Neumann, maker of *very* expensive, *very* high-quality studio microphones, has gotten on the horn with eBay a number of times and had auctions pulled, claiming trademark and copyright infringements. Do a search on eBay for "Neumann", and, chances are, a lot of the links you click will say "this auction is no longer in our database".
Sorry, but as someone who uses Neumann microphones (I have two pairs), checks the listings of Neumann gear on eBay every day, and has purchased Neumann gear on eBay before, I can say you are totally WRONG.
There's plenty of microphones up for auction on eBay right now and it's been that way for a while.
Neumann has no problems at all with people selling their microphones. In fact, you can go to the Neumann web site and post to their message board the serial number of an old Neumann microphone you are considering purchasing, and they will respond (publically) with the date of sale and who they sold it to (and any other information about the microphone they may have on file). Also, their engineers frequently give advice on how to evaluate an old condenser mic you are considering purchasing.
Go to this message where Stephan Peus, Neumann Director of Development, tells someone when each of two microphones they are considering purchasing were sold. Looks like they are pretty supportive of people buying their old microphones...
Neumann is quite proud of the fact that their microphones are so well made as to be useful and valuable even 50 years after manufacture. They don't do anything to impede this as it would reflect negatively an their well deserved reputation. The community that buys and uses these types of microphones is very small (professional recording engineers, artists, and specialist dealers) and Neumann knows it. They wouldn't piss those people off.
The ONLY time I have seen listings for Neumann mics pulled on eBay is because the lister broke other eBay rules such as adding to their listing discription ads with prices for other items that aren't being auctioned on eBay.
Well, in one court (New York?), the judge found against my.mp3.com for doing precisely this. So the current legal opinion is that this is not OK. Of course, since the two files would be completely indistinguishable, the judge's decision is utterly goofy, but for now it holds...
No, the recent MP3.com decision had nothing to do with transmitting MP3's to users. The claim was that MP3.com had infringed on RIAA member copyrights by ripping CDs to their server's disks for commercial purposes without the permission of the copyright holders.
Of course, quantum coupling provides a possible solution in the form of an unbreakable one-time pad, but how this can be applied to problem sets which public key/private key encryption addresses remains to be seen.
Huh? The One-Time-Pad has been unbreakable since it was proven so by Claude Shannon in the 1940's. Quantum computing doesn't change this situation in the slightest. No advances will ever break the One-Time-Pad because it is perfect from an information theory point of view; every possible solution is equally as likely to be the correct solution.
Perhaps your are referring to Quantum Encryption (sometimes known as Quantum Key Exchange); sending photons down an optical fiber with a guarantee that no eavesdropping has occurred (which would collapse the wave function, alerting the recipient that the photon has been observed...).
There's tons of free music you can download on Napster. Lots of old music that isn't copyrighted anymore. Lots of live concert recordings that the artists have consented to distribution (even Metallica allows recording and distribution of their music. Not everything on Napster is a copyright violation.
OS-X is based on Mach, which isn't anything like the Linux or BSD kernels. Mach has been in use for quite a long time and is used in more than a few operating systems. So it isn't as untested as you may think.
It is important to remember that Aqua is essentially just a widget set - the real power behind the interface is Quartz, the new PDF based rendering engine.
Aqua is just a set of graphics and Quartz is just a window manager that can manage the screen between multple graphics systems, such as DPDF and Quickdraw. PDF has a powerful graphics model but it's not much different from PostScript, except that it works with PDF files.
The real power lies in Cocoa, the Frameworks Formerly Known As NeXTStep, then OpenStep, then YellowBox.
These Frameworks are the most advanced and mature API's available. They make writing powerful applications easy since they provide such a rich set of classes. It's hard to sell something based on the API's but Mac OS X has by far the best. By comparison, programming in your typical X window manager is much more difficult, as evidenced by the fact that few X applications even support cut and paste.
