Looking at the Wayback Machine archive for the stormaster.com site, it looks like it included ROM images. That'd probably be why the DMCA was invoked.
I can understand why the game makers would want those ROMs taken down. People are still willing to pay for versions of the classic games -- look at the various "oldies" cartridges for modern game systems. Two of the games on the list I know to be available in stores: Frogger was recently remade as a 3D game, as was Dig Dug. Both include the "classic" game. (I saw Dig Dug at my local job-lot clearance store just the other day.)
It's not a case of the code having no value. Clearly, you can still sell that code. So, having it available for anyone with MAME to use is stealing from the pockets of the current rights-holders.
As much as I think DMCA is bad law and is abused, this is one case where it seems to be used as intended.
Think of a paper book. You can buy it, read it, and give it to your friend to read. In fact, two people read the book, and only paid once. Now, how is that substantially different from beaming an ebook to your friend before you're finished reading? What about after you're finished reading?
It is different. If you give the book to your friend, you no longer have the book. If you want to read it again, you must either get it back from the friend (in which case they no longer have the book) or you must buy a new copy.
If you beam an ebook to your friend, you've made a copy. You both have use of the book.
Consider the word "copyright." It is the right to copy. You do not have the right to copy the book, whether it is on paper or on a disk, without the permission of the author. There are a few limited exceptions, none of which include "but I wanted my friend to have a copy."
In your scenario, clearly both you and your friend wanted to read the book. If you wanted to keep a copy, and your friend wanted a copy, by making a copy of the ebook you've definitely deprived the author of a sale. After all, if ebooks didn't exist, one of you would have had to buy a paper copy.
I don't care for the way the music and movie industries are trampling upon fair-use rights. I don't support the recent copyright extensions. However, as a person who writes the occasional newspaper article, I certainly believe in copyright.
Consider: if not for copyright, would the GNU Public License be enforceable?
The big problem TiVo faces with marketing to the masses is that its "killer app" feature is hard to sum up in a 15 to 30 second commercial spot.
TiVo's ads have focused on "gee whiz" features like pausing live TV, which are easy to show.
The feature that I find convinces people that they need one is: TiVo means never missing your favorite program.
Do you have to wear a pager? Well, now if it goes off in the middle of your program, you can pause and come back to it at your leisure.
Spend too long reading web pages and miss the first 10 minutes of the show? No problem, you set up a Season Pass for it, so you can just rewind and start watching. Heck, if you forgot about it completely, it'll still be sitting there, waiting for you, tomorrow.
You don't have to worry about rushing home from the store, or scheduling things around a TV Guide, if there's a show you particularly like.
The other features are gravy; it's the idea that you don't miss programs anymore that sells TiVos. It's nice that it will find programs that you may be interested in watching and record them for times when there's nothing else on. Pausing live TV is good. But it's that core function that gets lost.
From what I've read, the Scientific Atlanta Explorer 8000 PVR doesn't really meet this need. It doesn't have the agility of the "Season Pass" TiVo function. It is buggy and prone to failures. What point in having a PVR if there's some doubt that it will actually perform the recording?
Macs are expensive, but the price is still acceptable compared feature-wise to top PC-brands. But on Macs you are forced to buy a lot of crap which you don't need and/or will have to replace (Firewire, 1GBit LAN, 1-button mouse) which makes them really expensive compared to a PC that contains only what you are going to use.
The "Macs are expensive" argument is hard to justify without making spurious comparisons. A Kia is less expensive than a Saab, and both are cars... but they're hardly equivalent. Many people wouldn't want a Kia, even if you could get aftermarket add-ons to get a decent engine, heated leather seats, and an ignition key between the seats.
Take the latest Gateway, for example: the all-in-one LCD model they're touting as an iMac killer. Yes, it's cheaper than the iMac... if you don't want little things like a modem. By the time you buy such a Gateway that comes with the same equipment -- equipment that most home customers will need or desire -- the price difference vanishes. And as for performance... there's plenty of evidence that Gateway seriously cooked the numbers they use for their claims. Big surprise.
Does the average person need FireWire? Well, judging by the sales of digital video cameras, and the interest in iMovie, I'd say that it's a pretty attractive feature. USB 2.0 is off to a slow start, and its real world performance is poor compared to FireWire. The most popular MP3 player, the iPod, uses FireWire. HDTV cable boxes use FireWire. I'd say it's a standard that's here to stay.
Does the average person need Gigabit Ethernet? No, but the average person doesn't buy the models of Mac that come with it... and it's no longer much more expensive than 100base-T Ethernet. Besides, it wasn't long ago that 100base-T was considered overkill for the home. Now, most people would think you crazy if you suggested that they wire up a home LAN with a 10Mbps hub instead of a 100Mbps switch. In two years, who knows? Gigabit Ethernet may be the standard, and your TV and TiVo might even be using it to talk to your PC.
One button mouse... well, it is easier for new computer users to figure out. But I do tell people who buy new Macs to buy a new USB scroll mouse. It would be nice if Apple included 'em in the box, but it's hardly worth all the gnashing of teeth. Mice are cheap. You can get a name-brand optical USB scroll mouse for $18 or less. It plugs right in and Mac OS X recognizes the second button and the scroll wheel instantly, no drivers required. You can choose the mouse whose shape works for your hand. What's the big deal?
For that matter, why is the complaint that Apple includes a mouse with only one button? Why not complain that they include a mouse? After all, that's an additional expense that's part of the computer's cost. They could cut costs if they left the mouse out, and you had to buy your own! They're taking away your choice by foisting a stylish optical mouse on you!
Oh, wait... maybe it's because that argument is ridiculous. Almost as ridiculous as shunning a computer because you're too worked up to spend $18 on a mouse.
