and ask about my microlaptop. Although it's already more than 2 years old, it must still be fascinating to every nerd seing it. Some people already asked me how I like Windows CE and are surprised when they learn that it's a full-blown PC and runs KDE.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
They pay a pittance to some collection agency and in return operate legally, not in violation of russian copyright law.
My brother has a small record label in Germany, he distributes some albums with exclusive DJ tracks. These albums are available on allofmp3 and he isn't happy about it. He knows that the artists receive nothing from that fictional russian collection agency.
If any download site ever was piracy, allofmp3 is. Their story sounds compelling, but it's a lie, plain and simple.
Then again, there are references to morgellons.org in Usenet back to 2002:
s &start=60&scoring=d&hl=de&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&
http://groups.google.de/groups/search?q=morgellon
(I don't know if one can fool Google's Usenet archive with a faked article date, though.) All those articles are in the paranoid conspiracy discussions, so that's where I'd file this topic, as well.
One thing I really don't get is that there is virtually no public outcry in the US. At least none that we here in Europe hear much about, except from the usual suspects who criticized Bush ever since he's in office and before.
/despite/ all this obvious cronyism.
I mean, Nixon resigned for breaking the law, the public grilled Clinton for weeks just because he was unfaithful to his wife, yet the Bush Jr. government appears to be firmly in place
Even the Republican media outlets should see the cronyism by now. Why do they still defend this government?
Dark times for democracy.
(Then again, Berlusconi in Italy is cronyism of its purest form and German Ex-Chancellor Schröder's appointment to a new job in a shady Russian corporation is highly questionable, so we have little to feel better than you Americans.)
this is why (most) modern music has become "disposable" because it's been manufactured as something that justs goes on in the background while you are doing something else.
Every generation complains about the music that the following generation prefers. Every single one in history.
There will be classic popular tunes of the 200x decade that people will still listen to in 2050, just like we still listen to Elvis and the Beatles today. But not everything in current charts will survive this long. But it's the same with 1950s pop music. Look at the old chart hits of the 1950s and you will note that only few of those pop tunes and artits of that era survived music history.
Throwaway, easy-to-consume music existed in the 1950s, as well, and it's forgotten today.
Sorry, I can do that myself for free...
Well, go ahead. I am quite sure you actually can't.
Three fellow software developers and I run a small company since 2001. We have employees and freelancers working for us by now, so we do buy and upgrade desktop computers every now and then. We're not Coca Cola's IT budget, sure, but we do spend a bit of money on hardware. We have Macs, Windows PCs and Linux PCs on our desktops, with Linux on about half of them.
I never ever had any problem buying a Linux-friendly desktop PC from our computer suppliers. Ok, we don't buy from Dell etc., we buy from a local computer store here in Hamburg called Comptronic. And this shop isn't specialized on Linux, most likely they sell 99% Windows computers. But when I ask them to make sure it runs Linux, they do make sure to choose the right parts and we don't pay the Windows tax.
It's a regional company, they sell (plain vanilla) hardware to businesses since several years and we are loyal customers. Really good service, we get replacements on the spot if something breaks, sometimes in less than an hour after the phone call. We have also bought several Linux-ready servers from them over the years and I'm more than happy with what we got from them.
So I see no conspirancy here.
If we, as a rather small company, have no problem buying Linux-ready PCs for a good price, a bigger company than us should be even more interesting as a customer for a computer supplier. If you want, say, 150 Linux-ready desktop computers plus three years of service for your business next month, several suppliers like the one we use will be more than eager to provide this to you.
You always got to choose?
I wrote a program that made a statistical analysis of the party platform for the upcoming German national elections. The Phrasinator is able to write new nonsense texts based on the original material.
It's more satire than science, making fun of political blabla.
The idea is more than 20 years old and based on an old article by Bryan Hayes, "A progress report on the fine art of turning literature into drivel".
This "new method" by Edelman and his colleagues sounds rather similar. I'm really curious what they did to improve it.
If the expertise is rare or the potential workforce unwilling to do it, raise the pay.
If it pays well, people will learn to do it. If it pays bad and other jobs pay better in the same industry, why does the industry complain?
I would love to have an e-ink display for my computer, so that I could use it to read long texts. Even if e-ink is not fast enough for GUI stuff (I guess), it might make a good secondary display on the desktop.
Where are the end-user products? The only thing I've heard of so far is the mystical ebook-reader from Sony, available in Japan only.
According to this report, the Berlin Fire Department's central radio dispatching system broke down at 0:04, including the backup system. The whole system was replaced a year later.
The breakdown was a whole series of unfortunate bugs of several systems. There's more detail in an article in c't issue 13/2000.
With the system missing, the fire department used fully manual dispatch via radio, pen and paper, but without their infrastructure, they were completely overwelmed.
Without the central dispatching system, the reginal fire departments were given several false information. In Germany's bigger cities, the fire departments also operate several ambulances, so this isn't just about fires, but also about regular injuries.
According to the article, one single fire was visited by 20 fire engines, unaware of each other's dispatch. Sometimes the police used riot control water cannons to extinguish fires, some injured people people were brought to the hospital by police staff long before the firemen's ambulances were able to arrive, in two incidents, victims had to wait 30 or 60 minutes for an ambulance to arrive. In another case, the neighbours of a small house used their garden hoses trying to control a fire that began small but wouldn't die during the two hours they waited for the fire engine to arrive.
Helpless, the fire department sent some fire engines and ambulances "on patrol" starting at 2:00 and told them to look for fires and act on their own without the central dispatch.
I wasn't affected (I don't live in Berlin), so I just report this second hand. But considering that this was new year's eve with several wild parties and firecracker incidents and Berlin being Germany's largest city, we were lucky that no really big fire or emergency occured that night.
