---"He seems to missing a fundamental point: You do not have a Constitutional right to an internet connection."
However, data transmission SHOULD NOT be considered as long as you're paying the correct price for the bandwidth (perferrably per K-packet).
That's crazy. Kiddie porn and death threats are absolutely intolerable. Paying to transmit obviously illegal speech doesn't legitimize it.
Spam is a gray area, but it's certainly not true that you can transmit whatever you like without any limits as long as you've paid for the bandwidth.
---"If Qwest sees that they are losing customers because they provide internet access to you, they have a fiduciary duty to terminate their business relationship with you."
Does the same analogy hold true for the snail mail industry? NO.
Two words: Mail Fraud.
There are plenty of long standing laws and rules that regulate postal mail. Aside from prohibiting fraudulent advertising (as much of today's spam is), correct identification of who sent the letter is also required.
The spam idiots pay for the media, and pay for postage to my house. I just toss it away. Some are crafty and make it look like legit-like bills. Some promise prizes. It all goes to the shredder. My point is, if they pay through the nose for constand bandwidth, give them what they asked.
It's much more accurate to compare electronic spam transmission to other electronic mediums, such as telephone solicitation and advertising by sending "junk" faxes.
For telephone soliciation, a 1992 law regulates callers to identify themselves within 30 seconds. Companies who call are required to maintain "do not call lists", and the FCC imposes harsh penalties on soliciters who repeatedly call after requests to place that number on their do not call list. Many states have laws allowing individuals to sue for $200 to $1000 as well.
For junk faxes, which are the closest analogy to spam email (same or similar message sent to many numbers, to be read by receipient when they notice it later on), JUNK FAXING IS ILLEGAL.
Also illegal under the 1992 act is telephone solicitation (without opt-in or previous relationship) using pre-recorded messages. There are a few folks doing this today, as well as some companies junk faxing, and it is illegal.
Before 1992, junk faxing was not against the law, just as today there is no federal law that prohibits sending unsolicited advertising by email. Today there is no law that regulates usasage of correct headers and identification of the party who transmitted the message. Today there is no (federal) law that requires actually honoring the receipients request to not receive future mailings.
That's today. Soon there will be laws to regulate unsolicited commercial ads by email. Just as some advertisers abused telephones and faxes and lawmakers eventually responded, so they also will with spam.
And they rightly should. Just because you've paid to send some data via an ISP, you should not have any more right to send fraudulent ads with forged headers than you would to send a similarly illegal message via the USPS with a fake return address. Just because you've paid to send that message gives you no more right to ignore "don't send me any more" than a telemarketer has under the 1992 law.
There is quite a bit of legitimate use for email marketing, but at least IMHO, there's no excuse for forged headers, fraudulent advertising, and not properly honoring request to avoid more messages from the same sender. Sooner or later, these acts will be illegal (at least in the USA), and assholes like Ronnie Scelson are only serving to expedite the need for lawmakers to respond.
can handle streaming audio for 10,000 users, versus current technology of 100 - 1,000 users per box depending on expense of system
Apple claims that their
QuickTime Streaming Server can send 4000 silultaneous streams. That's a lot more than 100 to 1000.
It's also available as an
open-souce project, depending on your exact definition
of open-source (not Free for all uses, apparantly).
Wouldn't moving the software for streaming onto the router make for a more expensive router and still require the expense a box outside of the router anyway?"
Yep, but if the box is streaming the same exact stream to lots of users, it could save a whole lot of expensive bandwidth by transmitting one copy of the stream over the long-haul backbone lines, where presumably a switch nearer to a cluster of users could transmit individual copies to the users over the "last mile".
I don't know if that's what they're really doing, but it'd be the smart thing to do. Bandwidth on the internet backbone is a lot more expensive than servers and switches.
... when you get email from them the email client would scan your address book to see if they were on your approved sender's list.
That's nice if you only communicate with people you already know. Not so good if you have a public website, a company, or you participate in public forums (like slashdot) and people you do not yet know will make contact with you.
According to the article, 13 homes (23 machines) consumed so much bandwidth that it cost the ISP 1/4 million dollars. That's gotta be the biggest load of bullshit I've heard in a long time.
If each contributed equally, that's $19230 each in bandwidth. $19k buys a lot of bandwitdh... much more than a single home could potentially use, even over many months. For example,
this
budgetary pricing for Verio (a backbone provider) shows that the monthly charge for a 155 Mbit/sec OC-3 line is somewhere around $44k per month.
