I agree with what others have said; this is a pretty nifty idea but would ultimately just force DoubleClick et al. to implement a workaround. All they'd have to do would be to add some data to the contents of the actual cookie that says "this cookie really came from DoubleClick". Then we'd have to find that field and tamper with it, and then they'd find some other workaround, and so on. Plus, giving a site someone else's cookie might cause the site to display incorrectly, in some cases. And if you mind cookies, but you don't mind broken sites, well, then just turn cookies off.
IMHO the stuff the corps are trying to block are the seemingly endless supply of stupid joke forwards (and the like) as well as the abuse of email.
Sure, and there's not really anything so terrible or sinister about that, but do they have to log keystrokes to do it? Because keystroke logging means they have any passwords you enter from your computer at work. And if you use the same passwords for other sites . . . it sort of snowballs into an invasion of privacy, if you ask me.
What's really interesting is that my mom's sysadmin will not allow anyone on his network to set an e-mail or network login or password without telling him what it is. Or maybe he tells them what it'll be; I'm not sure. Either way, he has a record, somewhere, of every password in the building. If you ask me, that's not only inconsiderate and privacy-invading, it's also potentially dangerous. On the other hand, at my job, we -- and by "we" I mean all IS staff -- are encouraged to explicitly inform users that we're looking the other direction while they enter their passwords. Some users feel the need to give them to us anyway, for various reasons that make varying degrees of sense, but officially speaking, I don't know anyone's password, and I don't want to. If we tried to log users' keystrokes I'm sure we'd get fired for it. That's why it shocks me to read about companies where doing so is actually a policy.
I still say that if someone is doing the job you're paying them to do, and doing it competently, then that's all you need to know about how they spend their work hours. When they start performing poorly, then you can start investigating why that is, but not before. Whatever the reason for their sub-standard performance is -- too much e-mail forwarding, drinking straight vodka on the job, unable to stop daydreaming about Britney Spears -- is actually relatively unimportant. The point is that they have a problem, any problem, and they need to solve it. And ideally you would just confront them about it and not have to sneak around behind their backs installing monitoring software on their computers or hidden video cameras in their cubicles or anything like that.
A growing number of employers are using computer software to secretly determine which of their employees may be wasting company time using their computers to visit inappropriate Web sites and to send unauthorized e-mail.
My supervisor spends all day at work downloading MP3s, visiting websites, watching "Wazzup?" commercial parodies, playing FreeCell and Minesweeper (which I must say he's quite good at) and sending e-mail. In fact, he does it so much he doesn't even need to use his home computer. But he's still one of their best employees. How? He's doing phone support. His job is reactionary, and he can easily download and talk on the phone at the same time. And if there's a lull, no one cares that he's playing games, as long as he stops to answer the phone when it rings.
The part about "unauthorized e-mail" is a little scarier. Most likely, the only way they can tell the e-mail is "unauthorized" is to read it, and I feel that's an invasion of my privacy. I don't want my sysadmin reading my e-mail for the same reason I don't want him tapping my phone.
And, as others have pointed out, there are legtimate uses of company e-mail for personal purposes. An example: my mother's work e-mail address is her only one. If I'm coming home from school for the weekend, and I need to get in touch with her on Friday to let her know when I'll be coming in, chances are that it'll be difficult for us to get in touch via phone, between her being in meetings and me being in classes. But if we can exchange e-mail about it, then our problem is solved. And as long as answering my e-mail doesn't impair her work performance -- which I can't imagine it doing -- then where's the problem?
In fact, this last point is probably the most important: as long as e-mail, or anything else, doesn't get in the way of one's performance at work, I don't see why anyone should complain about it. If e-mail or web surfing is getting in the way of work performance, then you handle it the same way as you handle any interference with work performance. Presumably my supervisor is competent enough to recognize when I've got such a problem, be it with e-mail or with anything else, and talk to me about it. After all, that's what supervisors are for.
But as long as it doesn't create a problem, I think that, were I a manager, I wouldn't mind a little "inappropriate" web surfing now and then. It could only serve to improve employee morale, and god knows that's important. As an employee, I feel my company takes plenty of my time as it is. If they want my undivided attention for the entire time span during which I'm on the clock, they'd better be paying me more than they are for it, or giving me more time off so I can get all that inappropriateness out of my system.
"We live in a world of cubicles, closed office spaces," said Roy Young of Adavi Inc., maker of Silent Watch surveillance software. "It's difficult for managers to monitor what employees are doing. . .."
I want to know where this guy works, that he thinks cubicles are "closed spaces". In my office (read: collection of cubicles), you can hear everything everyone else says, and every noise their computer makes. Ah, for the good old days when people who got paid less than I do were still entitled to real offices . . ..
Young's stealthy software allows an employer to monitor dozens of computers from a single screen in real time, while recording every keystroke an employee makes, even if the data are deleted.
Great, a commercial keystroke logger. Now k1dd13z can pay to steal passwords. That's how you know you're professional. So let's see if I have this straight: if I'm typing a Word document, and out of frustration, I type "I hate this company", then delete it, it's still saved and available for my employer to view? Gosh, when I think of all the wonderful things technology has done for me, it brings a tear to my eye.
Rosen warns against the larger potential effect of computer surveillance. "It's not conducive to a free society or a really productive workplace that every moment of the day is conducted under the unblinking eye of the camera, the employer," he said.
Preach on, brother. I couldn't have said it better.
I was going to suggest this, but then I thought, doesn't that only work on unpatched 95 machines? Even 98 shouldn't ship with port 139 listening, IIRC, because this (or a similar) nuker works *so* well -- a totally debilitating attack carried out in a mere second or two. My coworkers and I used to use this exploit to nuke a box we were using to monitor network status whenever we got bored.
Okay, so this is mostly reminiscing. Anyway, my point is, I doubt the port-139 attack will work on any versions of Windows post-95. If it does, well, Microsoft is even dumber than I gave them credit for.
There's a Dialup Networking patch for Win95 users that will fix this vulnerability, sort of; I'd post a link but I couldn't find it on MS' site. Maybe they're trying to force people to upgrade.
But I agree. You have to admit it's funny that any news relating to Microsoft that gets posted on Slashdot is automatically bad news. If they somehow managed to save the entire internet from imminent destruction, we'd complain about how they only did it to secure their profits.
Not that we'd necessarily be wrong about that . . ..
A quick web search for "random haiku generator" turned up several worthy matches.
However, most of them either recycle the same lines, or string words together based on few criteria other than syllables. One way or another, they make little sense. I wouldn't consider a haiku generator "intelligent" until it escaped both of these traps. Okay, sure, so the beauty of minimalist work is that the human mind gets to fill in the gaps. But they'd better be "gaps" and not massive, yawning chasms.
And if the haiku/senryu is going to be generated from an RDF file, ideally it would say something of some relevance about the contents of said file. That is, it would either synthesize verbally communicated information or form an opinion, which are both extraordinarily tall orders even with the current advancements in AI technology.
I love haiku/senryu, and if I had the hacking skillz, I'd have a go at this myself. But I don't, so I'll merely wish luck to those who try. And if any of you happen to read this, you'll be my hero if you include a --moooose option. Where a normal haiku is a poem in 5-7-5 format that makes reference to the seaason, a mooooooose haiku is a poem not quite in 5-7-5 format that makes reference to the moooooooose.:P
Yeah, my friends and I always called it the "Konami code". They usually varied it slightly (e.g. LLRR instead of LRLR) from game to game, which explains why so many people are posting the "correct" version of it. In Gradius, it gets you a complete set of upgrades if you pause the game and enter it within a few seconds of starting out. In Legend of the Mystical Ninja for the SNES, there's a mini video arcade in one town, and you can walk up to one of the consoles and play a quick, scaled-down version of Gradius, and the guy standing next to the console warns you that the code doesn't work here. Anyway, it is probably more correctly called a cheat than an easter egg, but what the hell, it was fun.
The reason I GPL my source code is because I want others to learn from it. My intent in releasing source is not to let people copy and paste code from my programs into their own; that's not helping them become better programmers, rather, it's allowing them to solve a problem without understanding the solution. Giving people band-aid solutions to their programming problems is something I would view as a disservice to the programming community at large, and to those people in particular.
My real intent in releasing source is to allow others to learn from it. If those "others" turn out to be developers of closed-source programs, well, that's unfortunate, but I knew that I was taking that risk when I GPLed the code. I consider it inauthentic and somewhat elitist to say "my source code is open as long as you share my conviction that source code should be open." If I wanted to share my code, and the ideas it contains, with people whose philosophical or political leanings match mine, I'd start a mailing list. But I want to share it with any member of society interested in seeing it, so I GPLed it and posted it on the web.
Do I wish that everyone who looked at my code also believed in GPLing theirs? Sure. Am I going to try to use legal maneuvering and the terms of the GPL to force them to? No. I'm going to talk rationally with them about tghe benefits of open source, maybe I'll write an essay about it, and I'll hope to convince them of the value of my perspective. If I don't succeed, oh well. It takes all types of people, you know.
