What's needed for indies are the reviews
on
Reflecting Fires
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
We "know" what's good in music and books, because it's stuff we hear on the radio or see on the shelves in stores, stuff by our favorite artists and authors.
But how do you tell with an unknown or an indie, where the industry hasn't shoved it into your face, or where it's too diffuse for word of mouth?
I enjoy the format of CDBaby, with sorting by genre, reviews, "If you like this, you might also like..." and most of all, samples. (Sabbatum - Black Sabbath visits the 14th century, in Latin) I wish there were more of this, especially site-neutral reviews.
Seeing something like this on the publishing front is welcome.
Is it a deliberate policy, or is it because Ford is a car company and so far TPTB there haven't really heard of the DMCA, or that they could use it to go after car chippers?
or back to email... IMHO there's a PhD thesis waiting for someone to study email joke propagation on the Internet and find some sort of sociological relevance to it. After all, someone got a PhD out of the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, and they drew computer networking conclusions out of that one.
Maybe the TLA (insert favorite one, here) could get involved. Sooner or later Al Qaeda is going to wise up to traffic analysis. Maybe the next way to try and hide communications would be coded and/or steganographic messages in jokes or spam.
I was one of those people inspired by Apollo. Stayed up late on Sunday night that Summer when I was thirteen watching the fuzzy time on the surface replayed, with Walter Cronkite commentaries.
Fast forward a few years, and watch it all rot.
Maybe an elevator would do better, maybe it will finally get us access for good. I hope so. I fear not.
Last I heard, and mentioned by a co-reply by trixillion, there is a followon for the Hubble planned. The really good NASA missions have long exceeded their planned lifespan, so it's entirely possible that there will be operational overlap between the Hubble and the Hubble++. There would be an opportunity to team them, perhaps. I don't know what extra infrastructure is needed to do this.
Perhaps it's not that you should avoid laughing, but that you are laughing at the wrong things. Maybe if you laughed at the right things, your immune system would quit attacking the wrong things.
From what I understand, in 2006 when we all MUST use digital TV, Hollywood will have completely reworked what the VCR is capable of. I've heard of some strange restrictions and don't know what is true, but it sounds as if a digital VCR will be nowhere near as "versatile" for consumers as today's analog VCR.
and then we can have a telescope cluster even BIGGER than the Earth. I believe I've heard of proposals to do just this. Actually, I think it was to have multiple telescopes orbiting Earth's L4 or L5 points, much bigger than the Earth.
Kind of reminiscent of the question, "How about a Beowulf cluster of these?" only applied to telescopes.
Certainly Microsoft improves their products. But that takes time, and time will be the critical factor, here. Plus it isn't all under Microsoft's control, because the other half of the DRM will be done by the media industries.
There are two failure modes of interest, here. First is failure of a DRM system to play non-DRM content and second is failure of a DRM system to play DRM content. Palladium systems will have to play all non-DRM content perfectly on all prevalent hardware just to break even. The main source of problems would be inherent bugs and letting a system attempting a DRM boot fall gracefully back to non-DRM. But Palladium also has to play DRM content in order to show *any* advantage, and that will be a harder task. That's where not only must the DRM software be bug-free, but they need industry-wide cooperation on signed drivers.
In the meantime, during all of this DRM learning curve, Apple is billing the Mac as 'the media machine'. The question is how bad a drubbing DRM will take in the market during the learning curve. Failure to play DRM will hurt the PC business a little, but the media industrys quite a bit. Failure to play non-DRM will hurt the PC business *badly*. The question will be making it through the growing pains, how much patience customers have, and how hard ??AA turn the screws on us before the whole mess is debugged.
This presumes a smooth launch of Palladium and rapid customer uptake. That in turn presumes that Palladium itself isn't buggy, and that the whole industry has a massive driver signing party.
Much more likely in the near-to-middle term is that Palladium will come out with some number if, if not bugs, at least hardware/driver problems. In addition, the first DRM-enabled media will have problems. It's hard enough to launch a new technology *without* disablement technology in it, and the whole field of disablement is relatively new.
The old days of copy protected software are probably the best precedent, and they were rocky enough. I don't look for Palladium to have an easy launch, and I further expect one side-effect to be driving more users toward Macs. This depends, of course, on legislation, as well.