For that 13 users to have consumed $250k of bandwidth over a period of one year, the "bandwidth cost" would have been equivilant to using one half of a 155 Mbps/sec OC-3 line. Even if all 13 contributed equally, I doubt each of them sustained a 5.7 Mbit/sec stream of data for a whole year! Cable service can rarely run at this speed, and many small groups of houses (like mine) are connected by a 1.2 Mbit/sec line (I saw the At&T tech when he was installing our neighborhood's hub a few months ago). If you consider the "theft" to have occured from February (when "cable officials" claim they first became aware of the situation) until today, that's just 5 months for a "loss" of $50,000 dollars worth of bandwidth each month... equivilant to just 13 users consuming the entire bandwitdh of an OC-3! Even to a someone who has no idea what kind of bandwitdh $250,000 dollars buys, it simply defies imagination that 13 home users would normally consume $50 to $100 per month, could somehow "steal" 1/4 million dollars. It's as rediculous as a claiming someone robbed a 7-11 store and stole 1/4 million dollars from the cash register.
I wonder if it ever occured to Christina Hall or Mark Reiter to ask Paul Shryock how Buckeye figured these 13 home users "stole" such a massive amount. Even if it's larger group of users, it's still an absurd claim. Saddly, they were probably fed a press release with lots of "sound bites", and they threw this scare-tactic story together without even the slighest questioning and investigatave journalism into such an absurd claim.
One thing is for certain... Buckeye CableSystem certainly didn't take a loss of $250,000. If they really were losing that much money, they certainly would have contacted the "others [that] were using a lot". No ISP these days (except perhaps AOL) can afford to take a $250,000 loss and just sit back for five months and wait for the cops to investigage and bust a dozen users.
In case anyone is reading this thread, I recently learned of the
MPEG4IP Project, which is a Free (LPGL, MPL, other licenses) streaming encoder for Linux and other unix systems. Parts of the project are ported to windows also. It encodes using MPEG4, not Sorenson.
I've yet to try it, but I'm planning to install and test in a couple weeks when I borrow a friend's camera. It sounds like the project is a little rough around the edges and problems are still being worked out, but from the message board it looks like some non-developers have used it successfully.
According to the site, MPEG4IP can capture and broadcast live MPEG4/AAC streams, that can be viewed with its own (very basic) player and also with Apple's (beta) QuickTime 6. Apparantly RealOne can also view the streams using a plugin from Envivio.
If anyone with mod points is reading this, my original message (at +3) is wrong... this MPEG4IP program does (or will soon do) exactly what I was asking about. Please mod that message down and this one up, so anyone else looking for a completely free way to stream live video might find this.
There are many other articles archived on the net, from virtually all credible newspapers. These are just the first few that turned up in a quick search.
It just doesn't get much more factual than that. Microsoft presented a videotape that they claimed was a demonstration showing Windows 98 performing very badly when IE was removed. It turned out that the tape was a fake. Microsoft admitted false evidence, under oath. They lied and were caught. It's amazing anyone could take "trustworthy computing" seriously, coming from the likes of MS.
The article says, "people will have to trust Microsoft".... it's usually a bad idea to trust one entity
Most users already do trust Microsoft, since they allow their computers to be controlled by Microsoft's operating systems. Many of them run the windows update automatically, or at least regularily, thereby trusting Microsoft not only initially, but in an ongoing basis.
When it comes to your computer, you can't really end up trusting a company more than that. They handle every bit of input and output, login and passwords, network connectivity, and for most 'doze users the major apps too.
Lotta trust in Microsoft. Seems strance, when you consider their very untrustworthy track record... virus/worm problems, bugs and crashes, nasty business practices, criminal convition, doctored videotape in court, and the list goes on and on. Yet 80-some percent of computer users _still_ trust them with complete control over the computer!
how many people do you know that have a Quicktime streaming server?.... Windows Media Services on NT(free as in beer) or Real's Realserver (~$1000+) on Linux. Considering a copy of NT/2000 is about the same as a copy of RealServer, you're shelling $1000 either way.
As nearly as I can tell, you need to also lay out a similar wad of cash for an encoder to produce "hinted" quicktime video that's usable with Apple's free streaming server.
If someone knows of a free or cheap way to encoder or convert video to include "hinting" for use with Apple's open-source streaming server, please speak up!
Apple's QT streaming server is free and open source
Yeah, so what? Apache's open source, but you still need a browser (decoder) and authoring tools (encoder). All the server does is send the data to users over the net. If you can't have a browsers, you can't even see the content, and without at least a text editor and image manipulation program you can't create any content.
In fact, when you encode video for streaming, you need to include a thing Apple calls "hinting". Normal MPEG4 and other streams do not have this. The hinting is an additional track that specifies to the server where the packet boundries out to be so that lost packets won't corrupt lots of upcoming video. The point is that most of the streaming magic happens at the encoder where the "hinting" makes most of the decisions about how to stream the video... the server does parse the data and read the hinting, but all the "real work" is precomputed by the proprietary encoder.
Based on lots of user feedback, I
redesigned
it yet again in 2001, mainly to increase the speed, add more memory to be C compiler friendly, and I added the most user-requested feature, a port to plug in a standard LCD.
Today, those old pages (well, still need to update the '99 ones) have a message at the top of the page that tell the visitor they're viewing obsolete material and strongly suggests they follow a link to the new version of the circuit board, which is easier to build (added in 1997), uses parts that are currently available on the market (added in 1999), and has more features (added in 2001).