It's interesting to note that, as the "from-dept." line suggested, this question is really one of where lies the line between learning and plagiarism. This is signigficantly more difficult to discern when dealing with computer code than when dealing with most other forms of expression. If I read 1984, get ideas from it, and write a book using those ideas, I've learned, not plagiarised. If I write a book using Orwell's exact wording (and don't attribute the quote), then I've plagiarised. Now, if I read the source to, say, WordPerfect 8, and write the capability to do that shadow-cursor thing into my own word processor, have I learned or plagiarised? I mean, there are probably only a very few different algorithms I could use to achieve the same result. All would necessarily have some structural similarity, refer to similar variables and parameters, etc. If I change the variable names, is it still plagiarism? If I change the indentation style, is it still plagiarism? If I use a while-loop instead of a for-loop, is it still plagiarism? How different does my algorithm have to be from its prototype to be merely a derivative work and not a copy? How different can it be? I mean, Perl excluded, most languages don't leave you much room to play around with your diction. The variety of ways to achieve a similar effect with different wording in your typical C program is pretty slim.
Disclaimer: I haven't written that much code that's been worth plagiarising. I'm just speaking on principle here.
Yeah, the address works for me too, and seems to be the same company & the same software. But the question's still valid. I mean, what happens with shareware programs (especially crippled ones) when their author dies (as the creator of PKZip recently did), or the contact information circulated with the program ceases to be accurate? What happens to proprietary software when the company folds? IMO, it should become public domain, but U.S. copyright law doesn't work that way -- it protects creations for 70 years after the last author's death or 120 years after creation (assuming software is covered by this same law, which isn't entirely clear). In a lot of these cases, of course, source code simply won't be available. Should the public be allowed to use legal maneuvering to obtain source code for a program upon the author's death? I mean, it's not likely that today's computer programs will be of much use in 70 years, so ideally you'd want the source much sooner. But wouldn't that involve sort of a post-mortem violation of privacy? I don't know . . ..
Now, if the author or company disappears for whatever reason, but reappears later, or someone with a legitimate claim to ownership of the program is still around, opening the source or making the program public domain prematurely could be a big problem. I don't know; I don't seem to be providing many answers here. Oh well.
This is good advice, but in a sense, the increase in speed is sort of an optical illusion. Obviously when the page has to be resized to accomodate the newly-discovered dimensions of an image, it disrupts any reading the viewer had already started to do and forces him to reorient himself. But the amount of data to be downloaded is still the same. I do recommend that all web authors use width= and height= whenever possible, but depending on the primary cause of the complaints about "slowness" you've been getting, this may or may not help solve your problem.
I'm also interested to know what the site is; it might be easier to spot problems in the implementation if we could see it in action. Don't be afraid of a little shameless self-promotion now and then.:P
This would indeed be very clever of the Offspring if it were there intent. But I don't believe that it is. See http://www.offspring.com/napster.html for clarification on the band's stance on MP3/Napster. Relevant excerpt:
The Offspring view MP3 technology and programs such as Napster as being a vital and necessary means to promote music and foster better relationships with our fans.
I've already mentioned this elsewhere, but it bears repeating. The Offspring, being a punk band, are part of a long tradition of anti-corporation, anti-government, pro-public, and hyperpolitical musicians. Despite the fact that they haven't really lived up to this since Smash, and despite their move to a major label, I'm not surprised to see them supporting grassroots music distribution. They owe their longevity to it. I applaud them for doing what they feel (and I agree) is the right thing, and in such an ingenious manner.
People are right to be pointing out that this is very similar to the issue many musicians have with Napster and the like. Of course, the difference is, character recognition scanners aren't yet as advanced as sound recording technology, so you can probably expect that your book won't get "ripped" and put on the internet against your will. Yet.
People are also right to point out that many people feel there's something special about an actual, physical book that's superior to staring at a screen. Plus, books are still much more portable than laptops.
But what I haven't seen anyone say yet is that there are a whole lot of people out there who don't have computers or internet access yet, but might still want to read. If you think your book might appeal to that audience, you're not doing yourself (or them) any favors by releasing it exclusively online.
Of course, if you really wanted to release it in a "multi-platform" format, there's always good ol' ASCII text. Or HTML. But then you'd have to put up banner ads to make money off it, like someone pointed out. Which is, to be fair, a real possibility.
How are you going to determine what the potential customer's mailserver is? You can't just ask him for his e-mail address and then strip the "username@"; a lot of mail services (especially massive, quasi-anonymous ones like Hotmail or Netaddress) don't run SMTP on the machine whose name is after the @ in the address -- if a machine with that name even exists. Many use several mailservers, with each handling a certain category of usernames. Probably this leaves you asking the user what his mailserver is, and from working at a helpdesk I can tell you that most people won't even know what you mean by that. This is all before you even locate the mailserver to find out whether it accepts VRFY/EXPN or not. Sounds like too much trouble to me. IMHO, the best way to go is the time-honored method of mailing a password to the address the user provides and then asking him to log in with that password to continue. This isn't perfect, but is less likely to fail than using VRFY would be -- and more importantly, it's less likely to deny a user access unjustly.
We now live in an era in which a few clicks of your mouse will make it possible for you to summon every book ever written in any language, every movie ever made, every television show ever produced, and every piece of music ever recorded.
Can we agree that this would be a good thing? Does anyone think it wouldn't? I want to make sure we all agree on this.
Music is on the leading edge of this revolution, and because of that, it has become the first product to illuminate the central - and I believe the most critical - challenge for this technological revolution: The protection of "intellectual property rights."
Finally, an MP3/Napster opponent who leads off his argument by saying that intellectual property rights are the most important issue. Most of them jump straight to talking about theft and how much money they think they're losing.
For the great ferment of works and ideas, including your own, if taken at will and without restraint, have no chance of surviving any better than did the buffalo.
Let me get this straight. If ideas are freely available, if they are given, taken, disseminated, distributed, shared, WITHOUT restraint, then they will die out. But if we restrain ideas, and make sure we control how they get distributed, then they can survive and prosper. Right.
And why is this important? Because you, like we in the entertainment business, are thoroughly dependent on patents and copyright. You need them no less than we do, to protect your processes, your conceptions, your software code, your procedures, your designs, your ideas.
No I don't. I don't think up ideas for personal gain, I think them up -- not to sound too self-important here -- for the betterment of humanity, for *everyone's* sake. They don't need to be registered in my name to do their job. If Thomas Edison hadn't patented the lightbulb, that wouldn't have stopped anyone from using it. In fact, had it not been for the patent system, Edison would not have been able to steal thousands of ideas, concepts and tools from other inventors and patent them as his own.
The Internet does not exist, and cannot prosper in a world that is separate from our civilized society and the fundamental laws upon which it is based.
He uses the word "civilized" a lot. I don't think it means what he thinks it means. Look it up. Know what word is conspicuously absent from the definitions? "Law". Also "property", "business", "consumer", and "money".
I have moved those lawyers - or some of them - but I have done so, and will continue to do so - not to attack the Internet and its culture but for its benefit and to protect it. For its benefit.
It seems to me that if this were true, it would be self-evident, and he wouldn't need to repeat himself in an effort to drive the point home.
We will launch a secure downloading format later this summer that will be the start of making our content widely available in digital form.
It will be interesting to see what measures this format will take to ensure that once one person downloads something, s/he can't share it with the rest of us.
And because of the security our product will offer, consumers' privacy will also benefit because their files and their systems won't be corrupted.
Yeah, you know, my biggest complaint about Napster has always been that it keeps corrupting my files and my systems. Please.
We will re-emphasize this truth and articulate this message in an educational effort, with our industry allies, targeted to the great majority of people who want to do the right thing - yet, may not fully comprehend that accessing copyrighted material without proper payment or permission in the digital world, is as wrong as it is in the physical world.
Oh, if only Napster users *understood* that downloading copyrighted material they don't own was illegal! I bet they'd stop doing it then.
. . . technology will offer the owners of property at least as much comfort as it may currently offer to hackers and spies, pirates and pedophiles.
More demonizing of the term "hacker". That's productive.
Technology exists that can trace every Internet download and tag every file. These tools make it possible to identify those who are using the Internet to improperly and illegally acquire music and other copyrighted information.
And soon, tools will exist that allow those people to circumvent these file-tagging and criminal-identifying technologies.
On line, privacy is assuring that what you do, so long as it is legal, is your own business and may not be exploited by others.
Anonymity, on the other hand, means being able to get away with stealing, or hacking, or disseminating illegal material on the Internet - and presuming the right that nobody should know who you are. There is no such right.
Privacy is being able to close the door when you go into a public toilet. Anonymity is not being required to write your name and address on the door before you do so. Understand how these are important to each other?
Here at Slashdot, we call anonymous people "cowards". But we don't deprive them of the ability to post.