Since I was taken to task a while back, I have one (for the moment) question about Palladium. Does a Palladium boot need to be completely trusted or completely untrusted, or can it be mixed? For instance, if my video card doesn't have a Palladium-signed driver, can I still boot trusted and listen to DRM music?
I call Palladium disablement technology rather than enablement because the only thing it has added is a point of refusal. It is enabling only in that it lets me view/hear media that someone else would prefer to refuse, otherwise. But bits are bits, samples are samples, and in that respect it has added no new capability.
Actually, I wasn't going to mention this, because I haven't checked my facts, but since you approach the topic....
I'm under the impression that under the Constitution one right/reason/responsibility to own guns is the overthrow of a tyrannical government. I seem to remember a line that if the government becomes tyrannical, it is our responsibility to "throw it off."
I don't have time at the moment to find the reference, so I'm not putting it in my regular thread. But it does appear in line with shooting tax collectors.
Maybe we should stress the parallels...
on
Fritz's Hit List
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· Score: 4, Insightful
between digital media devices and guns.
After all, guns have decent, law abiding uses like hunting, self defense, target shooting, collectables, and such.
Clearly digital media devices also have many law abiding uses.
Guns also have illegal uses, and let's face it, those illegal uses are FAR worse than any illegal uses of digital media devices. At least abuse of digital devices doesn't kill.
Therefore, if Fritz is to get his way, there is a clear parallel to place 'access restraint' devices in every marketed gun. Enlist the NRA to help fight our battle.
I know this is silly. But I'm not sure I know what's wrong with the reasoning, at least until I get to the prior paragraph.
In a much more meaningful sense...
I work in the electronics field. My employer has had rounds of layoffs in the past year, as have others. Our state has been badly hurt. IMHO the stuff Hollings is trying to push through will hurt the tech industry, badly. One of my Senators (Leahy) has been in Hollywood's pocket in the past. He needs to understand that this will hurt our state if this nonsense gets put into law.
I wish I knew what was the most effective way to communicate. In the past, I guess the phone has gotten the most specific response, even better than a letter delivered directly to his office in town.
Both good and bad come in shades.
on
Freeing the Specs?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Even though Matrox is put in the "good" category when it comes to releasing specs, even they're not all the way there. At least back in the G400 days, there was a chunk of closed-source binary that the open-source driver loaded into the "Warp Engine" on the chip/card. Since the closed-source portion didn't execute on the main CPU, no big fuss arose. But it still wasn't completely open or documented.
From what I've heard, ATI is at least partially forthcoming on hardware spec releases, too.
We're dancing around the real issue, here. It's far bigger than how long Disney gets to keep exclusive rights to Mickey Moust. Unfortunately far worse damage is being done than merely overextending Mickey's copyright.
If retroactive copyright extension is upheld, then the public domain is essentially dead. At the very least, the last public domain music/literature ends up coming from early in the 20th century.
If retroactove copyright is upheld, does anyone believe that some Senator won't be for-hire next time Steamboat Willie is about to expire, and again and again after that.
At the moment, I don't give a %^&* about Mickey Mouse, nor of any of the $%^& Jack Valenti wants to protect "for Eternity minus one day." It's all the other stuff that gets dragged along with it. Essentially the cultural "abandonware" that sometimes becomes important much later. In the name of Mickey Mouse, we've prevented EVERYTHING from lapsing into the public domain.
It stinks, and I'd like to see retroactive extension reversed. Even better, I'd like to see terms more "limited". Even though Jefferson himself did sign extensions, I don't believe he envisioned going beyond "threescore and ten". After all, that's Eternity, to me.
If we can't have reversal or rollback, I'd prefer to require copyrights to need renewal. Abandonware (be it music, print, movie, or software) simply should fall into the public domain.
Perhaps we need "constructive engagement" with the Lindows people, and help them improve the security of their machines. At this point, it's in all of our best interest to not see Linux responsible for a net security fiasco.
There are ways to take care of this, beginning with establishing a default non-root id and enough sudo or setuid configuration tools to do what needs to be done. Remember these boxes are for non-Linux users, so the configuration needs should be simpler, as well.