An archive of the original 1995 page, even archived in 1996, isn't going to warn the poor user about the usability improvements added in 1997, the part that became obsolete in 1999, and the nice new features that were added in 2001. At the very least, it'd be proper for archive.org to link to the current version of the page (if it's on-line)... but even that would be difficult since the site moved from a university to its permanent domain name in 1999 (the old site keep a redirect for a couple years, but even that is gone now).
So, while it sucks that someone might find that old material and suffer though all the problems that have been corrected and miss out on the improvements of the last several years, it doesn't suck enough that I'd hire a lawyer, or even bother to tell them to exclude my material.
But I can understand how a large company would not want its old products displayed with the then-current literature in a way that might confuse potential customers.
I doubt a tool could be crafted to automatically alter a text message sufficiently to avoid Nilsimsa without also distorting the message so badly that it'd be worthless (it'd have to be automated to be effective). Even knowing where Nilsimsa will decide where the clusters are within the data, you'd need to be able to make a good number of those clusters change, and change in a different combination that ever done previously.
It'd take quite a linguist to craft code to substitute words, phrases, etc and still achieve the same overall message with each one significantly different. Then again, maybe
Scott
Pakin could do it?
Eventually, Razor is going to use the Nilsimsa Hash Algorithm, which is supposed to be able to detect spams where the spammer made only a minor change to avoid being matched against previously transmitted copies.
The Razor
V2 protocol has support for this hashing algorithm and others. Who knows, maybe they're already implmented it? Ought to take a peek at the perl code sometime....
I've been using Razor with Spamassassin for many months. All you need to do it install the razor package (and the various perl modules it wants), and then add a line like this in your.spamassassin/user_prefs file:
score RAZOR_CHECK 5.0
I've also got the other "network tests" enables (blacklists), but I assign them low scores since they have a lot of false positives.
Using spamassassin with razor and the blacklists really works. My spam file has 836 spams automatically filtered between March 1 to today, June 19. Of those 836 messages, 511 have the RAZOR_CHECK string in the "X-Spam-Status" line that spamassassin adds to the header.
Not too bad, considering Razor uses a rigid message digest that fails if the spammer adds any "random" content to the messages. Saddly, it seems like that's becoming more common. Rumor has it that Razor is someday going to use "fuzzy" matches with one of two algorithms that somehow accomplish such a feat. Anyone know when/if this is supposed to happen??
I submit to you that the 2001 refrigerator is approaching perfection. Thermodynamic efficiency is approaching theoretical maximum, reliability is approaching 99.99999%, sound is down to essentially nothing
I purchased a new fridge approx 4 years ago, so a '97 or '98 model, but pretty close to 2001.
It stopped working a few months back. I pulled it out and did a quick look... no fuses to blow, no fan jammed, no "obvious" problem within plain site. After a few days, my girlfriend made me call for someone to come repair it.
Turned out that the thermostat had failed after just 4 years. The warranty was only 1 year, so about $120 later the fridge was working again. He had spare thermostats and other parts in his van, and he had a full schedule for the rest of that day servicing other refridgerators... one little anecdote that perhaps my fridge isn't just one isolated incident.
So what's the point... well, had you chosen another example I wouldn't have replied, but you chose to compare software to refridgerators, and my brand new 1997 model Amana fridge failed and not only did I have to pay ~$120 for "tech support", but I lost all the food that it was keeping cold (sorta like losing your unsaved word processor document when the computer crashes).
I can't really speak to the exact efficiency, but I can tell you that it's loud enough that I can sometimes hear it while laying in bed at night, and if the efficiency were approaching 99.99999%, I think it'd at least be able to go 8-10 hours throughout the night (door closed properly) without the noisy compressor needing to turn on!
No thanks, I'd rather *legally* digitize my copy-unrestricted VHS tapes and burn them onto [media format of the day]
That would be your macrovision-free tapes of wedding, baby's first steps, etc. Certainly if you purchased commercial pre-recorded VHS media with movies on them, they include the macrovision copy protection signals.
I agree that it within your fair-use rights (in my non-lawyer opinion) to transfer the content from your old VHS tapes to new DVD discs... but if you believe your VHS tapes are without copy protection, well, you're in for a suprise.
Wal-Mart's loading Linux on their dirt-cheap PCs for the masses
I too was excited when I saw this earlier today... until I read the comment that pointed out the ugly truth:
Those Lindows-based machines are sold on the web only, not in the retail stores. Very few among "the masses" will buy their PC on-line... generally that's the realm of tech-savvy folks who already own a computer and are buying another one.
It'll be a different story when a linux-based PC is sitting right next to a windows-based PC in the retail store, with a $99 difference in price. I hope those days are coming soon. Someone mentioned that Fry's is planning a $300 PC. Fry's doesn't really have a web store, so maybe they'll be the ones to truely break the ice??