This is nothing more than the digital equivalent of putting on a ski mask when you rob a bank.
Which is the crime: putting on the ski mask, or robbing the bank? If knowing people's identities is all that prevents us from total anarchy, the problem lies with those citizens who care so little for their fellow people that they would freely commit crimes against them. We need to stop perpetuating a society that creates so many heartless citizens. But we don't need to blame the ski masks.
In the appropriation of intellectual property, myMP3.com, Napster, and Gnutella (which has stolen from the breakfasts of 100 million European children even its name) . . .
He has got to be kidding. Are we supposed to picture those 100 million European children crying disconsolately just because a piece of software made a pun on the name of their breakfast food? Are even puns going to be outlawed now? He says "stolen" as if the Gnutella developers were maliciously appropriating the name, like the pirates they really are. You know, when humor is outlawed, only outlaws will be funny, except for people who are unintentionally funny, like Seagram's chairmen.
. . . are, in my opinion, the ringleaders, the exemplars of theft, of piracy, of the illegal and willful appropriation of someone else's property.
These are pretty strong words from someone whose company makes most of its money by selling a drug (i.e. alcohol). If he wants to criticize MP3.com/Napster/Gnutella for enabling copyright infringement and theft of intellectual property, let's first talk about how many automobile accidents Crown Royal enables each year. Let's talk about the abusive fathers who hold a belt in one hand and a bottle of Chivas Regal in the other. Let's talk about Captain Morgan's contribution to date rape, or the casino patrons who are served free drinks so they'll waste more money, or the lives, bank accounts, and relationships destroyed by alcohol addiction. Frankly, I don't think Ed Bronfman is in much of a position to be moralizing about a crime as relatively trivial as music piracy.
What individuals might do unthinkingly for pleasure, in my view, they do with forethought for profit, justifying with weak and untenable rationale their theft of the labor and genius of others.
I don't know, I'd say Gnutella was a pretty ingenious piece of work itself. And I'd be remiss were I not to point out that its developers aren't earning a single cent from it.
They rationalize what they do with a disingenuous appeal to utopianism: Everything on the Internet should be free.
Oh, no! Anything but that! You know, it's typical that such a hardcore capitalist can't understand that some people really mean it when they say something should be free.
What of the extraordinary gifts of software and whole operating systems of which we sometimes read?
They are rare, and sometimes they are loss leaders. Some of the donors may regret their generosity when later they are confronted with their children's college tuition and orthodontic bills, but yes, they have given, and they have given freely.
You hear that, Linus? What a fool you are, for giving away your operating system. Think of your children's college tuition! Forget the thousands of users! Forget the superior operating system, forget the challenge to the Microsoft empire! What will these things matter when it comes time to pay your children's orthodonist bills? Do you think you can derive some kind of *happiness* out of what you've done? Do you mean to take some sick sort of satisfaction from a job well done? What are you, some goddamned altruistic commie bastard? See where your generosity will get you! Hah!
Those whose intellectual property is simply appropriated on the Internet or anywhere else, are forced to labor without choice or recompense, for the benefit of whoever might wish to take a piece of their hide.
If this is a principle of the New World, it is suspiciously like the Old World principle called slavery.
Trading MP3s == enslaving the musicians. Got it.
World War II was won by the Allied forces . . .
Very stereotypically American tactic: bring World War II, the war that made the U.S. the superpower it is today, into the argument whenever you want to get the red-blooded American patriots on your side. Unfortunately, it has little to do with the issue at hand.
But being fair, and being just, is what allowed our civilized society to survive and prosper, while that of our conquering ally, the Soviet Union, cracked, crumbled and collapsed because it attempted to perpetuate a society that was fundamentally unjust, and unfair.
As someone else has already pointed out in this thread, the Soviet Union most likely "cracked" because its leaders were greedy and self-serving, not because it was based on an unjust system.
Thank you for letting me speak from the heart.
It's a scary world in which we have to thank people for the "privilege" of being able to speak from our hearts.
In closing, just remember, kids: don't get your philosophy from the same place you get your ginger ale.
As a matter of fact, I don't think brainfuck is all that cryptic. But perhaps you could discern my bias from my sig.:)
I'd go so far as to say that brainfuck, having been forced to be both logical and simple by virtue of its drive for compactness, is an excellent teaching language. It's a good introduction to the concept of arrays, to ASCII, and to while-loops and sentinel values. I would not go so far as to say that brainfuck is a good first language, but it might be an excellent companion language to C (which was also my first language, and which I do still recommend as a first language: it gives you a good foundation, and is absolutely imperative if you want to be a UNIX developer). Especially since its interpreter and certain tools are written in C.
Anyone interested in learning more about brainfuck can visit the presentation page I set up a couple of semesters ago, when I had to deliver (you guessed it) a class presentation on the language. It was meant as a companion to my talk and demo programs, so if you don't find it as informative as you'd like, follow the links at the bottom. Or, better yet . . ..
Anyway, if you think brainfuck is bad, you've obviously never tried Befunge.;P
Disclaimer: there are well over 1000 comments in this thread. This one will necessarily be to some degree redundant. I apologize in advance, and will do my best to say things that are worth repeating anyway.
. . . I would say that I'm quite, I'd say, more than surprised, I'm quite stunned at the lack of communication and input from the record company. Obviously, you know, with record companies we never really usually depend much on what they have to offer in terms of creative things, but I am stunned at the low volume of support from the record company, both publically and privately.
I am too. One would think that the record company would jump to protect their investment. Unless, of course, they understand better than Lars that MP3/Napster is something they can't fight.
I mean, obviously, Peter and Cliff, our two managers -- they're our closest advisors -- we have been, they've been advising us for 18 years now. Our managers are basically the fifth and the sixth members of the band. They're a total partnership. We view both of them as equal. And they're equally involved in this.
. . . we don't take anything from anybody. We take advice from our two managers, but ultimately we override them a lot.
These two comments paint their managers in very different lights, I think. In the first, they're friends; in the second, merely advisors. After reading the first quote, I was surprised to hear the phrase "We take advice from our two managers," because I would have thought that those managers would be part of "we".
. . . when it comes to my relationship with the Internet and with my comptuer, the fact is that we don't spend a lot of time together.
I would never fault Lars for not using the web, or for not being a geek. These things aren't everyone's cup of tea. But I think it's important to note that Lars admits here to not being well-versed in computers or the internet. He is attacking something about which he is not adequately educated, and I think it shows. He and the band, and their lawyer too, would do well to familiarize themselves with the structure of Napster, the nature of the internet, and the concept of filesharing before they make themselves look foolish in court.
. . . when somebody fucks with what we do, we go after them.
What are they, a street gang? Never mind, that's not important. What's important is that it is Metallica themselves who are setting up the Us vs. Them dichotomy of this debate. People don't trade Metallica MP3s because they hate Metallica, they do it because they like Metallica. These people consider themselves fans, and if the band has not already alienated these fans by getting them banned from Napster, they will surely do so by insisting that they [the fans] are trying to "fuck with" them [the band].
You don't sit down and sort of try and sort of justify yourself, well, 'Maybe our time and energy would be better spent thinking about something a year or two from now.'
Why not? Everyone else in the music industry seems to be doing precisely that. (Or hiding their heads in the sand, I guess.) It is astounding to me that a band with as long a history as Metallica might not have extensive experience with either planning for the future, or adapting to the present. MP3 will force the industry to develop a radically new way of doing business, but there's no reason Metallica shouldn't be blazing that trail.
We really felt that it was time for somebody, an artist, with a potential of a public platform, to get involved with this.
I do applaud Metallica for using their fame to draw attention to an issue they believe in. At least they were at the head of some parade, even if it had to be a misguided one.
Now, are we aware of the Gnutellas and all these other things? Of course we are, but you can only take it one step at a time. And I believe, and the people that we talk to about this, we believe, that the minute some of these companies become active, when they basically come to a point that they become fully funcitonal, we believe that there will be technology and a way to go after them in the way they can invent this technology and make it untraceable. We believe that as quickly as they can make it untraceable we believe that you can find a way to fuck with it . . .
I believe it will be very difficult for Metallica to "fuck with" Gnutella. First of all, the last I heard -- and someone please correct me about this if I'm wrong -- Gnutella wasn't even supposed to be released. Its own developer doesn't support it (and barely acknowledges it). Who is Metallica going to sue to stop Gnutella? It's pirated music being transferred via pirated software. And even if I'm wrong about this, or if it changes, it's the concept that's important, not the implementation. Like CmdrTaco said, "Yeah, we should definitely ban peer-to-peer file sharing over the Internet, and NFS pisses me off, too." If we can't use Napster or Gnutella, we'll use DCC. Or FTP. Or HTTP. Or we'll invent a new protocol.