Forget "pursuit of happiness," for the moment. We have a number of other "rights" which we take for granted, and at this point I'm not sure exactly where they came from. But at the moment, two come to mind as relevant:
"Innocent until proven guilty" and "right to a trial by jury of your peers"
It seems to me that this bill relegates the roles of prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner (I know, it's not as dramatic as the death penalty, but "executioner" can be someone who implements the judgement/sentence.) to the RIAA in these cases.
I've been really happy to see the recent see-saw between nVidia and ATI. Nor do I see why we have to have one become best, and remain so. Your BMW and Fiat analogy is great, but neglects the existence of Audi and Chevy, not to mention Ford, Saab, Volvo, etc.
As far as I can tell, we're the ONLY market so badly dominated. The next closest thing might be soft drinks, with the Pepsi/Coke duopoly. But we have Microsoft and Intel, and until ATI's comeback, it looked like nVidia was going to be IT on PC graphics. (Actually, I think the Pepsi/Coke dupoloy has a worse stranglehold on their industry than Microsoft/Intel on ours.)
You've missed the point. There is not supposed to be a Final Winner, or else we all lose. As soon as there is a Final Winner, competition dies. At any one generation, the Winner gets better profits and the right to compete on the next generation. But you want there to be a runner-up who will viably go on to the next generation, as well.
We have let Microsoft color our thinking too much, fill us with envy, and convince us that this is The Business Model.
From the Burlington Free Press last week, quoting from the N.Y. Times New Service:
"Christian radio stations oust NPR in Lousiana"
A growing Christian Radio network dislikes the "distinctly liberal and secular perspective" of NPR, and decided to do something about it by knocking the stations off the air. "The Federal Communications Commision considers them squatters on the far left side of the FM dial, and anyone who is granted a full-power license can legally run them out of town." The "them" in the quoted sentence refers to low-power repeater stations, often used by NPR affiliates.
I was thinking of submitting this to/. under YRO or Almighty Buck, but it isn't really news. After all, I saw it in a newspaper last week.
Slashdot Mirror
We "know" what's good in music and books, because it's stuff we hear on the radio or see on the shelves in stores, stuff by our favorite artists and authors.
But how do you tell with an unknown or an indie, where the industry hasn't shoved it into your face, or where it's too diffuse for word of mouth?
I enjoy the format of CDBaby, with sorting by genre, reviews, "If you like this, you might also like..." and most of all, samples. (Sabbatum - Black Sabbath visits the 14th century, in Latin) I wish there were more of this, especially site-neutral reviews.
Seeing something like this on the publishing front is welcome.
Your code looks unconstitutional to me. To fix it, all you need to do is change "while(1)" to "while(Eternity-1)" and it will be just fine.
Yet.
Is it a deliberate policy, or is it because Ford is a car company and so far TPTB there haven't really heard of the DMCA, or that they could use it to go after car chippers?
Just wondering what those with synaesthesia think of colorized movies. Or for that matter, what they think of dubbed foreign language films.
Do the picture/sound clash more or less on "tampered" movies more or less than on the original?
or back to email... IMHO there's a PhD thesis waiting for someone to study email joke propagation on the Internet and find some sort of sociological relevance to it. After all, someone got a PhD out of the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, and they drew computer networking conclusions out of that one.
Maybe the TLA (insert favorite one, here) could get involved. Sooner or later Al Qaeda is going to wise up to traffic analysis. Maybe the next way to try and hide communications would be coded and/or steganographic messages in jokes or spam.
Bad analogy.
I was one of those people inspired by Apollo. Stayed up late on Sunday night that Summer when I was thirteen watching the fuzzy time on the surface replayed, with Walter Cronkite commentaries.
Fast forward a few years, and watch it all rot.
Maybe an elevator would do better, maybe it will finally get us access for good. I hope so. I fear not.
Maybe that's good, that they have to fish all the way to the r* services to flesh out a top-10 list.
OTOH, I wonder if next year Lindows will be on the list, with our favorite practice of running users as root.
Last I heard, and mentioned by a co-reply by trixillion, there is a followon for the Hubble planned. The really good NASA missions have long exceeded their planned lifespan, so it's entirely possible that there will be operational overlap between the Hubble and the Hubble++. There would be an opportunity to team them, perhaps. I don't know what extra infrastructure is needed to do this.
Perhaps it's not that you should avoid laughing, but that you are laughing at the wrong things. Maybe if you laughed at the right things, your immune system would quit attacking the wrong things.