Open office may be more than enough, but it's certainly not remotely equal to MS Office. It does not have the polish, and it does not have the usability.
And these things will matter to the consumer who intentionally chose the "cheap" machine with the "windows substitute" ??
Linux has the advantage that it cares not whether it runs on a 15 year old 386, or a brand new Itanium.
The kernel perhaps, but the instance of Mozilla (0.9.7) that I am using right now while writing this message has allocated 62 megabytes of RAM, approx 50 megs is resident and 12 megs swapped out at this very moment.
Xfree86 has allocated 70 megabytes (26 megs swapped out). It is supporting Mozilla with 9 windows open, 7 gnome terminals, and a couple windows associated with "seyon" (an old terminal emulator I'm using with a serial port attached device).
The font server is using 15 megs, sawfish is using 7 megs, and a variety of gnome applets each show multiple megabytes of ram. Admittedly, some of this is shared memory for libraries, but the point remains...
The original slackware 1.x of '94 to '95 would run on an old 386, but today's KDE and Gnome based distros don't have a chance!
... and just to be picky, 15 years ago was the summer of 1987, before the 386 chip entered the market.
Did I miss anything? The Windows machine mentions something about the graphics card, but it's "integrated" (not an AGP card), so both machines probably have the same video on the motherboard?? Is that a reasonable assumption?
please don't lay this all on Windows and Outlook either. Yes, there are some questionable design decisions in these programs.
Outlook, MSIE, IIS is the short list.
It's not all due to the shoddy design of these 3 products, but most of it is.
Very Bad Design (executable code mixed in data)
Insecure Default Settings
Shoddy Implementation (buffer overflows, etc)
But if the whole world was running Linux or something similar, people would be causing problems running everything as root, or whatever other stupid things you can do to get yourself in trouble.
Today's Linux systems notably lack these three qualities that have caused the world so much trouble. Sure, some lusers would run everything as root, but since that's not the default setup (except for Lindows, and they've caught a lot of flack for that), people running apps as root are the small minority and thus are not significant for widespread virus/worm propgation.
Indeed, if the whole world were running Linux (as it is implemented in today's widespread distributions), or if the whole world were running a fictious Windows-based system with well designed apps, secure default settings, and linux-level quality code, the virus problem would be only a tiny fraction of what it is today.
Apparantly their "advanced streaming format" can carry the codec, which gets auto-installed into media player with little or no user intervention. Not sure if there's a major security hole lurking there, but it seems rather dangerous.
I have to agree with this parent...but for a different reason. I am an IT Headhunter.
Really? Why would you post with an Apple email address and not one associated with your headhunting work? This is slashdot... supposedly a community of geeks and "IT" types.
One thing is certainly true, which a relatively small number of +5 comments have touched upon: Hiring people is difficult and risky. It is were easy, there wouldn't be much need for headhunters at their significant fees, would there?
Risk is a key factor involved in counter offers. Hiring a new person is a big risk. More likely than not, an employee who gets a counter offer is considered valuable and experienced, even if they originally appeared to be inexperienced when initially hired (thus offered an "entry level" salary). They're worth more now, partly due to experience and their good relationships with others in the office, partly due to the cost and risk of replacing them. Risk aside, consider the fee to be paid for a headhunter (or time spent interviewing many canidates). It's not cheap!
The smartest tactic to solicit a counter offer is to establish that salaries in general are higher than you're currently being paid. Published salary surveys work the best, but a few well substantiated "by brother makes XXX at his job and my wife's friend also makes XXX". Coupled together with "company XYZ offered me XXX", your employer will be faced with the reality they they'll probably end up paying about that much to a new hire, without your experience, and with the risk that they might not work out for a variety of reasons. Of course, this assumes that you do make a valuable contribution to your employer's business, that you do fit well into the office culture, and that your salary really is somewhat low relative to a number of opportunities in your area.
Headhunters do have their place... they save a lot of time in the hiring process and good ones are often better at interviewing and selecting the "best fit" than a lot of middle managers (who frequently are over-tasked or constantly putting out fires and don't have time to effectively screen and interview canidates).
I particularily like the "sob story" in the large caption on page 6 of the PDF report:
I have seen pirate copies of my album sold in the street and it hurts to see the fruits of your hard work stolen on every corner. Since Ukrainian artists cannot make money selling their albums, they are forced to give endless concerts to survive.
Maybe he should come here to the USA, where the vast majority of artists can't make any money from their albums either, once all of the expenses are deducted from their meager royalties.
The question on my mind about the MP3 download is if the labels still deduct 10% from the artists royalty to cover "breakage" of the albums in transit, stores, etc?
There is a Linux and Mac game executable in the box.
Did you read these words in the press release:
The PC version of Neverwinter Nights will ship to retailers before the end of June. Linux gamers can anticipate the online release of the Neverwinter Nights server at launch and the client program shortly afterward. Linux gamers will still need the Windows version of the game to register at the Neverwinter Nights community site and to import essential game resources into their Linux server and game.