This gets me back to the one-handed keyboard. If you had a device like that, you could have the best of worlds, infinite data entry, and graphical layout. Imagine you wanted to copy a file to another directory. You could click on it and type "cp/wherever" directly into the icon. You could open any folder on the system (just click the desktop and type "open/bla/openthis". (One of the things that bugged me about BeOS was the lack of integration of the GUI and the CLI. It would have been nice to be able to open the folder I was in the CLI in the GUI, and vice versa. You can do this in Windows for god sakes.)
You already have a one-handed keyboard. Windoze, at least, ships with left and right handed Dvorak keyboards in addition to the two-handed one. Modmaps for X are out there too.
In addition to the two handed keyboard layout bearing his name, Dvorak also created versions optimized for typing with one hand. These keyboard layouts group the most common English letters and combinations of letters on either the left or right side of the keyboard. You still hit one key per letter but the layout is designed so you don't have to frequently go all the way across the keyboard.
Well, if it becomes unlawful "to teach or demonstrate to any person the manufacture of a controlled substance, or to distribute to any person, by any means, information pertaining to, in whole or in part, the manufacture or use of a controlled substance" then we can finally bust the morons at the Patent office. For in the patent office you'll find the (expired) patents for MDMA, LSD, and other Schedule I drugs, with complete synthesis information.
What if the company were dumping toxic chemicals into the river late at night and Aquacool_2000 was blowing the whistle on them? Shouldn't workers be able to report evil doings by their company, forcing them to correct their actions, without jeopardizing their position at the company? If spilling the beans about bad things your company is doing means certain termination then employees will be unlikely to inform the public at all.
A judge can rule that the public's interest in having this person remain anonymous, and remain at the company is more important than the company's interest in finding out who this person is so they can be fired. That is the issue here. Yahoo isn't allowing the person to come before the judge to make that decision. Yahoo is simply rolling over and providing the information without giving the affected person any recourse.
I seem to remember a landmark libel case, Cubby vs. Compuserve, where the court ruled that Compuserve was not liable for the content of their message boards because of the fact that the did not excercise any sort of editorial control.
It seems that eBay takes the opposite tack of discussion groups; eBay actively monitors and exercises control of the listings on their sites by removing auctions practically at the drop of a hat. Does this make eBay liable for auctions on their site?
It's pretty clear what legal advice eBay was given by their counsel. However, that doesn't mean they are right. Does anyone expect to see a major lawsuit against eBay for an auction that slips by their monitors? Is it possible for eBay to be liable for an illegal auction that slips through the cracks?
What your father showed you were guidelines for sentencing, which are applied after the person has been convicted in a real trial by a real jury.
This is different, this isn't just the sentencing of an already guilty person. This software is the replacement of a trial. Fortunately they are allegedly only using it for "straightforward" cases, but it is still a little scary to an American. The US constitution guarantees the accused a fair trial with a jury of their peers.
Furthermore, many people, some of whom are federal judges, believe the Federal Mandatory Minimum Sentencing Guidelines are a travesty of justice. They do not allow the judge much discretion, if any, because the sentence is determined by the charges. Prosecutors determine the charges, not the judges. Mandatory minimus effectively remove sentencing descions from judges, where they should be, and place them in the hands of the Proscutors.
Once again demonstrating what we all already knew, namely that the labels are useless middlemen.
While I don't necessarily support the status quo of the music industry, the labels aren't entirely useless middlemen.
Nice studios and their associated equipment cost a lot of money. While electronics are getting cheaper and you can produce an album with little more than a nice computer and some microphones (which are mostly mechanical and don't get cheaper), there's never going to be a substitute for a properly designed performance space and control room. Talented engineers and producers are scarce and command very large fees. While using a fancy studio with a hot shot producer and engineering team isn't the only way to make an album, it's always going to be one of the best ways because of the unlimited control over the process given to the artists/producer. Unfortunately, it costs a heck of a lot of money that artists don't have when they are starting out.
One of the things a label does is front a bunch of money to the artist to make an album. Labels also use millions of dollars of their own money to build some of the nicest studios around. In return for this they take a lot of the profits from the artists sales (much like venture capitalists in the computer industry).