It's true, what Lars says, that as quick as hackers can find some way to facilitate the flow of MP3s, "The Man" can find some way to block it. But the cycle doesn't end there -- the hackers circumvent the block, the Man blocks the circumvention, etc. Where does it end? With the simple fact that, because of the way computers have been built from the early days, it is effectively impossible to prevent a string of bits from being copied.
So it's sort of like -- the thing about this sort of mob mentality, what we call the 'Internet Extremists,' it's all kind of cute -- 'Yeah, we want to fuck with the system,' 'Yeah, we have a right to get everything for free.' But I believe that if you have the energy and the resources to chase 'em -- and that's one thing we have is a lot of energy and a lot of resources . . .
Why doesn't he just walk around wearing a t-shirt that says "I Am The Man"? He dismisses the notion of rebellion as "cute" and brags about his vast supply of resources (read: money). I think this is a very damaging thing for Lars to have said, though I must admit I'm glad he's said it. It certainly does suggest that Metallica is firmly entrenched in the corporate world.
So of course there will be at some point -- we are not stupid, of course we realize the future of getting music from Metlalica to the people who are interested in Metallica's music is through the Internet.
This, on the other hand, is encouraging. It suggests that Metallica haven't doomed themselves to being legacy artists.
That ultimately is what the biggest beef about this whole thing [is], is that Napster could have so easily avoided this whole thing. It's like, OK, 'It's January, my name is Napster, or I'm Sean, or whoever the CEO was at the time, we have this service, we would like to know if you are interested in being part of it.' If we'd said Yes, then there's no issue, if we'd said No, then this whole thing would have never -- it's really what this is about, it's what this whole thing ultimately comes down to, you know.
This is plainly ridiculous. Either Lars simply does not understand how Napster works, or he is being deliberately silly in the middle of making what should be a critical argument to his side of the story. Napster never asked a single band if they wanted to be a part of their service. Likewise, Napster has never made available a single work belonging to a single band via their service. The service they are providing is not, as Lars seems to imply, to the bands. They are providing a service to their users, a service that allows them to transmit files of certain types across the internet. (Never mind Gnutella, which permits sharing of any file, period.) It is the users who share the files, and if anyone should have asked Metallica first, it's the users. I have said elsewhere that Metallica was right to finger individual users, if they feel they must persist in this attack, and I stand by that statement. (Actually, it was Dr. Dre to whom I was referring, but it's the same idea.)
It's sort of like, you know what, fair enough, I can certainly respect and I would certainly somewhat agree with the fact that paying 16 bucks for a CD is probably, you know, pushing too much. But, it's the marketplace that dictates that, not me.
Quite right. And this is what scares people who make money off of music. One of the rarer moments in the history of capitalism is upon us: for once, the consumers are going to tell the producers how the industry will be run. People are not willing to pay $16+ for a CD. In fact, people don't necessarily want the entire CD, and they may not be willing to pay a cent. The marketplace is speaking, and it's saying, music should be free. No one has told Metallica not to charge money for their music. But MP3 listeners worldwide are telling Metallica that they're not going to pay it. Is this frightening? Should this worry us? Only if we're the sort of people who think that music is created to earn the artist money. But if we believe that music is art created for art's sake . . ..
Understand one thing: this is not about a lot of money right now, because the money that's being lost right now is really pocket change, ok? It's about the priciple of the thing and it's about what could happen if this kind of thing is allowed to exist and run as rampant and out of control for the next 5 years as it has been for the last 6 months.
. . . look, our record sales have gone up in the last three weeks, OK?
You heard it directly from Lars, folks: the amount of money currently being lost due to MP3 trading "is really pocket change". And now he suddenly starts thinking about the future. Convenient.
Well, 1st of all, you have to remember that you're talking to somebody who advocates bootlegging, who has alwyas been pro-bootlegging. We have always let fans tape our shows, we've always had a thing for bootlegging live materials, for special appearances, for that type of stuff. Knock yourselves out, bootleg the fuck out of it, we don't give.
The bottom line is the size of it. The size of it and the quality of it. . . . So it's the quality, the quality and the scale.
So is it okay to make and trade MP3s of bootlegs?
I can't help feeling that this is a bit hypocritical. Metallica insists that their crusade is about principles, not money, but then say that it's okay if your illegal copying only costs them a little bit of money, but not if it costs them a lot.
So back to the question again, the 'commodity' really becomes about it being traded around illegally, and rather than the art that it is.
Is Lars trying to say that art isn't art if there's not a price tag attached? If someone doesn't receive compensation for it? Art is art because it has an effect on the audience. And I'm talking about an effect aside from the removal of $16 from the audience's wallets. Art's effect on the audience, 99% of the time, has little or nothing to do with how it got to the audience, or whether the audience had to pay for it.
Napster has the right to exist. I support Napster's right to exist, OK? But I want them to support my right to not be part of it.
This is a reasonable request, made to the wrong people. As Lars has already demonstrated he doesn't know, Napster is not responsible for the contents of their users' hard drives. This appeal ought to be made to the users.
. . . you have to remember that statistically, for every one band that you hear about, for every one band that a record company helps make successful, they lose their fucking shirt on the nine other ones you never hear about . . .
. . . which wouldn't happen if music were traded without restriction or cost. There would be no need for record labels, and thus the only money lost when a band failed to achieve its goals would be whatever money its members had contributed themselves.
But record companies will never be completely extinct, for one reason and one reason only, that there will always be a need to develop younger artists, and record companies will always be able to play a big part of that, because this whole thing about "I'm a young band, I'm an upstart band, I'm going to put my music on Napster, and then I'm going to become successful?" Fantasy. The only way you you will become successful is by having a publicity and promotion campaign behind you that elevates what you're doing above what your competition is doing.
This is not even true in the current music industry, where bands like Fugazi, a dedicated anti-commercial act, can do their own marketing and achieve a level of popularity that longevity that rivals many corporate-sponsored acts. But if the current music industry is rendered obsolete, and consumers go back to trusting their own personal tastes to decide what music they'll listen to, instead of advertisements, radio and TV, then not only will this scenrio Lars rejects be possible, it might be the only way to succeed as a musician.
It's very very simple. One of the -- when we monitored Napster for 48 hours three weekends ago, we came up with the 1.4 million downloads of Metallica music, there was one, one downloading -- one! of an unsigned artist the whole time.
Inconceivable. There is not a snowball's chance in hell that, in a 48-hour stretch, only a mere one out of the millions of songs transferred via Napster was written by an unsigned artist. I don't know what caused Lars (or NetPD) to make this massive error in calculation, but it is statistically as near to impossible as you could hope to get.
As for those 1.4 million downloads, here is a short list of things Metallica does not know about them:
Metallica does not know whether or not the files were actually transferred, unless they downloaded them themselves, or shared them and watched them being uploaded. All they could know is how many were publicly available for downloading. To know how many actual downloads there were, they would have to monitor a host-to-host transmission as a third party, which is eavesdropping, and is illegal.
Metallica does not know whether or not the files that purported to be MP3s of their music were actually MP3 files. They could just as easily have been empty files carrying the name of a Metallica song and a.mp3 extension.
Even if they were MP3 files, Metallica does not know whether they were their MP3 files. Renaming another band's song would be child's play. The disk space required even to download and listen to a sufficiently large sample of 1.4 million MP3s is a lot more than Lars has on that computer he never uses. The task itself would be mind-numbing and eventually downright infuriating; I can't imagine anyone having the patience to do it.
Metallica also does not know how many of those transfers were between two users who already owned the albums, and thus had legitimate rights to own copies of the songs. Doubtless these users account for a significant percentage of the 30,000 who challenged the ban Napster placed on them at Metallica's request.
You can sit there and talk about how this is great for up and coming artists or for unsigned bands, but a big counterargument that nobody gets is, me and you could form a band together, and we could like, make a demo and then we could put it up on Napster. Who is going to give a fuck? Nobody's going to care, because they don't know anything about what sets my and your band out from the gardener and the guy who cleans my pool's band. The record companies will never be extinct, because there will always be a need down at that level.
I believe ultimately -- and this is sort of what I was talking about before -- that the hardest thing about this is to try and come up with a system where it becomes an individual's right to choose how he will want to partake in this sort of stuff through the Internet. That's the hardest thing because it becomes very difficult, it's very difficult to generalize, like I said before. It's not fair to sit there and say, 'Napster can't exist,' because there are people who would like to use it. And it's not fair to sit there and say 'It has to exist and you have to be part of it,' for the people who don't want to use it.
This is a very good point, and an insightful one as well. Lars is right, this will be a very difficult problem, and in fact, I'm not sure I want to see how it gets solved. It also addresses a more important issue: the question of how to ensure that authors retain copyrights to their work, and how to ensure they're properly credited for it.
We believe based on the people we hired that we're probably not more than a year away from where you can basically download Mission Impossible 2 the same day that it opens in the theatre . . .
Another example of how much Lars hasn't bothered to find out. This is, of course, more or less possible today, though with the problem that a two-hour movie will generally be a much larger file than a five-minute song.
