Reading this review points a few things that might be relevant.
1. 2.7 pounds. 2. No touchscreen. 3. Full keyboard.
This is NOT a palmtop folks. As a handheld it is more like a low power low graphic low memory low expansion ultralight, than a color palmpilot.
Certainly I could see some uses for a product like this, but since I see people in this discussion talking about handwriting recognition I would like to suggest they make sure they understand the specs. This one uses a nubby eraser pointer like thinkpads and such do.
For some reason the performance chart for this says it has handwriting recognition but since it doesn't have a touch screen that seems sort of a part of the OS and not really relevant to the piece of hardware we are talking about.
I would say that there was more to the issue than for exploration.
While a number of people have raised the point of the woman playing a man to avoid sexual passes and so on, there has always been a tactical advantage as a hacker to pretending female gender. In the eighties most of my friends had gotten free accounts on systems with special features by finding a girl to talk on the phone and 'Prove' they were female, at any number of systems.
The fact is that having females on a BBS was a huge draw, and sysops were VERY horny boys most of the time.
Exploiting this issue has always been one of the humorous side-effects of a desperation for female attention even in a virtual world.
In recent play on Everquest I found that as a female I was FAR more likely to be simply GIVEN stuff because I was in a female character. I actually stopped playing female characters because I felt that it was in some ways a cheat. The females are projected on the screen as scantily clothed buxom lasses, who despite the fact that they might be 50th level warriors, might not have had the wearwithal to buy pants.
In Clan Lords (another multiplayer game) I found that by creating a female character I was absolutely treated better than the males. In a game where I was represented by a 32 by 32 icon of an elf in a dress, guys would go out of their way to help me.
As a former administrator on a mush for 6 years, I have seen a number of players be given advantages based on their gender.
In truth, as a 14 year old boy, I used to log into DDials as Generic Girl and log the disturbing modemsex so that I could show it to the other members of the systems I was on.
And as to getting away with pretending female gender, I found that it was easy. Just act like a person and don't make a big fuss over your gender. Most people don't actually pay much attention to their gender until it is brought into question.
As I like to say, "Actually I am a superintelligent blue hamster developed at MIT."
While I recognize that SUN might have strategic problems with Linux and open source in general, I would like to point out that they seem to be supporting Java for that platform.
Check out the Macintosh support. Not Open Source at all.
If Java actually ran on multiple platforms with any performance, it would make the question of Platform old fashioned. However instead they work hard to push it on the majority platform, Windows.
I appreciated hearing from one of my early day heroes. I own an Apple ][+ and one of the great things about it was that the ROM's were listed in the manual as where the schematics. It let me understand what a computer is, back when I was 11 years old. Further the fact that it included 2 flavors of basic (I had a language card (16k!!!)) and the monitor(programming environment for writing code to memory with hex) and the miniassembler which actually let me use mnemonics, all in the inital box, was great. When the first Macintosh came out, I was very unhappy to see that the schematics were in a 50 dollar book, and there was NO programming language. While I do love the Mac, I have always felt that the difficulty programming it for the begining coder is prohibitive. Where Microsoft gave us Visual Basic, It took years to match that kind of easy novice development system. Microsoft Basic infact was the first language I bought for the Mac. It has always been my feeling that an OS provider had a responsibility to see that there were development tools available to get the greatest application library, and from the Apple][+ with 10000+ programs to the Mac which for a long time had one app in any given category, It is clear how long it has taken for the Mac to really gain market parity.
I do not think that Steve Wozniak has to prove his comittment to hobbyist computing and programming. I think his efforts there made alot of programmers out of kids in the 80's. Whether he has the power to influence modern apple towards his early and it seems current philosophies, he is a real hero in my book and he doesn't need to do a damned thing.
The thing that was clearest in this Q&A session was the overwhelming difference between the 80's hacker and the 90's netgeek. The days when hacking meant figuring out how shit works, and when the morality of it was based on information must be free without any real other goals or intents was never as clear as it seems. There were always kids who attacked other sites for no good reason but a desire to show their stuff, wave their dick, be assholes without being caught. The same vandals who would egg a passing bus might take down a bbs using 99e99 or p1tt...
Hell, the notion that there were switches between me and the longdistance call was cool. The fact that you knew that somewhere there was a computer keeping track of billing was cool. The fact that you knew that it wasn't just magic was a big reason why hackers did what they did. To show that all the things that we take for granted are really exciting if you look at them, and the tricks you can do once you do that are amusing too!