Artists can't just go to the bank and get a loan to make an album because that's not the type of risk that banks can handle. That's been the labels territory for decades. Now that labels are becoming less and less necessary for distribution I expect to see venture capital groups to start funding promising artists albums, independent of labels. With this model the artist keeps the creative and distribution control, which is always the main thing artists hate about labels.
What about public domain music? Copyright isn't forever, you know. There's lots of music that is no longer protected by copyright because the authors explicitly placed it in the public domain or they have been dead for 70 years. It should be tradeable with Napster.
How about bands that allow their fans to record and trade their concerts? People are permitted to trade their recordings of concerts by Dave Matthews, Grateful Dead, Pearl Jam, Phish, and even METALLICA! It's not reasonable to ask these bands to go around signing every single recording their fans have made.
As always, the tools are neutral. Only people are good or evil.
Burris
Re:The Forbes perspective is the only one that cou
on
Be to Drop BeOS? No.
·
· Score: 1
Within a year, NeXT is going to be the second largest desktop operating system around (as Mac OS X). I'd say that NeXT did pretty well.
Not available for my NeXT black hardware, that's what:-(
Whoopeeeee.... black hardware is cool and all but it's dog slow these days... It's even slow as a web server (especially if you have any CGI). I use one for a Mailman server and the load goes up to 11 if a couple messages arrive at once.
There's been plenty of substantive evidence that dinosaurs were warm blooded and had high metabolism. This find is just more fuel for the fire. The structure of dinosaur bones is like that of warm blooded creatures, with plenty of channels for blood to feed oxygen hungry muscles. The fossil evidence points to very fast growth rates, with large dinosaurs gaining tons of weight within a year or two. Many dinosaurs could fly (a very high metabolism activity). Population densities of the top level preditor dinos is similar to the same population densities of today's mammalian top level predators. The fact that dinosaurs out-competed and suppressed the development of warm blooded mammals for 100 million years, not allowing mammals to develop beyond rat sized critters is also pretty damning (gigantic sluggish cold blooded dinos would have been overrun by fast warm blooded mammals).
As has been pointed out in other posts, much of this evidence, and plenty more, was presented to the general public over 15 years ago in Robert Bakker's book _The Dinosaur Heresies_. He presents a very solid case, even without a fossilized heart. I highly reccommend his book, it's a great read.
What an understatment. He designed HTTP, the HTML subset of SGML, and the first browser, bringing global hypertext to reality.
Burris (actually used the first web browser, which ran on a NeXT, thought it sucked and was convinced that Gopher and WAIS, which had really nice clients for the NeXT and more sites , were going to rule the world. boy was I wrong.)
This was not a brute-force (formally known as "complete trial and error") attack. Brute force means trying every possible key until you find the right one. The attack in question is much faster than complete trial and error. Every asymmetric cipher has an attack faster than complete trial and error by virtue of the fact that there is a "public" component that can be analyzed by the attacker. That's why symmetric ciphers only need keys that are 128-bits long where asymmetric ciphers need much longer ones.
The point is to determine a minimum key length to use. Minimum key lengths are conservative estimates balanced by pratical key storage and enciphering computation limits. With the real-world data produced by contests such as these, we can make much better estimates of minimum key lengths required for the desired level of security.
It's not as major as you may think. All public key algorithms are cracked in a sense that there are known attacks that are significantly faster than complete-trial-and-error. For RSA you just factor the public modulus. ElGamal and Elliptic Curve involve calculating discrete logarithms in a finite field.
So, this doesn't mean the algorithm is broken. We've known all along that the keys could be cracked in this way. It does give us a better picture of how large the keys must be to make cracking them unfeasable.
Unless the implementations you mention use keys that are not much larger than the ones recently cracked then they are still quite safe. Major news would be an algorithm that ran in linear time.
Quartz is less critical, though in the long run it will probably make life easier for developers. The fancy stuff there isn't strictly necessary, not yet, though as the range of displays increases, going to PDF and breaking the dependency on DPI and viewing distances will be necessary for the range of devices that Linux will run on.