So, converting marketing to english, it sounds like there will in fact not be a Linux executable in the box (other than the server), but it will be made available undetermined time later on the website.
Even then, 'doze will be needed to register on the community site (presumably to get involved with public game servers).
And what do you suppose "to import essential game resources into their Linux server and game" means? I hope it does not in fact mean some small but critical setup component will only work on 'doze, and thereafter linux can be used.
Slashdot Mirror
However, data transmission SHOULD NOT be considered as long as you're paying the correct price for the bandwidth (perferrably per K-packet).
That's crazy. Kiddie porn and death threats are absolutely intolerable. Paying to transmit obviously illegal speech doesn't legitimize it.
Spam is a gray area, but it's certainly not true that you can transmit whatever you like without any limits as long as you've paid for the bandwidth.
---"If Qwest sees that they are losing customers because they provide internet access to you, they have a fiduciary duty to terminate their business relationship with you."
Does the same analogy hold true for the snail mail industry? NO.
Two words: Mail Fraud.
There are plenty of long standing laws and rules that regulate postal mail. Aside from prohibiting fraudulent advertising (as much of today's spam is), correct identification of who sent the letter is also required.
The spam idiots pay for the media, and pay for postage to my house. I just toss it away. Some are crafty and make it look like legit-like bills. Some promise prizes. It all goes to the shredder. My point is, if they pay through the nose for constand bandwidth, give them what they asked.
It's much more accurate to compare electronic spam transmission to other electronic mediums, such as telephone solicitation and advertising by sending "junk" faxes.
For telephone soliciation, a 1992 law regulates callers to identify themselves within 30 seconds. Companies who call are required to maintain "do not call lists", and the FCC imposes harsh penalties on soliciters who repeatedly call after requests to place that number on their do not call list. Many states have laws allowing individuals to sue for $200 to $1000 as well.
For junk faxes, which are the closest analogy to spam email (same or similar message sent to many numbers, to be read by receipient when they notice it later on), JUNK FAXING IS ILLEGAL.
Also illegal under the 1992 act is telephone solicitation (without opt-in or previous relationship) using pre-recorded messages. There are a few folks doing this today, as well as some companies junk faxing, and it is illegal.
Before 1992, junk faxing was not against the law, just as today there is no federal law that prohibits sending unsolicited advertising by email. Today there is no law that regulates usasage of correct headers and identification of the party who transmitted the message. Today there is no (federal) law that requires actually honoring the receipients request to not receive future mailings.
That's today. Soon there will be laws to regulate unsolicited commercial ads by email. Just as some advertisers abused telephones and faxes and lawmakers eventually responded, so they also will with spam.
And they rightly should. Just because you've paid to send some data via an ISP, you should not have any more right to send fraudulent ads with forged headers than you would to send a similarly illegal message via the USPS with a fake return address. Just because you've paid to send that message gives you no more right to ignore "don't send me any more" than a telemarketer has under the 1992 law.
There is quite a bit of legitimate use for email marketing, but at least IMHO, there's no excuse for forged headers, fraudulent advertising, and not properly honoring request to avoid more messages from the same sender. Sooner or later, these acts will be illegal (at least in the USA), and assholes like Ronnie Scelson are only serving to expedite the need for lawmakers to respond.
Apple claims that their QuickTime Streaming Server can send 4000 silultaneous streams. That's a lot more than 100 to 1000.
It's also available as an open-souce project, depending on your exact definition of open-source (not Free for all uses, apparantly).
Wouldn't moving the software for streaming onto the router make for a more expensive router and still require the expense a box outside of the router anyway?"
Yep, but if the box is streaming the same exact stream to lots of users, it could save a whole lot of expensive bandwidth by transmitting one copy of the stream over the long-haul backbone lines, where presumably a switch nearer to a cluster of users could transmit individual copies to the users over the "last mile".
I don't know if that's what they're really doing, but it'd be the smart thing to do. Bandwidth on the internet backbone is a lot more expensive than servers and switches.
That's nice if you only communicate with people you already know. Not so good if you have a public website, a company, or you participate in public forums (like slashdot) and people you do not yet know will make contact with you.
If each contributed equally, that's $19230 each in bandwidth. $19k buys a lot of bandwitdh... much more than a single home could potentially use, even over many months. For example, this budgetary pricing for Verio (a backbone provider) shows that the monthly charge for a 155 Mbit/sec OC-3 line is somewhere around $44k per month.