I thought I remembered something about doing something similar optically. How do they combine the Kecks output?
...lation?
From what I understand, in 2006 when we all MUST use digital TV, Hollywood will have completely reworked what the VCR is capable of. I've heard of some strange restrictions and don't know what is true, but it sounds as if a digital VCR will be nowhere near as "versatile" for consumers as today's analog VCR.
and then we can have a telescope cluster even BIGGER than the Earth. I believe I've heard of proposals to do just this. Actually, I think it was to have multiple telescopes orbiting Earth's L4 or L5 points, much bigger than the Earth.
Kind of reminiscent of the question, "How about a Beowulf cluster of these?" only applied to telescopes.
Certainly Microsoft improves their products. But that takes time, and time will be the critical factor, here. Plus it isn't all under Microsoft's control, because the other half of the DRM will be done by the media industries.
There are two failure modes of interest, here. First is failure of a DRM system to play non-DRM content and second is failure of a DRM system to play DRM content. Palladium systems will have to play all non-DRM content perfectly on all prevalent hardware just to break even. The main source of problems would be inherent bugs and letting a system attempting a DRM boot fall gracefully back to non-DRM. But Palladium also has to play DRM content in order to show *any* advantage, and that will be a harder task. That's where not only must the DRM software be bug-free, but they need industry-wide cooperation on signed drivers.
In the meantime, during all of this DRM learning curve, Apple is billing the Mac as 'the media machine'. The question is how bad a drubbing DRM will take in the market during the learning curve. Failure to play DRM will hurt the PC business a little, but the media industrys quite a bit. Failure to play non-DRM will hurt the PC business *badly*. The question will be making it through the growing pains, how much patience customers have, and how hard ??AA turn the screws on us before the whole mess is debugged.
This presumes a smooth launch of Palladium and rapid customer uptake. That in turn presumes that Palladium itself isn't buggy, and that the whole industry has a massive driver signing party.
Much more likely in the near-to-middle term is that Palladium will come out with some number if, if not bugs, at least hardware/driver problems. In addition, the first DRM-enabled media will have problems. It's hard enough to launch a new technology *without* disablement technology in it, and the whole field of disablement is relatively new.
The old days of copy protected software are probably the best precedent, and they were rocky enough. I don't look for Palladium to have an easy launch, and I further expect one side-effect to be driving more users toward Macs. This depends, of course, on legislation, as well.
Since I was taken to task a while back, I have one (for the moment) question about Palladium. Does a Palladium boot need to be completely trusted or completely untrusted, or can it be mixed? For instance, if my video card doesn't have a Palladium-signed driver, can I still boot trusted and listen to DRM music?
I call Palladium disablement technology rather than enablement because the only thing it has added is a point of refusal. It is enabling only in that it lets me view/hear media that someone else would prefer to refuse, otherwise. But bits are bits, samples are samples, and in that respect it has added no new capability.
Understood, but I'm not really thinking about moving to Montana.
My brother actually lived in Montana for a while, but he would probably assert that not everyone there wants their own nation.
Actually, I wasn't going to mention this, because I haven't checked my facts, but since you approach the topic....
I'm under the impression that under the Constitution one right/reason/responsibility to own guns is the overthrow of a tyrannical government. I seem to remember a line that if the government becomes tyrannical, it is our responsibility to "throw it off."
I don't have time at the moment to find the reference, so I'm not putting it in my regular thread. But it does appear in line with shooting tax collectors.
between digital media devices and guns.
After all, guns have decent, law abiding uses like hunting, self defense, target shooting, collectables, and such.
Clearly digital media devices also have many law abiding uses.
Guns also have illegal uses, and let's face it, those illegal uses are FAR worse than any illegal uses of digital media devices. At least abuse of digital devices doesn't kill.
Therefore, if Fritz is to get his way, there is a clear parallel to place 'access restraint' devices in every marketed gun. Enlist the NRA to help fight our battle.
I know this is silly. But I'm not sure I know what's wrong with the reasoning, at least until I get to the prior paragraph.
In a much more meaningful sense...
I work in the electronics field. My employer has had rounds of layoffs in the past year, as have others. Our state has been badly hurt. IMHO the stuff Hollings is trying to push through will hurt the tech industry, badly. One of my Senators (Leahy) has been in Hollywood's pocket in the past. He needs to understand that this will hurt our state if this nonsense gets put into law.