Quartz is actually much more critical than you suspect. Lets face it, the whole "raison d'etre" for Cocoa ("The Frameworks Formerly Known As NeXTSTEP, OpenStep, and Yellowbox), is to make the deveploper's life easier. Very powerful, intuitive, and advanced user intefaces can be done with Mac Toolbox, WIN32, Gnome/GTK, and even direct to X-protocol programming. It's all a matter of degree of difficulty for the developer (and by comparison to Cocoa, it's a serious PITA on the abovementioned platforms). As time to market and developer attention spans are at such a premium, a much more powerful developement environment (the frameworks and APIs, not fancy IDEs make the difference) allows developers to make much more powerful applications that really advance the state of the art of applications.
Aside from the powerful graphics primitives and coordinate space transformations, you get real WYSIWYG display and printing for FREE! If you can display it on the screen then you can print it simply by sending a message to a print object. You get free output to PDF files. Anyone who has written a serious application that creates documents intended to be printed knows that the printing code is often a major PITA and a substantial portion of the time and effort expended to write the whole application. A lot of applications that aren't necessarily intended for creating printed documents don't have printing support or have extremely rudimentary printing support because it is so difficult.
Furthermore, there is a thing known as "Filter Services" which are little bits of code that register with the OS indicating what file types they accept and what types they convert to. When you create an Open File panel you indicate what file types you want to accept (PDF for instance, which any app can display for free of course). There is already a PostScript distiller filter service that converts PS and EPS files to PDF. If the user has it installed on her system then PS and EPS files will show up in the Open File panel in your application. When they select them the file will be automatically converted to PDF. So even if your app doesn't directly support certain file formats, if there is a filter service available that can convert to one of your supported file formats then you get the additional formats without having to do anything, and without the user having to make an explicit conversion.
So Quartz gives developers and users an amazing amount of power that lets them write extremely functional applications without much effort. This of course is translates to a direct benefit to users. It's more than just whizzy transparency...
Slashdot Mirror
There's plenty of microphones up for auction on eBay right now and it's been that way for a while.
Neumann has no problems at all with people selling their microphones. In fact, you can go to the Neumann web site and post to their message board the serial number of an old Neumann microphone you are considering purchasing, and they will respond (publically) with the date of sale and who they sold it to (and any other information about the microphone they may have on file). Also, their engineers frequently give advice on how to evaluate an old condenser mic you are considering purchasing.
Go to this message where Stephan Peus, Neumann Director of Development, tells someone when each of two microphones they are considering purchasing were sold. Looks like they are pretty supportive of people buying their old microphones...
Neumann is quite proud of the fact that their microphones are so well made as to be useful and valuable even 50 years after manufacture. They don't do anything to impede this as it would reflect negatively an their well deserved reputation. The community that buys and uses these types of microphones is very small (professional recording engineers, artists, and specialist dealers) and Neumann knows it. They wouldn't piss those people off.
The ONLY time I have seen listings for Neumann mics pulled on eBay is because the lister broke other eBay rules such as adding to their listing discription ads with prices for other items that aren't being auctioned on eBay.
Burris
Burris
Perhaps your are referring to Quantum Encryption (sometimes known as Quantum Key Exchange); sending photons down an optical fiber with a guarantee that no eavesdropping has occurred (which would collapse the wave function, alerting the recipient that the photon has been observed...).
Burris
There's tons of free music you can download on Napster. Lots of old music that isn't copyrighted anymore. Lots of live concert recordings that the artists have consented to distribution (even Metallica allows recording and distribution of their music. Not everything on Napster is a copyright violation.
Burris
OS-X is based on Mach, which isn't anything like the Linux or BSD kernels. Mach has been in use for quite a long time and is used in more than a few operating systems. So it isn't as untested as you may think.
Burris
The real power lies in Cocoa, the Frameworks Formerly Known As NeXTStep, then OpenStep, then YellowBox.
These Frameworks are the most advanced and mature API's available. They make writing powerful applications easy since they provide such a rich set of classes. It's hard to sell something based on the API's but Mac OS X has by far the best. By comparison, programming in your typical X window manager is much more difficult, as evidenced by the fact that few X applications even support cut and paste.