I guess that's all I have. I'm sure it's plenty. There was other stuff I wanted to respond to, but I can't remember what it was, and damned if I didn't waste enough time writing this already. I guess it's obvious where my sympathies lie.
The AP reported that Yahoo's French site did not offer Nazi-related items but hundreds of such objects were available at Yahoo.com. Yahoo had no immediate response to the ruling.
If this is true, then I really don't think the French government is making a reasonable request, or one they even have a right to make. If, however, all they want Yahoo to do is remove material from its French-language or physically-present-in-France servers, then this issue is reduced to one of censorship, and not of a government trying to censor material over which they have no jurisdiction.
Anyway, if there are French citizens who actually want to purchase the items in the Yahoo auction, shouldn't that tell the French government something about popular support for their law? Collectors of Nazi artifacts aren't automatically Nazis. I took a course in the Third Reich a couple of semesters ago, but I didn't call the professor a Nazi just because he was interested enough in them to teach a course on them.
This is more of a request for information than a possible solution, though it could be that too.
What would have happened if Yahoo had just refused to show up in court? As far as I know, they don't own property, machines, server space or anything like that in France. Being based in another country entirely (the U.S.), they shouldn't be subject to French law. In one sense, it isn't even really their fault that French citizens can access their web sites at all. So what if they had just said "screw you, this is your problem, not ours; you work out how to prevent your citizens from buying that stuff"?
Would U.S. agencies have forced Yahoo to appear in the French court or to comply with its judgement? If Yahoo now turns around and declines to obey the ruling, how will the French courts enforce it?
I don't think you could be considered to be under duress in signing that. "Duress" involves some threat or application of force, so unless they're holding a gun to your head and making you sign it, I'm pretty sure it's valid. If you don't sign, then you don't get an account; it's no more complex than that. The worst they could do to you if you didn't sign would be to throw you out of the school, and you probably wouldn't have a case for having your rights violated if it were a private school. Most private educational institutions will tell you that if you don't like their terms, you're free to seek alternate means of education. They're not discriminating against you on the basis of any characteristic you couldn't voluntarily change at a moment's notice.
That was my mistake. I meant to moderate it as "insightful", but I was tired, and I guess my mouse slipped. Hopefully now that I've posted in this thread, the unwarranted moderation will be undone. My apologies.
It would be interesting to see how this would be a completely different issue if Napster allowed for trading of any kind of file, period. Sure, 99% of the byte traffic would still be MP3s, but technically, Napster would just be promoting the free exchange of information . . . and making it easier.
Going after individual users is probably the right thing for Dre to do, much as I hate to say it. Napster should not be getting sued over this; neither should universities who simply didn't prevent students from engaging in activity they already knew was illegal. If I get injured in a car crash, I'm not going to sue the construction crew who paved the highway. It's not their fault the guy was driving drunk, any more than it's the universities' fault their students are violating copyright law -- or, to be perfectly honest, Napster's fault that people are using their software. Trading MP3s is illegal; everyone knows that. It's not less illegal to trade MP3s via Napster, the same way it's not less illegal to mug someone if you use a gun. And yet we don't stop companies from manufacturing guns. So, the users know what they're getting themselves into.
Their best defense, which isn't really a defense, is that there are a f*cking lot of them, and suing them all is terribly impractical, if not impossible. (I think this is what Rob meant to say when he posted the article.)
Not that taking down Napster will be a tremendous blow to the software piracy industry. There was a pretty lively trade in MP3s before Napster, and it'll continue when they're gone. Personally, I just deny anonymous access to my FTP server, and give accounts out to people I know and trust. There could be a pretty healthy trade in any sort of illegal software if a whole bunch of people set up a network of such servers. Remember BBSes?
I suspect that the real tragedy for Dre is not that people are using Napster to listen to his music without paying for it -- radio? burned CDs? cassette tapes? retail theft? -- but the discovery that so many people don't like his songs enough to pay nearly 20 bucks for them. Again, speaking for myself, I still buy CDs if I really like the song, and I have quite a few tracks both on CD and in MP3 format. I spend more money on music now than I did before MP3, probably because now I can listen to a few tracks of my own choosing before I buy the album.
In any case, none of this is the real issue, and lawsuits like this are pathetic attempts to postpone the inevitable. For better or for worse, ethical or unethical, Napster or no Napster, MP3 is now effectively ineradicable. Dre and Metallica should get over it and start adapting. The rest of the industry is busy doing just that.
In a lot of cases, if you can't get the software/hardware to work, you won't be able to access online manuals to figure out what you're doing wrong. Printed manuals are likely to be more comforting to those users not familiar with their computers or operating systems. You can take long manuals with you when you're travelling, if you want. For any non-trivial software, and all hardware, I definitely want the vendor to provide a printed manual. Assuming, of course, the software isn't downloaded off the internet. In that case, procuring a hard copy of the manual is more trouble than it's worth.
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I agree with what others have said; this is a pretty nifty idea but would ultimately just force DoubleClick et al. to implement a workaround. All they'd have to do would be to add some data to the contents of the actual cookie that says "this cookie really came from DoubleClick". Then we'd have to find that field and tamper with it, and then they'd find some other workaround, and so on. Plus, giving a site someone else's cookie might cause the site to display incorrectly, in some cases. And if you mind cookies, but you don't mind broken sites, well, then just turn cookies off.
In Office Space, there's a scene in which a Mac shows a C:\> prompt after it shuts down.
The Mac guy where I work tells me that they use them because it's easier to make a Mac display whatever you want. Even if it's the wrong thing.
Sure, and there's not really anything so terrible or sinister about that, but do they have to log keystrokes to do it? Because keystroke logging means they have any passwords you enter from your computer at work. And if you use the same passwords for other sites . . . it sort of snowballs into an invasion of privacy, if you ask me.
What's really interesting is that my mom's sysadmin will not allow anyone on his network to set an e-mail or network login or password without telling him what it is. Or maybe he tells them what it'll be; I'm not sure. Either way, he has a record, somewhere, of every password in the building. If you ask me, that's not only inconsiderate and privacy-invading, it's also potentially dangerous. On the other hand, at my job, we -- and by "we" I mean all IS staff -- are encouraged to explicitly inform users that we're looking the other direction while they enter their passwords. Some users feel the need to give them to us anyway, for various reasons that make varying degrees of sense, but officially speaking, I don't know anyone's password, and I don't want to. If we tried to log users' keystrokes I'm sure we'd get fired for it. That's why it shocks me to read about companies where doing so is actually a policy.
I still say that if someone is doing the job you're paying them to do, and doing it competently, then that's all you need to know about how they spend their work hours. When they start performing poorly, then you can start investigating why that is, but not before. Whatever the reason for their sub-standard performance is -- too much e-mail forwarding, drinking straight vodka on the job, unable to stop daydreaming about Britney Spears -- is actually relatively unimportant. The point is that they have a problem, any problem, and they need to solve it. And ideally you would just confront them about it and not have to sneak around behind their backs installing monitoring software on their computers or hidden video cameras in their cubicles or anything like that.
My supervisor spends all day at work downloading MP3s, visiting websites, watching "Wazzup?" commercial parodies, playing FreeCell and Minesweeper (which I must say he's quite good at) and sending e-mail. In fact, he does it so much he doesn't even need to use his home computer. But he's still one of their best employees. How? He's doing phone support. His job is reactionary, and he can easily download and talk on the phone at the same time. And if there's a lull, no one cares that he's playing games, as long as he stops to answer the phone when it rings.
The part about "unauthorized e-mail" is a little scarier. Most likely, the only way they can tell the e-mail is "unauthorized" is to read it, and I feel that's an invasion of my privacy. I don't want my sysadmin reading my e-mail for the same reason I don't want him tapping my phone.
And, as others have pointed out, there are legtimate uses of company e-mail for personal purposes. An example: my mother's work e-mail address is her only one. If I'm coming home from school for the weekend, and I need to get in touch with her on Friday to let her know when I'll be coming in, chances are that it'll be difficult for us to get in touch via phone, between her being in meetings and me being in classes. But if we can exchange e-mail about it, then our problem is solved. And as long as answering my e-mail doesn't impair her work performance -- which I can't imagine it doing -- then where's the problem?
In fact, this last point is probably the most important: as long as e-mail, or anything else, doesn't get in the way of one's performance at work, I don't see why anyone should complain about it. If e-mail or web surfing is getting in the way of work performance, then you handle it the same way as you handle any interference with work performance. Presumably my supervisor is competent enough to recognize when I've got such a problem, be it with e-mail or with anything else, and talk to me about it. After all, that's what supervisors are for.
But as long as it doesn't create a problem, I think that, were I a manager, I wouldn't mind a little "inappropriate" web surfing now and then. It could only serve to improve employee morale, and god knows that's important. As an employee, I feel my company takes plenty of my time as it is. If they want my undivided attention for the entire time span during which I'm on the clock, they'd better be paying me more than they are for it, or giving me more time off so I can get all that inappropriateness out of my system.