Actually, RJ-45 is a USOC wiring standard. RJ means "Registered Jack," and is used to refer to the way wires are connected to a standard connector. The connectors on an Ethernet cable are actually called "8P8C" connectors, for 8 position, 8 conductor. Also, although Ethernet cables are often called "RJ45," a standard straight-through Ethernet cable is actually wired to the RJ61C standard. RJ45 is another way of wiring 8P8C for use with telephones.
Another example: your common household modular-jack telephone uses a 4 position connector. Many phones now come with a 4P2C jack wired to the USOC RJ11 standard -- two conductors in the jack, used with a two-wire cord. Better phone cords have a 4P4C jack, wired to the USOC RJ14 standard (which is backwards compatible with RJ11), so that two lines can be carried on the cord.
RJ-45 can be connected to a number of different cables, category 5 is the most common for PC networks. The 4-wire cable used for telephones has nothing whatsoever to do with the RJ-11 connector. God save us all from cluebie linux dweebos. A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing.
Okay, bad choice of words with 'public domain' but I still think that somone who publishes information publically should not have the right to recall that content whenever they please. Stealing content is wrong but caching content is not the same thing (Should the NYT have the right to force you to empty your broswer cache of NYT sourced content at any time? Should they be able to demand that proxy servers empty their cache at any time?)
Isn't that what the NO-CACHE meta tag does, in effect?
But, by making it available online for free, you allow anybody to download it and keep a copy.
That's true. That's called "fair use." If I buy a book, I can keep a copy of that book. I could even photocopy the book for my own use, so long as I don't give it to anyone else.
However, if I started making photocopies of the book and giving it to friends, saying "well, it's hard to find this particular book in the stores now," that'd still be a copyright violation. The whole concept of copyright is the only person with the right to sell or give away copies of the work is the author.
Online "archives" like Google and archive.org are useful, but in my non-lawyer opinion they do violate copyright law. Google, in particular, annoys me because they are a company that makes a profit from ad sales. They don't put ads on cached content currently. However, they do use cached content as a "value add" to convince people to use their engine, which drives up ad impressions, increasing their profit. Indirectly, they make money from illegally distributing copies of my work.
Yes, by publishing a web page you generally make the content available for free. However, under copyright law, there's a difference between "available for free" and "public domain." Under U.S. law, everything is protected by copyright until it expires (which hasn't happened for decades) or until the copyright holder explicitly puts it in the public domain. Publishing for free doesn't put it in the public domain. Publishing for free means you can read it for free, but you can't make copies without permission from the author.
The idea that one could use a robots.txt file or META tags to prevent stuff from being archived strikes me as a weak argument. It says "we will assume everything is public domain unless you state otherwise," which is at odds with the copyright law.
What about withdrawing web pages from publication? It's no different from a publisher ceasing publication of a book. A book which is out of print is still protected by copyright. You can't photocopy a copyrighted book and start passing it around just because no one is selling it at the moment. The publisher has the right to say "I don't care to sell this any longer." Why shouldn't a Web publisher have the right to say "I don't care to give away this text any longer?"
"Ah, but it's an online library," you say. Well, real libraries pay for copies of books, or for microfilm of magazines. This payment gives them the right to loan that one copy to other people, under the "first sale doctrine." If thirty people are on the waiting list to read the new Harry Potter novel, they can't photocopy the book for their patrons; they have to buy more copies. Often libraries have microfilm readers that will make copies, and they have copying machines. Library patrons can make fair-use copies of parts of books, or magazine articles, but copying the entire thing would bring pointed questions from a librarian concerned about copyright violation.
The key difference here is the idea of a "loan." A real library loans a book. Only one person can use it at a time. A web archive doesn't loan a copy of a web page; it copies it to as many people as may request it. That's a big difference under copyright law.
It's services that ignore the law that lead to people trying to use technology to protect their rights... technology like DRM and copy protection.
"It shouldn't be that way," you may say. Okay... let's invalidate copyright law and say anything released to the web is in the public domain. Congratulations, you've just made the GNU Public License worthless. You see, if publishing stuff on the web makes it public domain, all that GPL'd software is public domain and therefore cannot be subject to any sort of license restriction. That means companies can use GPL'd code in proprietary products without obeying any GPL terms.
Can't have your cake and eat it too.
Microsoft FUD: scared of Linux, or UNIX?
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Is Linux Dead?
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Lately, a lot of news organizations have been taking heat for "repackaging" press releases as hard news. This article strikes me as being along those lines... a producer probably saw a Microsoft press release and decided that it would make an easy story.
Microsoft's really been hitting the FUD machine wrt UNIX lately. On several news sites, I've noticed a joint Microsoft/UNISYS ad depicting "painted into a corner" with a window nearby, proclaiming "We have your way out." I'm a professional UNIX systems administrator, and I can't think of any company I've ever worked for who felt "painted into a corner" by UNIX. With Windows, sure, but not UNIX. Still, this "big lie" is probably effective for upper management, who won't think critically and will ask the IT staff why it's still using those dead end UNIX boxes.
The real gist of the article seems to be that Linux isn't a desktop OS. That's old news. Technically, "Linux" doesn't even include a GUI; it relies upon XFree86, developed by a seperate group, which is itself an implementation of another project (the X Windows System). That doesn't even provide the GUI, but the toolbox needed to display bitmaps -- you need a window manager for that. If you went to buy a car and found that Ford would sell you the chassis, but you'd have to get the dashboard seperately from Visteon and the gauges for the dashboard from ITT... and there was no guarantee they'd all fit without some modification... wouldn't you go buy from someone else? Well, OK, but what if it was your mother buying the car?
As it stands today, Linux is mostly a back-room OS, and an embedded OS. How many people who wouldn't install Linux on their personal computer use it happily every day on their TiVo?