For that 13 users to have consumed $250k of bandwidth over a period of one year, the "bandwidth cost" would have been equivilant to using one half of a 155 Mbps/sec OC-3 line. Even if all 13 contributed equally, I doubt each of them sustained a 5.7 Mbit/sec stream of data for a whole year! Cable service can rarely run at this speed, and many small groups of houses (like mine) are connected by a 1.2 Mbit/sec line (I saw the At&T tech when he was installing our neighborhood's hub a few months ago). If you consider the "theft" to have occured from February (when "cable officials" claim they first became aware of the situation) until today, that's just 5 months for a "loss" of $50,000 dollars worth of bandwidth each month... equivilant to just 13 users consuming the entire bandwitdh of an OC-3! Even to a someone who has no idea what kind of bandwitdh $250,000 dollars buys, it simply defies imagination that 13 home users would normally consume $50 to $100 per month, could somehow "steal" 1/4 million dollars. It's as rediculous as a claiming someone robbed a 7-11 store and stole 1/4 million dollars from the cash register.
I wonder if it ever occured to Christina Hall or Mark Reiter to ask Paul Shryock how Buckeye figured these 13 home users "stole" such a massive amount. Even if it's larger group of users, it's still an absurd claim. Saddly, they were probably fed a press release with lots of "sound bites", and they threw this scare-tactic story together without even the slighest questioning and investigatave journalism into such an absurd claim.
One thing is for certain... Buckeye CableSystem certainly didn't take a loss of $250,000. If they really were losing that much money, they certainly would have contacted the "others [that] were using a lot". No ISP these days (except perhaps AOL) can afford to take a $250,000 loss and just sit back for five months and wait for the cops to investigage and bust a dozen users.
I've yet to try it, but I'm planning to install and test in a couple weeks when I borrow a friend's camera. It sounds like the project is a little rough around the edges and problems are still being worked out, but from the message board it looks like some non-developers have used it successfully.
According to the site, MPEG4IP can capture and broadcast live MPEG4/AAC streams, that can be viewed with its own (very basic) player and also with Apple's (beta) QuickTime 6. Apparantly RealOne can also view the streams using a plugin from Envivio.
If anyone with mod points is reading this, my original message (at +3) is wrong... this MPEG4IP program does (or will soon do) exactly what I was asking about. Please mod that message down and this one up, so anyone else looking for a completely free way to stream live video might find this.
Really? I must not have heard about this one.
http://www.zdnet.com/anchordesk/story/story_3065.h tml
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/tech/DailyNews/msdo j_mjm990204.html
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/ch ronicle/archive/1999/02/17/MN10585.DTL&type=tech_a rticle
There are many other articles archived on the net, from virtually all credible newspapers. These are just the first few that turned up in a quick search.
It just doesn't get much more factual than that. Microsoft presented a videotape that they claimed was a demonstration showing Windows 98 performing very badly when IE was removed. It turned out that the tape was a fake. Microsoft admitted false evidence, under oath. They lied and were caught. It's amazing anyone could take "trustworthy computing" seriously, coming from the likes of MS.
Most users already do trust Microsoft, since they allow their computers to be controlled by Microsoft's operating systems. Many of them run the windows update automatically, or at least regularily, thereby trusting Microsoft not only initially, but in an ongoing basis.
When it comes to your computer, you can't really end up trusting a company more than that. They handle every bit of input and output, login and passwords, network connectivity, and for most 'doze users the major apps too.
Lotta trust in Microsoft. Seems strance, when you consider their very untrustworthy track record... virus/worm problems, bugs and crashes, nasty business practices, criminal convition, doctored videotape in court, and the list goes on and on. Yet 80-some percent of computer users _still_ trust them with complete control over the computer!
As nearly as I can tell, you need to also lay out a similar wad of cash for an encoder to produce "hinted" quicktime video that's usable with Apple's free streaming server.
If someone knows of a free or cheap way to encoder or convert video to include "hinting" for use with Apple's open-source streaming server, please speak up!
Yeah, so what? Apache's open source, but you still need a browser (decoder) and authoring tools (encoder). All the server does is send the data to users over the net. If you can't have a browsers, you can't even see the content, and without at least a text editor and image manipulation program you can't create any content.
In fact, when you encode video for streaming, you need to include a thing Apple calls "hinting". Normal MPEG4 and other streams do not have this. The hinting is an additional track that specifies to the server where the packet boundries out to be so that lost packets won't corrupt lots of upcoming video. The point is that most of the streaming magic happens at the encoder where the "hinting" makes most of the decisions about how to stream the video... the server does parse the data and read the hinting, but all the "real work" is precomputed by the proprietary encoder.
I am. Well, sorta anyway. My site has all of the pages that have ever appeared, all the way back to 1995. For example, this circuit board schematic page got a lot of hits in 1995. For years, I got emails from people who attempted to build it... a few were success but most were failures. So, in 1997 I redesigned the board/schematic so that it would be much easier to build and troubleshoot, and then I made another new rev in 1999 (because the flash rom chip became obsolete).
Based on lots of user feedback, I redesigned it yet again in 2001, mainly to increase the speed, add more memory to be C compiler friendly, and I added the most user-requested feature, a port to plug in a standard LCD.
Today, those old pages (well, still need to update the '99 ones) have a message at the top of the page that tell the visitor they're viewing obsolete material and strongly suggests they follow a link to the new version of the circuit board, which is easier to build (added in 1997), uses parts that are currently available on the market (added in 1999), and has more features (added in 2001).