We're already having problems finding decent applicants for our job posting (*) who know enough Perl. Which is frightning, because we do pretty standard web application development stuff. Most of this kind of work is now done in PHP, but few people want to learn from there and get proficient in Perl.
:-)
What a shame. Perl was my start into this business and it served me well. And that's just 9 years ago.
Yes, we did post an English summary of the job on jobs.perl.org, but all of the applicants coming from there did not even read the basic requirements.
(If you are interested: Please don't apply unless you consider yourself fluent in German. Oh, and yes, we did hire an American citizen recently. He speaks German.
Actually, I have seen this the other way round. I (German) once had to work with an Asian developer living in England. When talking with him on the phone, his English sounded crude and I had the impression he didn't even know English.
Then we agreed to switch to instant messaging. And we went along fine. His written English was great, while his spoken English was unbearable.
One of our clients is an online company and we are doing their development and administration while they are doing the business plan and business development stuff.
Their mails aren't as bad as in this article, but still, I'm surprised how many mistakes highly educated, tech-savvy business people make when dealing with e-mail. We agreed that I will give them a brief seminar on the pitfalls of e-mail:
Topquoting, fullquoting, exclamation marks, trojans (and how they work), chain letters, nigerian and order fraud, etc.
This article is perfect fodder for me. Thanks NYT.
Is there any definitive information on the actual resolution the gmini uses on the TV out? Is the TV out resolution the same as it uses on its own display or is it higher?
Thanks.
Thanks for the mini-review. The one thing I have been missing in reading about this device is anyone mentioning the quality of the TV-out. The gmini has a very small-resolution screen. But how is the resolution on the TV? Could you tell me something about that?
Thanks.
> It turns out it got stuck on the Lifetime
> network, so it really was in a state of
> distress.
I had a TV (also by Toshiba, coincidently) that would crash when it showed the local community channel. When that happened, it did not accept any key presses on the remote or on the TV set itself, so I couldn't change the channel anymore.
Basically, my TV forced me to watch the horrible Hamburg community channel.
I complained to Toshiba and it turned out that this channel aired a non-standard Teletext that had the ability crash this particular TV's teletext decoder.
> Is it me or is the squad thing a Piramid Scheme?
Exactly.
http://www.vandruff.com/mlm.html
Could this possibly mean a sequel to the System Shock franchise?
Could this possibly be another example of Slashdot's new habit of trolling for comments by adding rethorical questions?
CS Player #1: You could play deathmatch in Half-Life?
Actually, I was bored by Half-Life 1's deathmatch. Counterstrike is definitely the more interesting multiplayer game.
The newest Zaurus, at $600 or so, is probably a much better option. It will even run X-windows apps with a little work and recompilation.
Then you can have mine, if you wish. The Zaurus is the most expensive completely useless toy I ever bought.
Will recompiling the apps you need for the Zaurus cost you more than $1200 in billable time? It's unlikely.
I did spend way more than that time trying to get OpenZaurus / OPIE running on that thing. It still doesn't really run. OZ / OPIE is highly unstable. The official Zaurus Linux distribution comes with a rather useless set of PIM applications, so that doesn't cut it.
I use Linux on a daily basis and administrate several servers, some of them using funky hardware. But I haven't been able to install Linux in a satisfying configuration on the Zaurus.
I would exchange the Zaurus for an x86 compatible PDA any day, running standard Debian.
Yes, I know that the Zaurus can be used with ARM Debian. But now try to connect a mouse, a keyboard or similar devices on it...
We in the US do not hide the Civil War, slavery, or even racism.
d ay -ebert22.html
Of course, you "don't":
http://www.suntimes.com/output/answ-man/sho-sun
I'm still looking for a simple, straightforward solution to sharing calendar, address and todo data. Basically, I want a shared version of the Palm Desktop application.
I looked at phprojekt, phpgroupware, opengroupware and others, but for some reason, all of these are feature monsters that also include a webmail client, timetables and other things not needed, and all of them sport horrible UIs.
Anything people can recommend?
May I ask which Zaurus you bought?
I bought the SL5500 in Europe. Adding CF/SD cards, an IR keyboard, a WLAN card (which cannot be used while using a CF harddisk) makes the whole PDA experience clunky and extremely expensive. Also, I found both the original Linux distribution and the alternative Opie for the Zaurus a pain to use.
Overall, I paid less for my JVC microlaptop than the combined cost of a Zaurus with the added devices you describe would have cost me. The Zaurus gives me a very limited Linux experience. The Linux applications aren't very stable, both the original distribution and the alternative OPIE didn't convince me. My microlaptop can run any Linux app I want, has 386 MB of Ram, a 20 GB harddisk. Granted, it has only half the battery time, but I can live with that.
I still prefer my old greyscale PalmPilot's addressbook to the applications that the Zaurus provides. Usability of the Zaurus is very limited from my experience, both keyboard and pen input. It's true that the never Zaurus has a better keyboard, but so do these x86 PDA-sized computers described in the article.
Again, I consider my Zaurus one of the more stupid things that I bought so far. I mainly use it to browse news sites through WLAN while sitting on the toilet. Now that's an expensive toy.
It's good to get this perspective sometimes
:-)
I also travel by train a lot. On German speed trains, you now see lots of people using laptops. You could start lan parties with the people you just met on the trip.
It's funny how often people in the train approach me and ask about my microlaptop. Although it's already more than 2 years old, it must still be fascinating to every nerd seing it. Some people already asked me how I like Windows CE and are surprised when they learn that it's a full-blown PC and runs KDE.