The meta-FUD here is "UNIX isn't a viable desktop OS." Until a few years ago, this was true. The traditional model of X Windows plus a window manager plus GUI toolkits plus programs is a mess, loveable only by UNIX nerds... and the occasional scientist who puts up with it to get at the computing horsepower. Today, the world's biggest UNIX vendor is Apple, with Mac OS X. It's got a real GUI, which passes the Mom Test. It can be used without the command line.
Perhaps Microsoft's real fear is that Linux is a gateway drug. Without a major revolution in its user interface, Linux won't take over the desktop from Microsoft... but it does serve as a no-cost introduction to UNIX. If more people find that UNIX is more stable and more powerful than Microsoft, they might start looking for a UNIX that can be used as a desktop. You get tired of Windows. You try Linux, and like it, but get tired of wrestling with [Star|Open|K]Office. You look around for something that is UNIX and will run Microsoft Office, and Photoshop, and Quicken... and find OS X. It even connects so nicely to those Linux mail and web servers at your ISP...
US bills $10 and up have a color-shifting hologrammatic ink that changes from green to black as the viewing angle is changed. It's one of many ways to check the legitimacy of US currency:
Color-shifting ink
Watermark portrait offset from the main portrait, visible by holding the bill up to the light
Security strip with denomination microprinted on it, located at a different place for each denomination, which glows different colors for each denomination when exposed to UV light
Microprinting around the portrait
Cotton-based "paper" with red and blue security threads embedded, which feels very different from standard office paper
Intaglio printing process, which has a distinctive "embossing" effect and ink bleed pattern
Even with all these features, there are people who still accept obvious counterfeits. Anyone who has worked retail while not stoned can tell you that US paper money has a unique feel, and a counterfeit printed on inkjet paper feels and sounds wrong when handled.
Modern US currency has enough security features that the "counterfeit detector" pens sold to check the composition of the bill are a rip-off. If there's any doubt, anyone with reasonably normal corrected eyesight, or a magnifying glass, can easily check the security features.
I fear that colorizing the money will lead to increased counterfeiting, as people won't be familiar with the new bills and therefore won't know what's "wrong" about them. This has already happened with the most recent redesign. Counterfeiters got away with using green glitter sprinkles to duplicate the color shifting ink, because people weren't familiar with it.
There's a difference between copies made as a necessary part of reading, and the copies made by the Wayback Machine. The very nature of the Internet means that an intermediate copy must be made to read a web page. That's a fair use copy. A browser cache copy makes reloading the page more convenient for the user, and doesn't give profits to anyone--again, fair use.
Retaining a copy indefinitely and serving it up to other users isn't the same thing at all. The Wayback Machine isn't a necessary part of using the Internet. With the addition of a banner ad, it instantly becomes an income-generating enterprise. In that case, clearly there's a copyright issue, because they would be profiting from the work of others without compensation.
By putting up a web page, I'm not giving any permission for people to copy it beyond those copies strictly required to view it in the first place. Putting something up for public view does not place it in the public domain! U.S. law is quite clear on that count.
If I put my garden tractor on the front lawn, where others can see it, does that give my next door neighbor the right to come take it and use it on his lawn without asking? Nope.
Why are libraries different from Wayback Machine? Photocopies are expensive. It wouldn't be cost effective to photocopy a whole book. It'd be cheaper to buy a new copy. The costs of copying a web page are much lower... so there's no disincentive that keeps people from violating copyright flagrantly. In this case, though, it's not about profit like it is with the record companies and MP3s. It's about an author's right to decide who may profit from his work. Even if Wayback Machine isn't in it for the money, their reputation profits from other people's work. At best, this is a shady practice.
A better analogy would be: Wayback Machine is a public library consisting of photocopies of books. Anyone may check out books. It costs them nothing to do so. No profit is made... but photocopying the book in the first place was still illegal, because of copyright. Once the library buys a book, the First Sale Doctrine says they can lend it out. There's a consideration paid for the work. Wayback Machine isn't giving any monetary consideration for their use... and they aren't even being polite and asking permission!
(If someone sets up a tent on your lawn and camps out, do you think the cops will not arrest them for trespassing if they say "hey, the property owner never said we couldn't!" ? )
Like it or not, copyright is the law. Everything created in the U.S. has copyright invested in its author from the moment of creation until the copyright expires (if Congress ever permits that again) or until the author explicitly places it in the public domain. Publishing it, whether on paper or electronically, doesn't put it in the public domain. If I printed out my web page and handed the printouts to passersby on the street, I'm not giving away my copyright on the work.
The real use of ssh-agent is more obvious when you consider that ssh was originally developed as a replacement for the hideously insecure "rsh."
The reason why one would want to use "rsh," back in the day, rather than telnet, would be if you wanted to write a script that would perform an action on a remote machine. This isn't something that your average end-user does often, but it's something that systems administrators in business environments find very useful.
Problem is, with SSH, you have to provide a password or pass phrase in order to complete the connection. If your goal is to write an automated system to do the work unattended, this is an issue! "rsh" didn't have the problem, because its idea of security was pretty much blind trust.
So, we have ssh-agent. It's a way that you can enter your passphrase once when you're at the computer, and have that authorization stick around while you go away.
An example: At my last job, at an ISP, our DNS was managed through a CVS repository. With thousands of zones, updating the entire repository was not always speedy. So, I set up a cron job to do the update overnight. Since our CVS only allowed ssh connections, I had to find some way to handle the authentication. Running ssh-agent solved this issue: Once I had given the authorization, it would stick around. Of course, if the workstation weren't located in a physically secured space, and equipped with a password locking screen saver set to a short timeout, I'm not sure I'd have taken the security risk.
Re:Best Jon Katz ever!