An archive of the original 1995 page, even archived in 1996, isn't going to warn the poor user about the usability improvements added in 1997, the part that became obsolete in 1999, and the nice new features that were added in 2001. At the very least, it'd be proper for archive.org to link to the current version of the page (if it's on-line)... but even that would be difficult since the site moved from a university to its permanent domain name in 1999 (the old site keep a redirect for a couple years, but even that is gone now).
So, while it sucks that someone might find that old material and suffer though all the problems that have been corrected and miss out on the improvements of the last several years, it doesn't suck enough that I'd hire a lawyer, or even bother to tell them to exclude my material.
But I can understand how a large company would not want its old products displayed with the then-current literature in a way that might confuse potential customers.
You'd have to make substantial changes to defeat Nilsimsa (which I'm not sure if Razor is really using yet, but it is planned).
I doubt a tool could be crafted to automatically alter a text message sufficiently to avoid Nilsimsa without also distorting the message so badly that it'd be worthless (it'd have to be automated to be effective). Even knowing where Nilsimsa will decide where the clusters are within the data, you'd need to be able to make a good number of those clusters change, and change in a different combination that ever done previously.
It'd take quite a linguist to craft code to substitute words, phrases, etc and still achieve the same overall message with each one significantly different. Then again, maybe Scott Pakin could do it?
http://razor.sourceforge.net/docs/whatsnew.html
Actually, the version 2 protocol has been in use for some time. On my system, where I installed Razor in February 2002:
Shame on me. Apparantly I missed Vipul's announcement four days ago that everyone needs to upgrade to version 2.06.Eventually, Razor is going to use the Nilsimsa Hash Algorithm, which is supposed to be able to detect spams where the spammer made only a minor change to avoid being matched against previously transmitted copies. The Razor V2 protocol has support for this hashing algorithm and others. Who knows, maybe they're already implmented it? Ought to take a peek at the perl code sometime....
score RAZOR_CHECK 5.0
I've also got the other "network tests" enables (blacklists), but I assign them low scores since they have a lot of false positives.
Using spamassassin with razor and the blacklists really works. My spam file has 836 spams automatically filtered between March 1 to today, June 19. Of those 836 messages, 511 have the RAZOR_CHECK string in the "X-Spam-Status" line that spamassassin adds to the header.
Not too bad, considering Razor uses a rigid message digest that fails if the spammer adds any "random" content to the messages. Saddly, it seems like that's becoming more common. Rumor has it that Razor is someday going to use "fuzzy" matches with one of two algorithms that somehow accomplish such a feat. Anyone know when/if this is supposed to happen??
I purchased a new fridge approx 4 years ago, so a '97 or '98 model, but pretty close to 2001.
It stopped working a few months back. I pulled it out and did a quick look... no fuses to blow, no fan jammed, no "obvious" problem within plain site. After a few days, my girlfriend made me call for someone to come repair it.
Turned out that the thermostat had failed after just 4 years. The warranty was only 1 year, so about $120 later the fridge was working again. He had spare thermostats and other parts in his van, and he had a full schedule for the rest of that day servicing other refridgerators... one little anecdote that perhaps my fridge isn't just one isolated incident.
So what's the point... well, had you chosen another example I wouldn't have replied, but you chose to compare software to refridgerators, and my brand new 1997 model Amana fridge failed and not only did I have to pay ~$120 for "tech support", but I lost all the food that it was keeping cold (sorta like losing your unsaved word processor document when the computer crashes).
I can't really speak to the exact efficiency, but I can tell you that it's loud enough that I can sometimes hear it while laying in bed at night, and if the efficiency were approaching 99.99999%, I think it'd at least be able to go 8-10 hours throughout the night (door closed properly) without the noisy compressor needing to turn on!
That would be your macrovision-free tapes of wedding, baby's first steps, etc. Certainly if you purchased commercial pre-recorded VHS media with movies on them, they include the macrovision copy protection signals.
I agree that it within your fair-use rights (in my non-lawyer opinion) to transfer the content from your old VHS tapes to new DVD discs... but if you believe your VHS tapes are without copy protection, well, you're in for a suprise.
I too was excited when I saw this earlier today... until I read the comment that pointed out the ugly truth:
Those Lindows-based machines are sold on the web only, not in the retail stores. Very few among "the masses" will buy their PC on-line... generally that's the realm of tech-savvy folks who already own a computer and are buying another one.
It'll be a different story when a linux-based PC is sitting right next to a windows-based PC in the retail store, with a $99 difference in price. I hope those days are coming soon. Someone mentioned that Fry's is planning a $300 PC. Fry's doesn't really have a web store, so maybe they'll be the ones to truely break the ice??
That's never stood in the way of the world's most successful software company: Microsoft.