Still I can't forget red blue rainbow black white lemonscented boxes that were supposed to do any number of things if you just followed these instructions and had a soldering iron. Script kiddies of the past.
What amuses me most in seeing this dialog is the sense that there is a productivity to programming something for someone else, that doesn't exist in the explaining the basis of such programs. cDc always was about the how it works and not how to do it. It was about giving you the manual, not selling you the source. OpenSource software is built on OpenSource knowledge of underlying systems. If we don't have the information we don't have the programs. To require a hacker to program for someone else is nonsense. The way you become a hacker is by having other hackers see you can do it yourself. Then they say, "He is a hacker" and you are. If you think you can become a hacker by doing it someone elses way, then you are silly. Original thought, exploration, lack of interest in authority, and a little bit of a desire to show off to people who might actually understand what you are talking about is what fueled the 'hacker' of the 80's.
The geek of the 90's is a different animal, with pratical usage of opensource being a commercial reality, productivity being a primary force behind contribution to a movement, love for knowledge being a real secondary. How many of the people on this channel have actually read their source code cause they wanted to know how it was done? As much as most of ya'll want to feel good because you know how to code, you don't NEED to code most of the time because someone else has done it, or done something close to it before. Hell the art of Unix is to take 5 programs that other people wrote and pipe your data through em without writing a bit of code.
Getting on cDc for being script kiddies is a joke. I am not even sure why we call them script kiddies. Using canned software is as old as the day. Yeah when I got my first modem I had to patch the thing through my game controler port to get dial tone detection, and wrote my first comm program in basic and assembler. When AE came into my hands, I never went back. Fact is that cDc may write tools that people who couldn't normally write, might find useful. Maybe cDc drops a few trojans into the mix... Maybe Microsoft gets burned on the ass because their marketers have whipped their techs in the internal battles so that nothing works right, but atleast it has the 'features'. cDc does what it does and doesn't apologize. The question of why they don't do more is very very well returned. Why don't you!
Athlon killer? Who even has one yet? Where do I get a mother board for an Athlon? I know this isn't the point of the thread but the fact is that I have had an Athlon 500mhz for 2 weeks now. It runs great, and was no problem finding. I believe IBM has an K7 based Aptiva on the consumer market as well. (I picked up mine at 5oclock.com, and put it together myself so I wouldn't have to wait for 2 weeks for someone to do what I can do in 2 hours. Just remember to buy a CPU fan) ------- I do not trust announcement of chips. The basic fact is that a chip being produced doesn't have anything to do with a chip being available. There were Alpha's being demonstrated at a gigahertz last year. Intel showed 700mhz stuff this year. I see no product. Apple just got into trouble because they tried to sell G4 500's without auppliers. I have to say that Athlon is a great chip because it is a real chip. I was glad the company that was selling me a K6-3 screwed up my order so bad I had to cancel it. It forced me to wait the 3 weeks it took to get the K7 into the marketplace. The best thing is that my mobo is rated to the 700 (which costs 3 times as much as the 500)... When the 700 drops to 200 bucks or so I can bring my box up to 700mhz without any major effort. Meanwhile I have a pretty good development machine (not to mention the game performance. Hell Windows actually feels responsive at this speed.) Anyhow, if you want an Athlon they are out there. I may be the first person I know who has one, but unless I am mistaken, I won't be the last. D
Just so you know, Zaibatsu are merely the 4 japanese companies that controlled the Japanese economy prior to world war 2. I forget which they are but Mitsubishi was one of them.
Microsoft offers a server and asks that folks take a shot at gaining access to things Microsoft wouldn't want folks to have access to in a commercial product.
Some people yelp, "Screw Microsoft, let em do their own dirty work."
Others tut tut, "This is just like Open Source! This is a step in the right direction."
What to do!?! Is Microsoft challenging us to stick by our Morals? Or are we being "used" by a corporate entity. Even worse, are the logs of this attempt at hackign the system going to represent evidence?
#1. If you can't avoid a simple tcp/ip packet sniffer from tracking you down, then you are unlikely to be the ones the FBI cares about.