I wish I knew what was the most effective way to communicate. In the past, I guess the phone has gotten the most specific response, even better than a letter delivered directly to his office in town.
Even though Matrox is put in the "good" category when it comes to releasing specs, even they're not all the way there. At least back in the G400 days, there was a chunk of closed-source binary that the open-source driver loaded into the "Warp Engine" on the chip/card. Since the closed-source portion didn't execute on the main CPU, no big fuss arose. But it still wasn't completely open or documented.
From what I've heard, ATI is at least partially forthcoming on hardware spec releases, too.
We're dancing around the real issue, here. It's far bigger than how long Disney gets to keep exclusive rights to Mickey Moust. Unfortunately far worse damage is being done than merely overextending Mickey's copyright.
If retroactive copyright extension is upheld, then the public domain is essentially dead. At the very least, the last public domain music/literature ends up coming from early in the 20th century.
If retroactove copyright is upheld, does anyone believe that some Senator won't be for-hire next time Steamboat Willie is about to expire, and again and again after that.
At the moment, I don't give a %^&* about Mickey Mouse, nor of any of the $%^& Jack Valenti wants to protect "for Eternity minus one day." It's all the other stuff that gets dragged along with it. Essentially the cultural "abandonware" that sometimes becomes important much later. In the name of Mickey Mouse, we've prevented EVERYTHING from lapsing into the public domain.
It stinks, and I'd like to see retroactive extension reversed. Even better, I'd like to see terms more "limited". Even though Jefferson himself did sign extensions, I don't believe he envisioned going beyond "threescore and ten". After all, that's Eternity, to me.
If we can't have reversal or rollback, I'd prefer to require copyrights to need renewal. Abandonware (be it music, print, movie, or software) simply should fall into the public domain.
Perhaps we need "constructive engagement" with the Lindows people, and help them improve the security of their machines. At this point, it's in all of our best interest to not see Linux responsible for a net security fiasco.
There are ways to take care of this, beginning with establishing a default non-root id and enough sudo or setuid configuration tools to do what needs to be done. Remember these boxes are for non-Linux users, so the configuration needs should be simpler, as well.
Forget "pursuit of happiness," for the moment. We have a number of other "rights" which we take for granted, and at this point I'm not sure exactly where they came from. But at the moment, two come to mind as relevant:
"Innocent until proven guilty"
and
"right to a trial by jury of your peers"
It seems to me that this bill relegates the roles of prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner (I know, it's not as dramatic as the death penalty, but "executioner" can be someone who implements the judgement/sentence.) to the RIAA in these cases.
But neither your philosophical texts nor The Matrix had talking bombs nor aliens made of beach balls with rubber feet.
I've been really happy to see the recent see-saw between nVidia and ATI. Nor do I see why we have to have one become best, and remain so. Your BMW and Fiat analogy is great, but neglects the existence of Audi and Chevy, not to mention Ford, Saab, Volvo, etc.
As far as I can tell, we're the ONLY market so badly dominated. The next closest thing might be soft drinks, with the Pepsi/Coke duopoly. But we have Microsoft and Intel, and until ATI's comeback, it looked like nVidia was going to be IT on PC graphics. (Actually, I think the Pepsi/Coke dupoloy has a worse stranglehold on their industry than Microsoft/Intel on ours.)
You've missed the point. There is not supposed to be a Final Winner, or else we all lose. As soon as there is a Final Winner, competition dies. At any one generation, the Winner gets better profits and the right to compete on the next generation. But you want there to be a runner-up who will viably go on to the next generation, as well.
We have let Microsoft color our thinking too much, fill us with envy, and convince us that this is The Business Model.
From the Burlington Free Press last week, quoting from the N.Y. Times New Service:
/. under YRO or Almighty Buck, but it isn't really news. After all, I saw it in a newspaper last week.
"Christian radio stations oust NPR in Lousiana"
A growing Christian Radio network dislikes the "distinctly liberal and secular perspective" of NPR, and decided to do something about it by knocking the stations off the air. "The Federal Communications Commision considers them squatters on the far left side of the FM dial, and anyone who is granted a full-power license can legally run them out of town." The "them" in the quoted sentence refers to low-power repeater stations, often used by NPR affiliates.
I was thinking of submitting this to