You can always distribute a "service pack" 4-6 months later
And these things will matter to the consumer who intentionally chose the "cheap" machine with the "windows substitute" ??
The kernel perhaps, but the instance of Mozilla (0.9.7) that I am using right now while writing this message has allocated 62 megabytes of RAM, approx 50 megs is resident and 12 megs swapped out at this very moment.
Xfree86 has allocated 70 megabytes (26 megs swapped out). It is supporting Mozilla with 9 windows open, 7 gnome terminals, and a couple windows associated with "seyon" (an old terminal emulator I'm using with a serial port attached device).
The font server is using 15 megs, sawfish is using 7 megs, and a variety of gnome applets each show multiple megabytes of ram. Admittedly, some of this is shared memory for libraries, but the point remains...
The original slackware 1.x of '94 to '95 would run on an old 386, but today's KDE and Gnome based distros don't have a chance!
$498.00 - Microsoft Windows, 1.3 GHz Celeron, 128 Meg RAM, 40 GB hard drive 52X cdrom, ethernet, modem
$399.00 - Lindows, 1.3 GHz Celeron, 128 Meg RAM, 40 GB hard drive 52X cdrom, ethernet, modem
Did I miss anything? The Windows machine mentions something about the graphics card, but it's "integrated" (not an AGP card), so both machines probably have the same video on the motherboard?? Is that a reasonable assumption?
Looks like there's a reason Bill's so rich...
Outlook, MSIE, IIS is the short list.
It's not all due to the shoddy design of these 3 products, but most of it is.
But if the whole world was running Linux or something similar, people would be causing problems running everything as root, or whatever other stupid things you can do to get yourself in trouble.
Today's Linux systems notably lack these three qualities that have caused the world so much trouble. Sure, some lusers would run everything as root, but since that's not the default setup (except for Lindows, and they've caught a lot of flack for that), people running apps as root are the small minority and thus are not significant for widespread virus/worm propgation.
Indeed, if the whole world were running Linux (as it is implemented in today's widespread distributions), or if the whole world were running a fictious Windows-based system with well designed apps, secure default settings, and linux-level quality code, the virus problem would be only a tiny fraction of what it is today.
It is the fault of Microsoft.
Apparantly their "advanced streaming format" can carry the codec, which gets auto-installed into media player with little or no user intervention. Not sure if there's a major security hole lurking there, but it seems rather dangerous.
Really? Why would you post with an Apple email address and not one associated with your headhunting work? This is slashdot... supposedly a community of geeks and "IT" types.
One thing is certainly true, which a relatively small number of +5 comments have touched upon: Hiring people is difficult and risky. It is were easy, there wouldn't be much need for headhunters at their significant fees, would there?
Risk is a key factor involved in counter offers. Hiring a new person is a big risk. More likely than not, an employee who gets a counter offer is considered valuable and experienced, even if they originally appeared to be inexperienced when initially hired (thus offered an "entry level" salary). They're worth more now, partly due to experience and their good relationships with others in the office, partly due to the cost and risk of replacing them. Risk aside, consider the fee to be paid for a headhunter (or time spent interviewing many canidates). It's not cheap!
The smartest tactic to solicit a counter offer is to establish that salaries in general are higher than you're currently being paid. Published salary surveys work the best, but a few well substantiated "by brother makes XXX at his job and my wife's friend also makes XXX". Coupled together with "company XYZ offered me XXX", your employer will be faced with the reality they they'll probably end up paying about that much to a new hire, without your experience, and with the risk that they might not work out for a variety of reasons. Of course, this assumes that you do make a valuable contribution to your employer's business, that you do fit well into the office culture, and that your salary really is somewhat low relative to a number of opportunities in your area.
Headhunters do have their place... they save a lot of time in the hiring process and good ones are often better at interviewing and selecting the "best fit" than a lot of middle managers (who frequently are over-tasked or constantly putting out fires and don't have time to effectively screen and interview canidates).
But a headhunter Thomas J. Dougherty & Associates... the folks who posted that 10-reasons list post a generic list like that for no reason other spreading a little Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt in staying with one current employer (and thus jeprodising their placement fee).
I have seen pirate copies of my album sold in the street and it hurts to see the fruits of your hard work stolen on every corner. Since Ukrainian artists cannot make money selling their albums, they are forced to give endless concerts to survive.
Maybe he should come here to the USA, where the vast majority of artists can't make any money from their albums either, once all of the expenses are deducted from their meager royalties.
The question on my mind about the MP3 download is if the labels still deduct 10% from the artists royalty to cover "breakage" of the albums in transit, stores, etc?
Did you read these words in the press release:
So, converting marketing to english, it sounds like there will in fact not be a Linux executable in the box (other than the server), but it will be made available undetermined time later on the website.
Even then, 'doze will be needed to register on the community site (presumably to get involved with public game servers).
And what do you suppose "to import essential game resources into their Linux server and game" means? I hope it does not in fact mean some small but critical setup component will only work on 'doze, and thereafter linux can be used.