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Disconnecting
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If you're a U.S. citizen, harassment by a collection agency is a Federal crime under the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act. A lot of collection agencies play fast and loose with the FDCPA, though, because few people take the time to read the laws that affect them.
Under the FDCPA, your wife may have grounds to take the collection agency to court and collect statutory damages. You might want to check it out.
This problem only exists on filesystems that are formatted as HFS. If you mount a UFS-formatted filesystem, it has the traditional UNIX case sensitivity. Although OS X does tend to hiccup when booted from a UFS partition, there's no reason you couldn't put your web stuff on a seperate UFS partition...
You're right! I want to sue Apple for crappy firmware, too! I put a slice of American cheese in my DVD-RAM drive, and it didn't eject it right away! And now my system won't read CDs any more, and it's starting to smell funny! They designed that defect in! They should update their code to detect and eject any thing I want to put into that slot which isn't a valid audio CD, no matter how hard I mash it in!
Er. *deep breath*
I'm sure that neither Apple, nor the various third party vendors of 8cm optical disc media devices that provide Apple with drives, expected that someone would design a disc that appears to be an Audio CD but actually has trojan horse code on it intended to confuse the drive into nonoperation.
I can't fault them for that.
It's not that this copy protection system presents a few wrong bytes. It's intentionally designed to confuse the hell out of the drive, rendering it inoperative so it cannot "rip" the disc. In the process, it seems the copy protection vendors and the record labels forgot that a wide number of computers out there don't have an accessable hardware-based eject button.
Oh, well. Sony definitely lost a sale to me in this case. I'm not buying the Episode II soundtrack if I can't transfer it to my iPod.
Macintosh G4 computers may have half the processor clock speed of Intel-based computers. However, due to their more efficient RISC architecture, and the "Velocity Engine" vector-math unit, they are capable of performing complex graphic operations much faster than equivalently priced Intel-based computers -- two to three times as fast in some cases.
The computing needs of Pixar undoubtedly rely heavily on vector math. Therefore, using a computer architecture that is expressly optimized for vector math is probably a good idea for them.
Don't fall into the fallacy of equating clock speed with performance.
The cat recognition is a cool hack, but keeping the cats indoor would be safer and more ethical.
How is it ethical to confine a naturally predatory animal to an artificial environment for its entire life?
Is it ethical to deny an animal its instincts?
If cats have a devastating effect on wildlife, should I kill any stray outdoor cats (or "wildcats" like bobcats, cougars, etc.) I may happen across to prevent this unethical predatory behavior? Is it ethical for me to do so? Should I actively seek out these feline marauders and end their tyranny?
Did the previous poster really mean to imply that poisoning a cat that is behaving like a cat is ethical, but letting a cat go outside is not?
Re:Can't they look at their own experience?
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Killing Video Games
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Yes, it is a fact that school shootings are occurring on an unprecedented scale, and that they are far more violent (in a single instance) than, say, the average fistfight.
Is this really a fact? Or is it just that school shootings are being reported on a wider scale?
It seems to me that, since Columbine, every time a kid brings a watergun to school, it's called another "kids with guns tragedy." I don't know if this concern is just media hype, or if there really is an increasing problem.
Things like this Connecticut law are proposed and passed by people who turn media hype into "it is a fact" without checking the numbers. "Everybody knows" that there's a problem. "It's obvious" that it's caused by this, that, or the other thing. Rarely do I see the media present research that says "hey, we went and got actual impartial data, and we did a real analysis on it, and we found some trends!"
That kind of factual reporting doesn't get ratings. "Bloodbath at Boomtown High!" gets ratings.
There are a great many things which won't readily catch fire in a solid or liquid state, but which ignite explosively when sprayed as an aerosol. It's all about surface area.
Hold a match against a solid block of walnut wood. It will char, but it probably won't catch fire before the match burns your fingers.
Take the same block and grind it into fine sawdust. Blow the sawdust around so it makes a cloud. Light a match in that cloud, and you'll find yourself in the middle of an explosion. Same material... more surface area.
When the soybean oil is used in a Diesel engine, it's atomized by a fuel injector.
It's also subjected to extreme pressure. Unlike a standard gasoline engine, a Diesel engine doesn't use a spark plug. Instead, it compresses the air in the engine until the air is hot enough to ignite the fuel as it's sprayed into the cylinder. The fuel burns very rapidly, generating exhaust gases that consume more space than the atomized fuel/air combination, forcing the cylinder down.
Compare that to gasoline, which gives off explosive vapors at room temperature. The point of the article was making is: Compared to standard gasoline, Diesel engines can run well on fuel that is far safer to store and transfer under normal circumstances.
In Rochester, NY, there's an even more insidious form of advertising on TV. In light of this NYTimes article, I'm scared that it could catch on.
Time Warner runs advertisements on the local Fox station *during* the syndicated shows from 6 PM to 8 PM. Just after the credits, the bottom third of the screen gets superimposed with "Road Runner online service! Rochester's fastest Internet! Call now!" for about 15 seconds.
The local ad agency that convinced all involved that this was a good idea calls it a "banner ad." The ad exec got the idea from the Internet: he thought that since Web banner ads worked so well *snort*, might as well put them on TV.
If this catches on, where will it stop? Will we have a CNBC-style "ad ticker" beneath all our programs? Will those annoying station-ID "bugs" (which already are increasingly used to advertise upcoming programs with annoying motion graphics) start morphing into product ads? Will we get ads running in picture-in-picture style?
I'm scared that the "commercial TV" of the future may resemble Bloomberg... one quarter screen of entertainment, surrounded by all sorts of ads.