Burris
Breakfast cereal?? I thought "Kerberoo's" was the trademark of Microsoft's new superhero themed chastity belts.
Burris
Burris
Nobody ever got fired for buying IB^H^HMicrosoft.
Burris
In addition to the two handed keyboard layout bearing his name, Dvorak also created versions optimized for typing with one hand. These keyboard layouts group the most common English letters and combinations of letters on either the left or right side of the keyboard. You still hit one key per letter but the layout is designed so you don't have to frequently go all the way across the keyboard.
Burris
Burris
What if the company were dumping toxic chemicals into the river late at night and Aquacool_2000 was blowing the whistle on them? Shouldn't workers be able to report evil doings by their company, forcing them to correct their actions, without jeopardizing their position at the company? If spilling the beans about bad things your company is doing means certain termination then employees will be unlikely to inform the public at all.
A judge can rule that the public's interest in having this person remain anonymous, and remain at the company is more important than the company's interest in finding out who this person is so they can be fired. That is the issue here. Yahoo isn't allowing the person to come before the judge to make that decision. Yahoo is simply rolling over and providing the information without giving the affected person any recourse.
Burris
It seems that eBay takes the opposite tack of discussion groups; eBay actively monitors and exercises control of the listings on their sites by removing auctions practically at the drop of a hat. Does this make eBay liable for auctions on their site?
It's pretty clear what legal advice eBay was given by their counsel. However, that doesn't mean they are right. Does anyone expect to see a major lawsuit against eBay for an auction that slips by their monitors? Is it possible for eBay to be liable for an illegal auction that slips through the cracks?
Burris
This is different, this isn't just the sentencing of an already guilty person. This software is the replacement of a trial. Fortunately they are allegedly only using it for "straightforward" cases, but it is still a little scary to an American. The US constitution guarantees the accused a fair trial with a jury of their peers.
Furthermore, many people, some of whom are federal judges, believe the Federal Mandatory Minimum Sentencing Guidelines are a travesty of justice. They do not allow the judge much discretion, if any, because the sentence is determined by the charges. Prosecutors determine the charges, not the judges. Mandatory minimus effectively remove sentencing descions from judges, where they should be, and place them in the hands of the Proscutors.
Please see Families Against Mandatory Minimums
Burris
Nice studios and their associated equipment cost a lot of money. While electronics are getting cheaper and you can produce an album with little more than a nice computer and some microphones (which are mostly mechanical and don't get cheaper), there's never going to be a substitute for a properly designed performance space and control room. Talented engineers and producers are scarce and command very large fees. While using a fancy studio with a hot shot producer and engineering team isn't the only way to make an album, it's always going to be one of the best ways because of the unlimited control over the process given to the artists/producer. Unfortunately, it costs a heck of a lot of money that artists don't have when they are starting out.
One of the things a label does is front a bunch of money to the artist to make an album. Labels also use millions of dollars of their own money to build some of the nicest studios around. In return for this they take a lot of the profits from the artists sales (much like venture capitalists in the computer industry).
Artists can't just go to the bank and get a loan to make an album because that's not the type of risk that banks can handle. That's been the labels territory for decades. Now that labels are becoming less and less necessary for distribution I expect to see venture capital groups to start funding promising artists albums, independent of labels. With this model the artist keeps the creative and distribution control, which is always the main thing artists hate about labels.
Burris
What about public domain music? Copyright isn't forever, you know. There's lots of music that is no longer protected by copyright because the authors explicitly placed it in the public domain or they have been dead for 70 years. It should be tradeable with Napster.
How about bands that allow their fans to record and trade their concerts? People are permitted to trade their recordings of concerts by Dave Matthews, Grateful Dead, Pearl Jam, Phish, and even METALLICA! It's not reasonable to ask these bands to go around signing every single recording their fans have made.
As always, the tools are neutral. Only people are good or evil.