I want to know where this guy works, that he thinks cubicles are "closed spaces". In my office (read: collection of cubicles), you can hear everything everyone else says, and every noise their computer makes. Ah, for the good old days when people who got paid less than I do were still entitled to real offices . . . .
Great, a commercial keystroke logger. Now k1dd13z can pay to steal passwords. That's how you know you're professional. So let's see if I have this straight: if I'm typing a Word document, and out of frustration, I type "I hate this company", then delete it, it's still saved and available for my employer to view? Gosh, when I think of all the wonderful things technology has done for me, it brings a tear to my eye.
Preach on, brother. I couldn't have said it better.
I was going to suggest this, but then I thought, doesn't that only work on unpatched 95 machines? Even 98 shouldn't ship with port 139 listening, IIRC, because this (or a similar) nuker works *so* well -- a totally debilitating attack carried out in a mere second or two. My coworkers and I used to use this exploit to nuke a box we were using to monitor network status whenever we got bored.
Okay, so this is mostly reminiscing. Anyway, my point is, I doubt the port-139 attack will work on any versions of Windows post-95. If it does, well, Microsoft is even dumber than I gave them credit for.
There's a Dialup Networking patch for Win95 users that will fix this vulnerability, sort of; I'd post a link but I couldn't find it on MS' site. Maybe they're trying to force people to upgrade.
Yeah, and apparently that was pointless too.
But I agree. You have to admit it's funny that any news relating to Microsoft that gets posted on Slashdot is automatically bad news. If they somehow managed to save the entire internet from imminent destruction, we'd complain about how they only did it to secure their profits.
Not that we'd necessarily be wrong about that . . . .
A quick web search for "random haiku generator" turned up several worthy m a t c h e s.
However, most of them either recycle the same lines, or string words together based on few criteria other than syllables. One way or another, they make little sense. I wouldn't consider a haiku generator "intelligent" until it escaped both of these traps. Okay, sure, so the beauty of minimalist work is that the human mind gets to fill in the gaps. But they'd better be "gaps" and not massive, yawning chasms.
And if the haiku/senryu is going to be generated from an RDF file, ideally it would say something of some relevance about the contents of said file. That is, it would either synthesize verbally communicated information or form an opinion, which are both extraordinarily tall orders even with the current advancements in AI technology.
I love haiku/senryu, and if I had the hacking skillz, I'd have a go at this myself. But I don't, so I'll merely wish luck to those who try. And if any of you happen to read this, you'll be my hero if you include a --moooose option. Where a normal haiku is a poem in 5-7-5 format that makes reference to the seaason, a mooooooose haiku is a poem not quite in 5-7-5 format that makes reference to the moooooooose. :P
Yeah, my friends and I always called it the "Konami code". They usually varied it slightly (e.g. LLRR instead of LRLR) from game to game, which explains why so many people are posting the "correct" version of it. In Gradius, it gets you a complete set of upgrades if you pause the game and enter it within a few seconds of starting out. In Legend of the Mystical Ninja for the SNES, there's a mini video arcade in one town, and you can walk up to one of the consoles and play a quick, scaled-down version of Gradius, and the guy standing next to the console warns you that the code doesn't work here. Anyway, it is probably more correctly called a cheat than an easter egg, but what the hell, it was fun.
Pop is a member of one's family, and you can be damn sure I'm not drinking him.
My real intent in releasing source is to allow others to learn from it. If those "others" turn out to be developers of closed-source programs, well, that's unfortunate, but I knew that I was taking that risk when I GPLed the code. I consider it inauthentic and somewhat elitist to say "my source code is open as long as you share my conviction that source code should be open." If I wanted to share my code, and the ideas it contains, with people whose philosophical or political leanings match mine, I'd start a mailing list. But I want to share it with any member of society interested in seeing it, so I GPLed it and posted it on the web.
Do I wish that everyone who looked at my code also believed in GPLing theirs? Sure. Am I going to try to use legal maneuvering and the terms of the GPL to force them to? No. I'm going to talk rationally with them about tghe benefits of open source, maybe I'll write an essay about it, and I'll hope to convince them of the value of my perspective. If I don't succeed, oh well. It takes all types of people, you know.
It's interesting to note that, as the "from-dept." line suggested, this question is really one of where lies the line between learning and plagiarism. This is signigficantly more difficult to discern when dealing with computer code than when dealing with most other forms of expression. If I read 1984, get ideas from it, and write a book using those ideas, I've learned, not plagiarised. If I write a book using Orwell's exact wording (and don't attribute the quote), then I've plagiarised. Now, if I read the source to, say, WordPerfect 8, and write the capability to do that shadow-cursor thing into my own word processor, have I learned or plagiarised? I mean, there are probably only a very few different algorithms I could use to achieve the same result. All would necessarily have some structural similarity, refer to similar variables and parameters, etc. If I change the variable names, is it still plagiarism? If I change the indentation style, is it still plagiarism? If I use a while-loop instead of a for-loop, is it still plagiarism? How different does my algorithm have to be from its prototype to be merely a derivative work and not a copy? How different can it be? I mean, Perl excluded, most languages don't leave you much room to play around with your diction. The variety of ways to achieve a similar effect with different wording in your typical C program is pretty slim.
Disclaimer: I haven't written that much code that's been worth plagiarising. I'm just speaking on principle here.
Yeah, the address works for me too, and seems to be the same company & the same software. But the question's still valid. I mean, what happens with shareware programs (especially crippled ones) when their author dies (as the creator of PKZip recently did), or the contact information circulated with the program ceases to be accurate? What happens to proprietary software when the company folds? IMO, it should become public domain, but U.S. copyright law doesn't work that way -- it protects creations for 70 years after the last author's death or 120 years after creation (assuming software is covered by this same law, which isn't entirely clear). In a lot of these cases, of course, source code simply won't be available. Should the public be allowed to use legal maneuvering to obtain source code for a program upon the author's death? I mean, it's not likely that today's computer programs will be of much use in 70 years, so ideally you'd want the source much sooner. But wouldn't that involve sort of a post-mortem violation of privacy? I don't know . . . .
Now, if the author or company disappears for whatever reason, but reappears later, or someone with a legitimate claim to ownership of the program is still around, opening the source or making the program public domain prematurely could be a big problem. I don't know; I don't seem to be providing many answers here. Oh well.
This is good advice, but in a sense, the increase in speed is sort of an optical illusion. Obviously when the page has to be resized to accomodate the newly-discovered dimensions of an image, it disrupts any reading the viewer had already started to do and forces him to reorient himself. But the amount of data to be downloaded is still the same. I do recommend that all web authors use width= and height= whenever possible, but depending on the primary cause of the complaints about "slowness" you've been getting, this may or may not help solve your problem.
I'm also interested to know what the site is; it might be easier to spot problems in the implementation if we could see it in action. Don't be afraid of a little shameless self-promotion now and then. :P
This would indeed be very clever of the Offspring if it were there intent. But I don't believe that it is. See http://www.offspring.com/napster.html for clarification on the band's stance on MP3/Napster. Relevant excerpt:
I've already mentioned this elsewhere, but it bears repeating. The Offspring, being a punk band, are part of a long tradition of anti-corporation, anti-government, pro-public, and hyperpolitical musicians. Despite the fact that they haven't really lived up to this since Smash, and despite their move to a major label, I'm not surprised to see them supporting grassroots music distribution. They owe their longevity to it. I applaud them for doing what they feel (and I agree) is the right thing, and in such an ingenious manner.
People are right to be pointing out that this is very similar to the issue many musicians have with Napster and the like. Of course, the difference is, character recognition scanners aren't yet as advanced as sound recording technology, so you can probably expect that your book won't get "ripped" and put on the internet against your will. Yet.
People are also right to point out that many people feel there's something special about an actual, physical book that's superior to staring at a screen. Plus, books are still much more portable than laptops.
But what I haven't seen anyone say yet is that there are a whole lot of people out there who don't have computers or internet access yet, but might still want to read. If you think your book might appeal to that audience, you're not doing yourself (or them) any favors by releasing it exclusively online.
Of course, if you really wanted to release it in a "multi-platform" format, there's always good ol' ASCII text. Or HTML. But then you'd have to put up banner ads to make money off it, like someone pointed out. Which is, to be fair, a real possibility.
How are you going to determine what the potential customer's mailserver is? You can't just ask him for his e-mail address and then strip the "username@"; a lot of mail services (especially massive, quasi-anonymous ones like Hotmail or Netaddress) don't run SMTP on the machine whose name is after the @ in the address -- if a machine with that name even exists. Many use several mailservers, with each handling a certain category of usernames. Probably this leaves you asking the user what his mailserver is, and from working at a helpdesk I can tell you that most people won't even know what you mean by that. This is all before you even locate the mailserver to find out whether it accepts VRFY/EXPN or not. Sounds like too much trouble to me. IMHO, the best way to go is the time-honored method of mailing a password to the address the user provides and then asking him to log in with that password to continue. This isn't perfect, but is less likely to fail than using VRFY would be -- and more importantly, it's less likely to deny a user access unjustly.