Maybe it sounds paranoid... but think how commercial TV has changed recently. End credits have given two-thirds of the screen up to program advertisements. Opening sequences for many sitcoms have been severely trimmed to make more ad time. Local stations routinely squeeze in a quick ten second ad before returning to a show, often clipping a few seconds of program. Given all that callous behavior, ads on top of the programs themselves wouldn't surprise me at all...
I'd definitely second this -- it's my plan if/when I have children. I learned programming on the Atari 800, and moved on to the Apple II. Both machines were fully comprehensible. A young child can easily learn what those boxes do at the chip level, and apply it easily from BASIC.
Modern OSes have so many APIs and layers that you can't get that direct correlation between hardware and software so easily. You can make more complex programs, but I doubt it's as good for learning basic computer concepts.
Slashdot Mirror
Looking at the Wayback Machine archive for the stormaster.com site, it looks like it included ROM images. That'd probably be why the DMCA was invoked.
I can understand why the game makers would want those ROMs taken down. People are still willing to pay for versions of the classic games -- look at the various "oldies" cartridges for modern game systems. Two of the games on the list I know to be available in stores: Frogger was recently remade as a 3D game, as was Dig Dug. Both include the "classic" game. (I saw Dig Dug at my local job-lot clearance store just the other day.)
It's not a case of the code having no value. Clearly, you can still sell that code. So, having it available for anyone with MAME to use is stealing from the pockets of the current rights-holders.
As much as I think DMCA is bad law and is abused, this is one case where it seems to be used as intended.
It is different. If you give the book to your friend, you no longer have the book. If you want to read it again, you must either get it back from the friend (in which case they no longer have the book) or you must buy a new copy.
If you beam an ebook to your friend, you've made a copy. You both have use of the book.
Consider the word "copyright." It is the right to copy. You do not have the right to copy the book, whether it is on paper or on a disk, without the permission of the author. There are a few limited exceptions, none of which include "but I wanted my friend to have a copy."
In your scenario, clearly both you and your friend wanted to read the book. If you wanted to keep a copy, and your friend wanted a copy, by making a copy of the ebook you've definitely deprived the author of a sale. After all, if ebooks didn't exist, one of you would have had to buy a paper copy.
I don't care for the way the music and movie industries are trampling upon fair-use rights. I don't support the recent copyright extensions. However, as a person who writes the occasional newspaper article, I certainly believe in copyright.
Consider: if not for copyright, would the GNU Public License be enforceable?
The big problem TiVo faces with marketing to the masses is that its "killer app" feature is hard to sum up in a 15 to 30 second commercial spot.
TiVo's ads have focused on "gee whiz" features like pausing live TV, which are easy to show.
The feature that I find convinces people that they need one is: TiVo means never missing your favorite program.
Do you have to wear a pager? Well, now if it goes off in the middle of your program, you can pause and come back to it at your leisure.
Spend too long reading web pages and miss the first 10 minutes of the show? No problem, you set up a Season Pass for it, so you can just rewind and start watching. Heck, if you forgot about it completely, it'll still be sitting there, waiting for you, tomorrow.
You don't have to worry about rushing home from the store, or scheduling things around a TV Guide, if there's a show you particularly like.
The other features are gravy; it's the idea that you don't miss programs anymore that sells TiVos. It's nice that it will find programs that you may be interested in watching and record them for times when there's nothing else on. Pausing live TV is good. But it's that core function that gets lost.
From what I've read, the Scientific Atlanta Explorer 8000 PVR doesn't really meet this need. It doesn't have the agility of the "Season Pass" TiVo function. It is buggy and prone to failures. What point in having a PVR if there's some doubt that it will actually perform the recording?
The "Macs are expensive" argument is hard to justify without making spurious comparisons. A Kia is less expensive than a Saab, and both are cars... but they're hardly equivalent. Many people wouldn't want a Kia, even if you could get aftermarket add-ons to get a decent engine, heated leather seats, and an ignition key between the seats.
Take the latest Gateway, for example: the all-in-one LCD model they're touting as an iMac killer. Yes, it's cheaper than the iMac... if you don't want little things like a modem. By the time you buy such a Gateway that comes with the same equipment -- equipment that most home customers will need or desire -- the price difference vanishes. And as for performance... there's plenty of evidence that Gateway seriously cooked the numbers they use for their claims. Big surprise.
Does the average person need FireWire? Well, judging by the sales of digital video cameras, and the interest in iMovie, I'd say that it's a pretty attractive feature. USB 2.0 is off to a slow start, and its real world performance is poor compared to FireWire. The most popular MP3 player, the iPod, uses FireWire. HDTV cable boxes use FireWire. I'd say it's a standard that's here to stay.
Does the average person need Gigabit Ethernet? No, but the average person doesn't buy the models of Mac that come with it... and it's no longer much more expensive than 100base-T Ethernet. Besides, it wasn't long ago that 100base-T was considered overkill for the home. Now, most people would think you crazy if you suggested that they wire up a home LAN with a 10Mbps hub instead of a 100Mbps switch. In two years, who knows? Gigabit Ethernet may be the standard, and your TV and TiVo might even be using it to talk to your PC.
One button mouse... well, it is easier for new computer users to figure out. But I do tell people who buy new Macs to buy a new USB scroll mouse. It would be nice if Apple included 'em in the box, but it's hardly worth all the gnashing of teeth. Mice are cheap. You can get a name-brand optical USB scroll mouse for $18 or less. It plugs right in and Mac OS X recognizes the second button and the scroll wheel instantly, no drivers required. You can choose the mouse whose shape works for your hand. What's the big deal?
For that matter, why is the complaint that Apple includes a mouse with only one button? Why not complain that they include a mouse? After all, that's an additional expense that's part of the computer's cost. They could cut costs if they left the mouse out, and you had to buy your own! They're taking away your choice by foisting a stylish optical mouse on you!