Burris
Burris
Whoopeeeee.... black hardware is cool and all but it's dog slow these days... It's even slow as a web server (especially if you have any CGI). I use one for a Mailman server and the load goes up to 11 if a couple messages arrive at once.
Burris
There's been plenty of substantive evidence that dinosaurs were warm blooded and had high metabolism. This find is just more fuel for the fire. The structure of dinosaur bones is like that of warm blooded creatures, with plenty of channels for blood to feed oxygen hungry muscles. The fossil evidence points to very fast growth rates, with large dinosaurs gaining tons of weight within a year or two. Many dinosaurs could fly (a very high metabolism activity). Population densities of the top level preditor dinos is similar to the same population densities of today's mammalian top level predators. The fact that dinosaurs out-competed and suppressed the development of warm blooded mammals for 100 million years, not allowing mammals to develop beyond rat sized critters is also pretty damning (gigantic sluggish cold blooded dinos would have been overrun by fast warm blooded mammals).
As has been pointed out in other posts, much of this evidence, and plenty more, was presented to the general public over 15 years ago in Robert Bakker's book _The Dinosaur Heresies_. He presents a very solid case, even without a fossilized heart. I highly reccommend his book, it's a great read.
Burris
Tim Berners Lee "Director of W3C"
What an understatment. He designed HTTP, the HTML subset of SGML, and the first browser, bringing global hypertext to reality.
Burris
(actually used the first web browser, which ran on a NeXT, thought it sucked and was convinced that Gopher and WAIS, which had really nice clients for the NeXT and more sites , were going to rule the world. boy was I wrong.)
This was not a brute-force (formally known as "complete trial and error") attack. Brute force means trying every possible key until you find the right one. The attack in question is much faster than complete trial and error. Every asymmetric cipher has an attack faster than complete trial and error by virtue of the fact that there is a "public" component that can be analyzed by the attacker. That's why symmetric ciphers only need keys that are 128-bits long where asymmetric ciphers need much longer ones.
Burris
The point is to determine a minimum key length to use. Minimum key lengths are conservative estimates balanced by pratical key storage and enciphering computation limits. With the real-world data produced by contests such as these, we can make much better estimates of minimum key lengths required for the desired level of security.
Burris
It's not as major as you may think. All public key algorithms are cracked in a sense that there are known attacks that are significantly faster than complete-trial-and-error. For RSA you just factor the public modulus. ElGamal and Elliptic Curve involve calculating discrete logarithms in a finite field.
So, this doesn't mean the algorithm is broken. We've known all along that the keys could be cracked in this way. It does give us a better picture of how large the keys must be to make cracking them unfeasable.
Unless the implementations you mention use keys that are not much larger than the ones recently cracked then they are still quite safe. Major news would be an algorithm that ran in linear time.
Burris
"National borders aren't even speed bumps on the Information Superhighway" - Tim May
Aside from the powerful graphics primitives and coordinate space transformations, you get real WYSIWYG display and printing for FREE! If you can display it on the screen then you can print it simply by sending a message to a print object. You get free output to PDF files. Anyone who has written a serious application that creates documents intended to be printed knows that the printing code is often a major PITA and a substantial portion of the time and effort expended to write the whole application. A lot of applications that aren't necessarily intended for creating printed documents don't have printing support or have extremely rudimentary printing support because it is so difficult.
Furthermore, there is a thing known as "Filter Services" which are little bits of code that register with the OS indicating what file types they accept and what types they convert to. When you create an Open File panel you indicate what file types you want to accept (PDF for instance, which any app can display for free of course). There is already a PostScript distiller filter service that converts PS and EPS files to PDF. If the user has it installed on her system then PS and EPS files will show up in the Open File panel in your application. When they select them the file will be automatically converted to PDF. So even if your app doesn't directly support certain file formats, if there is a filter service available that can convert to one of your supported file formats then you get the additional formats without having to do anything, and without the user having to make an explicit conversion.
So Quartz gives developers and users an amazing amount of power that lets them write extremely functional applications without much effort. This of course is translates to a direct benefit to users. It's more than just whizzy transparency...
Dr. Burris T. Ewell