Can we agree that this would be a good thing? Does anyone think it wouldn't? I want to make sure we all agree on this.
Finally, an MP3/Napster opponent who leads off his argument by saying that intellectual property rights are the most important issue. Most of them jump straight to talking about theft and how much money they think they're losing.
Let me get this straight. If ideas are freely available, if they are given, taken, disseminated, distributed, shared, WITHOUT restraint, then they will die out. But if we restrain ideas, and make sure we control how they get distributed, then they can survive and prosper. Right.
No I don't. I don't think up ideas for personal gain, I think them up -- not to sound too self-important here -- for the betterment of humanity, for *everyone's* sake. They don't need to be registered in my name to do their job. If Thomas Edison hadn't patented the lightbulb, that wouldn't have stopped anyone from using it. In fact, had it not been for the patent system, Edison would not have been able to steal thousands of ideas, concepts and tools from other inventors and patent them as his own.
He uses the word "civilized" a lot. I don't think it means what he thinks it means. Look it up. Know what word is conspicuously absent from the definitions? "Law". Also "property", "business", "consumer", and "money".
It seems to me that if this were true, it would be self-evident, and he wouldn't need to repeat himself in an effort to drive the point home.
It will be interesting to see what measures this format will take to ensure that once one person downloads something, s/he can't share it with the rest of us.
Yeah, you know, my biggest complaint about Napster has always been that it keeps corrupting my files and my systems. Please.
Oh, if only Napster users *understood* that downloading copyrighted material they don't own was illegal! I bet they'd stop doing it then.
More demonizing of the term "hacker". That's productive.
And soon, tools will exist that allow those people to circumvent these file-tagging and criminal-identifying technologies.
Privacy is being able to close the door when you go into a public toilet. Anonymity is not being required to write your name and address on the door before you do so. Understand how these are important to each other?
Here at Slashdot, we call anonymous people "cowards". But we don't deprive them of the ability to post.
Which is the crime: putting on the ski mask, or robbing the bank? If knowing people's identities is all that prevents us from total anarchy, the problem lies with those citizens who care so little for their fellow people that they would freely commit crimes against them. We need to stop perpetuating a society that creates so many heartless citizens. But we don't need to blame the ski masks.
He has got to be kidding. Are we supposed to picture those 100 million European children crying disconsolately just because a piece of software made a pun on the name of their breakfast food? Are even puns going to be outlawed now? He says "stolen" as if the Gnutella developers were maliciously appropriating the name, like the pirates they really are. You know, when humor is outlawed, only outlaws will be funny, except for people who are unintentionally funny, like Seagram's chairmen.
These are pretty strong words from someone whose company makes most of its money by selling a drug (i.e. alcohol). If he wants to criticize MP3.com/Napster/Gnutella for enabling copyright infringement and theft of intellectual property, let's first talk about how many automobile accidents Crown Royal enables each year. Let's talk about the abusive fathers who hold a belt in one hand and a bottle of Chivas Regal in the other. Let's talk about Captain Morgan's contribution to date rape, or the casino patrons who are served free drinks so they'll waste more money, or the lives, bank accounts, and relationships destroyed by alcohol addiction. Frankly, I don't think Ed Bronfman is in much of a position to be moralizing about a crime as relatively trivial as music piracy.
I don't know, I'd say Gnutella was a pretty ingenious piece of work itself. And I'd be remiss were I not to point out that its developers aren't earning a single cent from it.
Oh, no! Anything but that! You know, it's typical that such a hardcore capitalist can't understand that some people really mean it when they say something should be free.
You hear that, Linus? What a fool you are, for giving away your operating system. Think of your children's college tuition! Forget the thousands of users! Forget the superior operating system, forget the challenge to the Microsoft empire! What will these things matter when it comes time to pay your children's orthodonist bills? Do you think you can derive some kind of *happiness* out of what you've done? Do you mean to take some sick sort of satisfaction from a job well done? What are you, some goddamned altruistic commie bastard? See where your generosity will get you! Hah!
Trading MP3s == enslaving the musicians. Got it.
Very stereotypically American tactic: bring World War II, the war that made the U.S. the superpower it is today, into the argument whenever you want to get the red-blooded American patriots on your side. Unfortunately, it has little to do with the issue at hand.
As someone else has already pointed out in this thread, the Soviet Union most likely "cracked" because its leaders were greedy and self-serving, not because it was based on an unjust system.
It's a scary world in which we have to thank people for the "privilege" of being able to speak from our hearts.
In closing, just remember, kids: don't get your philosophy from the same place you get your ginger ale.
As a matter of fact, I don't think brainfuck is all that cryptic. But perhaps you could discern my bias from my sig. :)
I'd go so far as to say that brainfuck, having been forced to be both logical and simple by virtue of its drive for compactness, is an excellent teaching language. It's a good introduction to the concept of arrays, to ASCII, and to while-loops and sentinel values. I would not go so far as to say that brainfuck is a good first language, but it might be an excellent companion language to C (which was also my first language, and which I do still recommend as a first language: it gives you a good foundation, and is absolutely imperative if you want to be a UNIX developer). Especially since its interpreter and certain tools are written in C.
Anyone interested in learning more about brainfuck can visit the presentation page I set up a couple of semesters ago, when I had to deliver (you guessed it) a class presentation on the language. It was meant as a companion to my talk and demo programs, so if you don't find it as informative as you'd like, follow the links at the bottom. Or, better yet . . . .
Anyway, if you think brainfuck is bad, you've obviously never tried Befunge. ;P
Disclaimer: there are well over 1000 comments in this thread. This one will necessarily be to some degree redundant. I apologize in advance, and will do my best to say things that are worth repeating anyway.
I am too. One would think that the record company would jump to protect their investment. Unless, of course, they understand better than Lars that MP3/Napster is something they can't fight.
These two comments paint their managers in very different lights, I think. In the first, they're friends; in the second, merely advisors. After reading the first quote, I was surprised to hear the phrase "We take advice from our two managers," because I would have thought that those managers would be part of "we".
I would never fault Lars for not using the web, or for not being a geek. These things aren't everyone's cup of tea. But I think it's important to note that Lars admits here to not being well-versed in computers or the internet. He is attacking something about which he is not adequately educated, and I think it shows. He and the band, and their lawyer too, would do well to familiarize themselves with the structure of Napster, the nature of the internet, and the concept of filesharing before they make themselves look foolish in court.
What are they, a street gang? Never mind, that's not important. What's important is that it is Metallica themselves who are setting up the Us vs. Them dichotomy of this debate. People don't trade Metallica MP3s because they hate Metallica, they do it because they like Metallica. These people consider themselves fans, and if the band has not already alienated these fans by getting them banned from Napster, they will surely do so by insisting that they [the fans] are trying to "fuck with" them [the band].
Why not? Everyone else in the music industry seems to be doing precisely that. (Or hiding their heads in the sand, I guess.) It is astounding to me that a band with as long a history as Metallica might not have extensive experience with either planning for the future, or adapting to the present. MP3 will force the industry to develop a radically new way of doing business, but there's no reason Metallica shouldn't be blazing that trail.
I do applaud Metallica for using their fame to draw attention to an issue they believe in. At least they were at the head of some parade, even if it had to be a misguided one.
I believe it will be very difficult for Metallica to "fuck with" Gnutella. First of all, the last I heard -- and someone please correct me about this if I'm wrong -- Gnutella wasn't even supposed to be released. Its own developer doesn't support it (and barely acknowledges it). Who is Metallica going to sue to stop Gnutella? It's pirated music being transferred via pirated software. And even if I'm wrong about this, or if it changes, it's the concept that's important, not the implementation. Like CmdrTaco said, "Yeah, we should definitely ban peer-to-peer file sharing over the Internet, and NFS pisses me off, too." If we can't use Napster or Gnutella, we'll use DCC. Or FTP. Or HTTP. Or we'll invent a new protocol.
It's true, what Lars says, that as quick as hackers can find some way to facilitate the flow of MP3s, "The Man" can find some way to block it. But the cycle doesn't end there -- the hackers circumvent the block, the Man blocks the circumvention, etc. Where does it end? With the simple fact that, because of the way computers have been built from the early days, it is effectively impossible to prevent a string of bits from being copied.
Why doesn't he just walk around wearing a t-shirt that says "I Am The Man"? He dismisses the notion of rebellion as "cute" and brags about his vast supply of resources (read: money). I think this is a very damaging thing for Lars to have said, though I must admit I'm glad he's said it. It certainly does suggest that Metallica is firmly entrenched in the corporate world.
This, on the other hand, is encouraging. It suggests that Metallica haven't doomed themselves to being legacy artists.