Oh, wait... maybe it's because that argument is ridiculous. Almost as ridiculous as shunning a computer because you're too worked up to spend $18 on a mouse.
That's odd, I get HBO HD and Showtime HD on my cable system. The cable box has analog 1080i output to Y/Pb/Pr component video jacks.
The technology exists, and is in use... it's just that not all cable companies have gone to the expense of upgrading their equipment.
Actually, RJ-45 is a USOC wiring standard. RJ means "Registered Jack," and is used to refer to the way wires are connected to a standard connector. The connectors on an Ethernet cable are actually called "8P8C" connectors, for 8 position, 8 conductor. Also, although Ethernet cables are often called "RJ45," a standard straight-through Ethernet cable is actually wired to the RJ61C standard. RJ45 is another way of wiring 8P8C for use with telephones.
Another example: your common household modular-jack telephone uses a 4 position connector. Many phones now come with a 4P2C jack wired to the USOC RJ11 standard -- two conductors in the jack, used with a two-wire cord. Better phone cords have a 4P4C jack, wired to the USOC RJ14 standard (which is backwards compatible with RJ11), so that two lines can be carried on the cord.
Amen.
Okay, bad choice of words with 'public domain' but I still think that somone who publishes information publically should not have the right to recall that content whenever they please. Stealing content is wrong but caching content is not the same thing (Should the NYT have the right to force you to empty your broswer cache of NYT sourced content at any time? Should they be able to demand that proxy servers empty their cache at any time?)
Isn't that what the NO-CACHE meta tag does, in effect?
But, by making it available online for free, you allow anybody to download it and keep a copy.
That's true. That's called "fair use." If I buy a book, I can keep a copy of that book. I could even photocopy the book for my own use, so long as I don't give it to anyone else.
However, if I started making photocopies of the book and giving it to friends, saying "well, it's hard to find this particular book in the stores now," that'd still be a copyright violation. The whole concept of copyright is the only person with the right to sell or give away copies of the work is the author.
Online "archives" like Google and archive.org are useful, but in my non-lawyer opinion they do violate copyright law. Google, in particular, annoys me because they are a company that makes a profit from ad sales. They don't put ads on cached content currently. However, they do use cached content as a "value add" to convince people to use their engine, which drives up ad impressions, increasing their profit. Indirectly, they make money from illegally distributing copies of my work.
Yes, by publishing a web page you generally make the content available for free. However, under copyright law, there's a difference between "available for free" and "public domain." Under U.S. law, everything is protected by copyright until it expires (which hasn't happened for decades) or until the copyright holder explicitly puts it in the public domain. Publishing for free doesn't put it in the public domain. Publishing for free means you can read it for free, but you can't make copies without permission from the author.
The idea that one could use a robots.txt file or META tags to prevent stuff from being archived strikes me as a weak argument. It says "we will assume everything is public domain unless you state otherwise," which is at odds with the copyright law.
What about withdrawing web pages from publication? It's no different from a publisher ceasing publication of a book. A book which is out of print is still protected by copyright. You can't photocopy a copyrighted book and start passing it around just because no one is selling it at the moment. The publisher has the right to say "I don't care to sell this any longer." Why shouldn't a Web publisher have the right to say "I don't care to give away this text any longer?"
"Ah, but it's an online library," you say. Well, real libraries pay for copies of books, or for microfilm of magazines. This payment gives them the right to loan that one copy to other people, under the "first sale doctrine." If thirty people are on the waiting list to read the new Harry Potter novel, they can't photocopy the book for their patrons; they have to buy more copies. Often libraries have microfilm readers that will make copies, and they have copying machines. Library patrons can make fair-use copies of parts of books, or magazine articles, but copying the entire thing would bring pointed questions from a librarian concerned about copyright violation.
The key difference here is the idea of a "loan." A real library loans a book. Only one person can use it at a time. A web archive doesn't loan a copy of a web page; it copies it to as many people as may request it. That's a big difference under copyright law.
It's services that ignore the law that lead to people trying to use technology to protect their rights... technology like DRM and copy protection.
"It shouldn't be that way," you may say. Okay... let's invalidate copyright law and say anything released to the web is in the public domain. Congratulations, you've just made the GNU Public License worthless. You see, if publishing stuff on the web makes it public domain, all that GPL'd software is public domain and therefore cannot be subject to any sort of license restriction. That means companies can use GPL'd code in proprietary products without obeying any GPL terms.
Can't have your cake and eat it too.
Lately, a lot of news organizations have been taking heat for "repackaging" press releases as hard news. This article strikes me as being along those lines... a producer probably saw a Microsoft press release and decided that it would make an easy story.
Microsoft's really been hitting the FUD machine wrt UNIX lately. On several news sites, I've noticed a joint Microsoft/UNISYS ad depicting "painted into a corner" with a window nearby, proclaiming "We have your way out." I'm a professional UNIX systems administrator, and I can't think of any company I've ever worked for who felt "painted into a corner" by UNIX. With Windows, sure, but not UNIX. Still, this "big lie" is probably effective for upper management, who won't think critically and will ask the IT staff why it's still using those dead end UNIX boxes.
The real gist of the article seems to be that Linux isn't a desktop OS. That's old news. Technically, "Linux" doesn't even include a GUI; it relies upon XFree86, developed by a seperate group, which is itself an implementation of another project (the X Windows System). That doesn't even provide the GUI, but the toolbox needed to display bitmaps -- you need a window manager for that. If you went to buy a car and found that Ford would sell you the chassis, but you'd have to get the dashboard seperately from Visteon and the gauges for the dashboard from ITT... and there was no guarantee they'd all fit without some modification... wouldn't you go buy from someone else? Well, OK, but what if it was your mother buying the car?