#2. If you believe that this is closer to open source than before, try a breath deep too. Oxygen is good. Yes.. It burns stuff... Anyone can torture test any product they buy. There is nothing open source about that. The issue of Open Source is that modifications we as hackers might make after finding bugs, are owned by the community, as is the original software to some extent. The notion that this method of security analysis is any different than normal practice of Microsoft is laughable. The question is HOW the software is being tested, not WHO is testing it.
#3. I will note that it is rare for a Linux machine to HAVE to be advertised to be crashed. That is because if you want to test out a security flaw you can create your own test machine with no cost. Thats the joy of OPEN SOURCE. You can truly know what you are getting, try it before spending money, and even fix problems yourself rather than having to wait for a company to respond to your bug report.
#4. I still have doubts that this product ever will exist. The fact is that if no one hacks the software, then Microsoft can claim their non-released software that probably will not be really implemented before some serious bug fixing, is secure within the context of 1999's security issues and protocols. With new services being added regularly and custom software being thrown into the mix, this is relatively vapor ware benchmarking...
I have been running a linux webserver in various incarnations and machines since 1993. I started on a 486 with some decent scsi (vl-bus) and 8 megs of ram, with a 28.8 hayes modem, matching the isp's.
I generally ran 3.6 kilobytes per second of bandwidth at the time, which wasn't bad for a 100 dollar a month dedicated line.:)
Now adays we use an alpha (for past 2 years) with 128 megs of ram and a T1. One day (and I really mean one 5 minute period) our line was saturated by what seemed to be a webcrawler from taiwan which literally downloaded the entire site. It filled our pipe. That is the only time that such a thing happened and my apache server didn't even blink. I wouldn't have known but I tend to analyze my peak times.
After we decided to upgrade the software on the alpha (redhat 4.2 being a bit old ) I moved the entire site over to a k6-2 running at 300 with 156 megs of ram or something... That hardware cost about 700 all together. (the alpha cost 5000 2 years ago..) It performs fine. I have never seen the apache webserver crash or not respond based on overusage although sometimes dynamic content will slow down (and that is because we don't really optimize for speed). In any case the performance is great for the price. I have bought one copy of redhat 5.0 and have 3 servers all running great. (Finally retired the 486 cause it was hard to find vlbus hardware)...
The basic fact is that the webserver has NEVER been a crisis point or even a decision point. When we went to shttp we went to stronghold as it was the only easy solution at the time. It has never caused us problem.
Further we serve realaudio, handle telnet sessions. handle email, handle pretty much any protocol a client wants. mysql, php, perl, c compilers...
There is literally nothing that we have needed to do that our linux boxes haven't handled. I am so comfortable with them that I have placed linux boxes as controlers for permanent automated exhibits, and have so far only had one hardware crash even.
The notion that NT would be easier for me to maintain, easier for my clients to interact with, or in any way a more efficient use of money is absurd. I don't even know what they charge for NT, but I believe I would rather purchase an extra 256 megs of ram per machine, or a faster processor, then pay to be a beta tester.
I know I am preaching to the converted here, but I started laughing the first time I saw the comparisons. While I WOULD like linux to catch up with SMP and such, and certainly would like to see it scale better, I happen to like being able to buy a 500 dollar computer when I need more processing, and have it up and running in 2 hours (and that because I generally do a redhat ftp instalation)
I betcha you can't do that with a win NT install.
While I do lookforward to an OC-3, I imagine the price of leasing it will be expensive enough that I can afford any number of widdle iddy biddy linux machines to serve up pages. The days of big iron may not be over, but I don't need a mainframe to do something as brain dead as serving static pages.
Since I have been doing this crazy online thing (1982) it has been absolutely positively known, and I believe impossible for a company to assert otherwise, that electronic mail is viewable by the administrator of the system. Now perhaps outgoing mail might be less available to a particular admin but the fact is that the information is sitting on someones computer... FURTHERMORE since folks don't seem to get it, I will repeat something I used to say on IRC back in 1993... EVERYTHING I SAY IS EASILY MONITORED BY ANYONE WHO GIVES A DAMN. There are too many access points to monitor any given persons communications. Thats why we needed PGP and why the battle for encryption is so important. The issue of merely logging sendmail or otherwise is trivial. It is my mailserver. I definately want to know what is going on with it. Personally I don't read my users mail, but sometimes they ASK me to check something that is wrong with their mail. Sometimes they DON'T want that 6meg file that some idiot sent them which is beating on their poor windows ppp session. So as an administrator, the fact is that I got ROOT for a reason. How I USE the information I have access to is what is important. If Dejanews is doing something with the info they are collecting that is counter to the wellbeing of those who are using their services then by all means make a fuss, and tell people. But if what they are doing is collecting data to analyze for the purposes generally suspected, that of usage monitoring, security, optimization, well who the hell cares.