This is plainly ridiculous. Either Lars simply does not understand how Napster works, or he is being deliberately silly in the middle of making what should be a critical argument to his side of the story. Napster never asked a single band if they wanted to be a part of their service. Likewise, Napster has never made available a single work belonging to a single band via their service. The service they are providing is not, as Lars seems to imply, to the bands. They are providing a service to their users, a service that allows them to transmit files of certain types across the internet. (Never mind Gnutella, which permits sharing of any file, period.) It is the users who share the files, and if anyone should have asked Metallica first, it's the users. I have said elsewhere that Metallica was right to finger individual users, if they feel they must persist in this attack, and I stand by that statement. (Actually, it was Dr. Dre to whom I was referring, but it's the same idea.)
Unfortunately, it seems that this comment is only a perpetuation of the consistent misunderstanding of the way Napster works that Metallica, Dr. Dre, and their attorney Howard King have shown since we first heard King say "Tha t [Napster's offer to ban usernames who were identified as sharing Metallica/Dre songs illegally] was not a satisfactory response. That was a comical response." Metallica, Dre, and King do not know how Napster works, and apparently, they do not care to find out. Worse, they do not seem to think they will need to.
Quite right. And this is what scares people who make money off of music. One of the rarer moments in the history of capitalism is upon us: for once, the consumers are going to tell the producers how the industry will be run. People are not willing to pay $16+ for a CD. In fact, people don't necessarily want the entire CD, and they may not be willing to pay a cent. The marketplace is speaking, and it's saying, music should be free. No one has told Metallica not to charge money for their music. But MP3 listeners worldwide are telling Metallica that they're not going to pay it. Is this frightening? Should this worry us? Only if we're the sort of people who think that music is created to earn the artist money. But if we believe that music is art created for art's sake . . . .
You heard it directly from Lars, folks: the amount of money currently being lost due to MP3 trading "is really pocket change". And now he suddenly starts thinking about the future. Convenient.
So is it okay to make and trade MP3s of bootlegs?
I can't help feeling that this is a bit hypocritical. Metallica insists that their crusade is about principles, not money, but then say that it's okay if your illegal copying only costs them a little bit of money, but not if it costs them a lot.
Is Lars trying to say that art isn't art if there's not a price tag attached? If someone doesn't receive compensation for it? Art is art because it has an effect on the audience. And I'm talking about an effect aside from the removal of $16 from the audience's wallets. Art's effect on the audience, 99% of the time, has little or nothing to do with how it got to the audience, or whether the audience had to pay for it.
This is a reasonable request, made to the wrong people. As Lars has already demonstrated he doesn't know, Napster is not responsible for the contents of their users' hard drives. This appeal ought to be made to the users.
. . . which wouldn't happen if music were traded without restriction or cost. There would be no need for record labels, and thus the only money lost when a band failed to achieve its goals would be whatever money its members had contributed themselves.
This is not even true in the current music industry, where bands like Fugazi, a dedicated anti-commercial act, can do their own marketing and achieve a level of popularity that longevity that rivals many corporate-sponsored acts. But if the current music industry is rendered obsolete, and consumers go back to trusting their own personal tastes to decide what music they'll listen to, instead of advertisements, radio and TV, then not only will this scenrio Lars rejects be possible, it might be the only way to succeed as a musician.
Inconceivable. There is not a snowball's chance in hell that, in a 48-hour stretch, only a mere one out of the millions of songs transferred via Napster was written by an unsigned artist. I don't know what caused Lars (or NetPD) to make this massive error in calculation, but it is statistically as near to impossible as you could hope to get.
As for those 1.4 million downloads, here is a short list of things Metallica does not know about them:
More bragging about how rich he is. In regards to this assertion, read The Brunching Shuttlecocks' An Open Letter From Metallica, which dispatches the notion better than I could, and more humorously too.
This is a very good point, and an insightful one as well. Lars is right, this will be a very difficult problem, and in fact, I'm not sure I want to see how it gets solved. It also addresses a more important issue: the question of how to ensure that authors retain copyrights to their work, and how to ensure they're properly credited for it.
Another example of how much Lars hasn't bothered to find out. This is, of course, more or less possible today, though with the problem that a two-hour movie will generally be a much larger file than a five-minute song.
I guess that's all I have. I'm sure it's plenty. There was other stuff I wanted to respond to, but I can't remember what it was, and damned if I didn't waste enough time writing this already. I guess it's obvious where my sympathies lie.
According to the NewsBytes article,
If this is true, then I really don't think the French government is making a reasonable request, or one they even have a right to make. If, however, all they want Yahoo to do is remove material from its French-language or physically-present-in-France servers, then this issue is reduced to one of censorship, and not of a government trying to censor material over which they have no jurisdiction.
Anyway, if there are French citizens who actually want to purchase the items in the Yahoo auction, shouldn't that tell the French government something about popular support for their law? Collectors of Nazi artifacts aren't automatically Nazis. I took a course in the Third Reich a couple of semesters ago, but I didn't call the professor a Nazi just because he was interested enough in them to teach a course on them.
This is more of a request for information than a possible solution, though it could be that too.
What would have happened if Yahoo had just refused to show up in court? As far as I know, they don't own property, machines, server space or anything like that in France. Being based in another country entirely (the U.S.), they shouldn't be subject to French law. In one sense, it isn't even really their fault that French citizens can access their web sites at all. So what if they had just said "screw you, this is your problem, not ours; you work out how to prevent your citizens from buying that stuff"?
Would U.S. agencies have forced Yahoo to appear in the French court or to comply with its judgement? If Yahoo now turns around and declines to obey the ruling, how will the French courts enforce it?
I don't think you could be considered to be under duress in signing that. "Duress" involves some threat or application of force, so unless they're holding a gun to your head and making you sign it, I'm pretty sure it's valid. If you don't sign, then you don't get an account; it's no more complex than that. The worst they could do to you if you didn't sign would be to throw you out of the school, and you probably wouldn't have a case for having your rights violated if it were a private school. Most private educational institutions will tell you that if you don't like their terms, you're free to seek alternate means of education. They're not discriminating against you on the basis of any characteristic you couldn't voluntarily change at a moment's notice.
That was my mistake. I meant to moderate it as "insightful", but I was tired, and I guess my mouse slipped. Hopefully now that I've posted in this thread, the unwarranted moderation will be undone. My apologies.
I won't pay a cent for anything that can't compete favorably with this.
It would be interesting to see how this would be a completely different issue if Napster allowed for trading of any kind of file, period. Sure, 99% of the byte traffic would still be MP3s, but technically, Napster would just be promoting the free exchange of information . . . and making it easier.
Going after individual users is probably the right thing for Dre to do, much as I hate to say it. Napster should not be getting sued over this; neither should universities who simply didn't prevent students from engaging in activity they already knew was illegal. If I get injured in a car crash, I'm not going to sue the construction crew who paved the highway. It's not their fault the guy was driving drunk, any more than it's the universities' fault their students are violating copyright law -- or, to be perfectly honest, Napster's fault that people are using their software. Trading MP3s is illegal; everyone knows that. It's not less illegal to trade MP3s via Napster, the same way it's not less illegal to mug someone if you use a gun. And yet we don't stop companies from manufacturing guns. So, the users know what they're getting themselves into.
Their best defense, which isn't really a defense, is that there are a f*cking lot of them, and suing them all is terribly impractical, if not impossible. (I think this is what Rob meant to say when he posted the article.)
Not that taking down Napster will be a tremendous blow to the software piracy industry. There was a pretty lively trade in MP3s before Napster, and it'll continue when they're gone. Personally, I just deny anonymous access to my FTP server, and give accounts out to people I know and trust. There could be a pretty healthy trade in any sort of illegal software if a whole bunch of people set up a network of such servers. Remember BBSes?
I suspect that the real tragedy for Dre is not that people are using Napster to listen to his music without paying for it -- radio? burned CDs? cassette tapes? retail theft? -- but the discovery that so many people don't like his songs enough to pay nearly 20 bucks for them. Again, speaking for myself, I still buy CDs if I really like the song, and I have quite a few tracks both on CD and in MP3 format. I spend more money on music now than I did before MP3, probably because now I can listen to a few tracks of my own choosing before I buy the album.
In any case, none of this is the real issue, and lawsuits like this are pathetic attempts to postpone the inevitable. For better or for worse, ethical or unethical, Napster or no Napster, MP3 is now effectively ineradicable. Dre and Metallica should get over it and start adapting. The rest of the industry is busy doing just that.
In a lot of cases, if you can't get the software/hardware to work, you won't be able to access online manuals to figure out what you're doing wrong. Printed manuals are likely to be more comforting to those users not familiar with their computers or operating systems. You can take long manuals with you when you're travelling, if you want. For any non-trivial software, and all hardware, I definitely want the vendor to provide a printed manual. Assuming, of course, the software isn't downloaded off the internet. In that case, procuring a hard copy of the manual is more trouble than it's worth.