As it stands today, Linux is mostly a back-room OS, and an embedded OS. How many people who wouldn't install Linux on their personal computer use it happily every day on their TiVo?
The meta-FUD here is "UNIX isn't a viable desktop OS." Until a few years ago, this was true. The traditional model of X Windows plus a window manager plus GUI toolkits plus programs is a mess, loveable only by UNIX nerds... and the occasional scientist who puts up with it to get at the computing horsepower. Today, the world's biggest UNIX vendor is Apple, with Mac OS X. It's got a real GUI, which passes the Mom Test. It can be used without the command line.
Perhaps Microsoft's real fear is that Linux is a gateway drug. Without a major revolution in its user interface, Linux won't take over the desktop from Microsoft... but it does serve as a no-cost introduction to UNIX. If more people find that UNIX is more stable and more powerful than Microsoft, they might start looking for a UNIX that can be used as a desktop. You get tired of Windows. You try Linux, and like it, but get tired of wrestling with [Star|Open|K]Office. You look around for something that is UNIX and will run Microsoft Office, and Photoshop, and Quicken... and find OS X. It even connects so nicely to those Linux mail and web servers at your ISP...
US bills $10 and up have a color-shifting hologrammatic ink that changes from green to black as the viewing angle is changed. It's one of many ways to check the legitimacy of US currency:
Even with all these features, there are people who still accept obvious counterfeits. Anyone who has worked retail while not stoned can tell you that US paper money has a unique feel, and a counterfeit printed on inkjet paper feels and sounds wrong when handled.
Modern US currency has enough security features that the "counterfeit detector" pens sold to check the composition of the bill are a rip-off. If there's any doubt, anyone with reasonably normal corrected eyesight, or a magnifying glass, can easily check the security features.
I fear that colorizing the money will lead to increased counterfeiting, as people won't be familiar with the new bills and therefore won't know what's "wrong" about them. This has already happened with the most recent redesign. Counterfeiters got away with using green glitter sprinkles to duplicate the color shifting ink, because people weren't familiar with it.
There's a difference between copies made as a necessary part of reading, and the copies made by the Wayback Machine. The very nature of the Internet means that an intermediate copy must be made to read a web page. That's a fair use copy. A browser cache copy makes reloading the page more convenient for the user, and doesn't give profits to anyone--again, fair use.
Retaining a copy indefinitely and serving it up to other users isn't the same thing at all. The Wayback Machine isn't a necessary part of using the Internet. With the addition of a banner ad, it instantly becomes an income-generating enterprise. In that case, clearly there's a copyright issue, because they would be profiting from the work of others without compensation.
By putting up a web page, I'm not giving any permission for people to copy it beyond those copies strictly required to view it in the first place. Putting something up for public view does not place it in the public domain! U.S. law is quite clear on that count.
If I put my garden tractor on the front lawn, where others can see it, does that give my next door neighbor the right to come take it and use it on his lawn without asking? Nope.
Why are libraries different from Wayback Machine? Photocopies are expensive. It wouldn't be cost effective to photocopy a whole book. It'd be cheaper to buy a new copy. The costs of copying a web page are much lower... so there's no disincentive that keeps people from violating copyright flagrantly. In this case, though, it's not about profit like it is with the record companies and MP3s. It's about an author's right to decide who may profit from his work. Even if Wayback Machine isn't in it for the money, their reputation profits from other people's work. At best, this is a shady practice.
A better analogy would be: Wayback Machine is a public library consisting of photocopies of books. Anyone may check out books. It costs them nothing to do so. No profit is made... but photocopying the book in the first place was still illegal, because of copyright. Once the library buys a book, the First Sale Doctrine says they can lend it out. There's a consideration paid for the work. Wayback Machine isn't giving any monetary consideration for their use... and they aren't even being polite and asking permission!
(If someone sets up a tent on your lawn and camps out, do you think the cops will not arrest them for trespassing if they say "hey, the property owner never said we couldn't!" ? )
Like it or not, copyright is the law. Everything created in the U.S. has copyright invested in its author from the moment of creation until the copyright expires (if Congress ever permits that again) or until the author explicitly places it in the public domain. Publishing it, whether on paper or electronically, doesn't put it in the public domain. If I printed out my web page and handed the printouts to passersby on the street, I'm not giving away my copyright on the work.
The real use of ssh-agent is more obvious when you consider that ssh was originally developed as a replacement for the hideously insecure "rsh."
The reason why one would want to use "rsh," back in the day, rather than telnet, would be if you wanted to write a script that would perform an action on a remote machine. This isn't something that your average end-user does often, but it's something that systems administrators in business environments find very useful.
Problem is, with SSH, you have to provide a password or pass phrase in order to complete the connection. If your goal is to write an automated system to do the work unattended, this is an issue! "rsh" didn't have the problem, because its idea of security was pretty much blind trust.
So, we have ssh-agent. It's a way that you can enter your passphrase once when you're at the computer, and have that authorization stick around while you go away.
An example: At my last job, at an ISP, our DNS was managed through a CVS repository. With thousands of zones, updating the entire repository was not always speedy. So, I set up a cron job to do the update overnight. Since our CVS only allowed ssh connections, I had to find some way to handle the authentication. Running ssh-agent solved this issue: Once I had given the authorization, it would stick around. Of course, if the workstation weren't located in a physically secured space, and equipped with a password locking screen saver set to a short timeout, I'm not sure I'd have taken the security risk.
If you're a U.S. citizen, harassment by a collection agency is a Federal crime under the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act. A lot of collection agencies play fast and loose with the FDCPA, though, because few people take the time to read the laws that affect them.
Under the FDCPA, your wife may have grounds to take the collection agency to court and collect statutory damages. You might want to check it out.
This problem only exists on filesystems that are formatted as HFS. If you mount a UFS-formatted filesystem, it has the traditional UNIX case sensitivity. Although OS X does tend to hiccup when booted from a UFS partition, there's no reason you couldn't put your web stuff on a seperate UFS partition...
You're right! I want to sue Apple for crappy firmware, too! I put a slice of American cheese in my DVD-RAM drive, and it didn't eject it right away! And now my system won't read CDs any more, and it's starting to smell funny! They designed that defect in! They should update their code to detect and eject any thing I want to put into that slot which isn't a valid audio CD, no matter how hard I mash it in!
Er. *deep breath*
I'm sure that neither Apple, nor the various third party vendors of 8cm optical disc media devices that provide Apple with drives, expected that someone would design a disc that appears to be an Audio CD but actually has trojan horse code on it intended to confuse the drive into nonoperation.
I can't fault them for that.
It's not that this copy protection system presents a few wrong bytes. It's intentionally designed to confuse the hell out of the drive, rendering it inoperative so it cannot "rip" the disc. In the process, it seems the copy protection vendors and the record labels forgot that a wide number of computers out there don't have an accessable hardware-based eject button.
Oh, well. Sony definitely lost a sale to me in this case. I'm not buying the Episode II soundtrack if I can't transfer it to my iPod.
Macintosh G4 computers may have half the processor clock speed of Intel-based computers. However, due to their more efficient RISC architecture, and the "Velocity Engine" vector-math unit, they are capable of performing complex graphic operations much faster than equivalently priced Intel-based computers -- two to three times as fast in some cases.
The computing needs of Pixar undoubtedly rely heavily on vector math. Therefore, using a computer architecture that is expressly optimized for vector math is probably a good idea for them.
Don't fall into the fallacy of equating clock speed with performance.
How is it ethical to confine a naturally predatory animal to an artificial environment for its entire life?
Is it ethical to deny an animal its instincts?
If cats have a devastating effect on wildlife, should I kill any stray outdoor cats (or "wildcats" like bobcats, cougars, etc.) I may happen across to prevent this unethical predatory behavior? Is it ethical for me to do so? Should I actively seek out these feline marauders and end their tyranny?
Did the previous poster really mean to imply that poisoning a cat that is behaving like a cat is ethical, but letting a cat go outside is not?
Is this really a fact? Or is it just that school shootings are being reported on a wider scale?
It seems to me that, since Columbine, every time a kid brings a watergun to school, it's called another "kids with guns tragedy." I don't know if this concern is just media hype, or if there really is an increasing problem.
Things like this Connecticut law are proposed and passed by people who turn media hype into "it is a fact" without checking the numbers. "Everybody knows" that there's a problem. "It's obvious" that it's caused by this, that, or the other thing. Rarely do I see the media present research that says "hey, we went and got actual impartial data, and we did a real analysis on it, and we found some trends!"
That kind of factual reporting doesn't get ratings. "Bloodbath at Boomtown High!" gets ratings.
There are a great many things which won't readily catch fire in a solid or liquid state, but which ignite explosively when sprayed as an aerosol. It's all about surface area.
Hold a match against a solid block of walnut wood. It will char, but it probably won't catch fire before the match burns your fingers.
Take the same block and grind it into fine sawdust. Blow the sawdust around so it makes a cloud. Light a match in that cloud, and you'll find yourself in the middle of an explosion. Same material... more surface area.
When the soybean oil is used in a Diesel engine, it's atomized by a fuel injector.
It's also subjected to extreme pressure. Unlike a standard gasoline engine, a Diesel engine doesn't use a spark plug. Instead, it compresses the air in the engine until the air is hot enough to ignite the fuel as it's sprayed into the cylinder. The fuel burns very rapidly, generating exhaust gases that consume more space than the atomized fuel/air combination, forcing the cylinder down.
Compare that to gasoline, which gives off explosive vapors at room temperature. The point of the article was making is: Compared to standard gasoline, Diesel engines can run well on fuel that is far safer to store and transfer under normal circumstances.
In Rochester, NY, there's an even more insidious form of advertising on TV. In light of this NYTimes article, I'm scared that it could catch on.
Time Warner runs advertisements on the local Fox station *during* the syndicated shows from 6 PM to 8 PM. Just after the credits, the bottom third of the screen gets superimposed with "Road Runner online service! Rochester's fastest Internet! Call now!" for about 15 seconds.
The local ad agency that convinced all involved that this was a good idea calls it a "banner ad." The ad exec got the idea from the Internet: he thought that since Web banner ads worked so well *snort*, might as well put them on TV.
If this catches on, where will it stop? Will we have a CNBC-style "ad ticker" beneath all our programs? Will those annoying station-ID "bugs" (which already are increasingly used to advertise upcoming programs with annoying motion graphics) start morphing into product ads? Will we get ads running in picture-in-picture style?
I'm scared that the "commercial TV" of the future may resemble Bloomberg... one quarter screen of entertainment, surrounded by all sorts of ads.
Maybe it sounds paranoid... but think how commercial TV has changed recently. End credits have given two-thirds of the screen up to program advertisements. Opening sequences for many sitcoms have been severely trimmed to make more ad time. Local stations routinely squeeze in a quick ten second ad before returning to a show, often clipping a few seconds of program. Given all that callous behavior, ads on top of the programs themselves wouldn't surprise me at all...
I'd definitely second this -- it's my plan if/when I have children. I learned programming on the Atari 800, and moved on to the Apple II. Both machines were fully comprehensible. A young child can easily learn what those boxes do at the chip level, and apply it easily from BASIC.
Modern OSes have so many APIs and layers that you can't get that direct correlation between hardware and software so easily. You can make more complex programs, but I doubt it's as good for learning basic computer concepts.