The fact is that one cannot technically prove anything based on logs. Those logs can be forged, or tampered with. There is no verification that the person who sent the email was represented appropriately, or that the person recieving the email ever truly did. Email is still a format that has not been defined well officially. Until we see official signatures and other methods, we are in a zone where the legality of an email message is dependent on many things that can't be controled by the user or admin...
I have spoken to friends about this, people who handle the email of law firms and security traders... The lawfirms try to clear the email off the systems because of discovery (if they deleted the message then a subpoena doesn't matter). The ones with the brokerages have to back up every email sent in or out, because THEY are required to have all communications documented by the the SEC...
So go figure. And truly, free email accounts cost you nothing and while they don't cost MUCH for the server, they do cost something. It is easy enough for a person to get a tcp/ip connection, and hook up a linux box to have their own mail server. Then log all you want or don't want...
Blah...
------ This message is under surveilance by the NSA. If you are reading this message you will be contacted by the NSA. The code word is 'excuse me'... If someone contacts you with this information, you submit immediately to a fullcavity strip search... Thank you for your cooperation.
I don't really know why it would be American versus the rest of the world or whatever, but I have always considered laziness as a virtue. Generally it motivates people to produce time/energy savers such as cars, compilers (I know, some of us just love to handcode stuff in whatever our favorite executible format is, but personally I dig how much C and perl accomplish...) and toilets.
I cannot even vote for how many lines of code I have written. Probably 100 different projects between 10 and 1000 lines of code, but most of them really involve cutting and pasting. Hell, if I wasn't so lazy I would probably be using more modular code than I already do and thus write even FEWER lines of code.
I expect on the otherhand that they didn't actually ask any of the Microsoft OS developers. From what I understand they write kajillions of lines of code, as they have to rewrite the OS over again everytime they make a revision.
Wheras with Linux generally you take someone elses code and rewrite the important differences.
So is OpenSource's real value the way it supports laziness? I mean there are all sorts of projects I have done where I have looked for appropriate open sourced code before hand coding. Is this wrong? I would say that a real measurement of productivity would be how much a single programer could accomplish with the fewest number of lines but since the majority of the lines of code written by US programmers are actual productivity wasters like games it is somewhat ironic...
Productivity is measured by how much work an individual can accomplish in a consistent amount of time. The notion that writing more lines of code as getting MORE done in less time is far fetched.
There are three aspects in evaluating college education. #1. The value of education without reference to practicality.
#2. The value of the degree as representing that education.
#3. The value of the relationships one forms in the process of getting #1 or #2
In the case of most people, the education has a value as experience but that never relates to financial benefit...
The other 2 items are where the financial value can be measured..
The top tier lawschool average salary after graduation can be $30000 dollars greater (or more) than the second tier school.
The reason for this is that when someone hires from a school based on the degree they are saying "I need predictable value based on my investment. As I see 0 job experience I need to evaluate based not on any qualification but on the statistical likelyhood that someone from a school I am familiar with as a good school will be like the majority of other people from that school.
I am a high school and college drop out who gets hired by people who are looking for things that NO ONE ELSE HAS DONE. Finding someone who is educated in doing things others have done is of no worth.
While a college education might benefit me (by giving me a broader range of experience and skills including communication, and more contacts with people who might hire me or contribute talent in my projects) it is not a good indicator of my core value, which is technical in nature and yet is not expressedly formalized as an engineer or other professional might be.
In truth college has many merits, but few are financial. I have always considered my college education a luxury that I could seek when my financial responsibilities were relatively settled. I enjoy learning and enjoy being in a group of people learning. However I don't see how my philosophy degree would help in anything beyond bio-ethics (which I dread)...
What sort of degree would you want for someone in this so called WEB industry? The ability to type? Clearly design is not primary as we can see from the high quantity of really nasty looking poorly behaved web pages. Clearly no technical skill is necessary as there is negligible difficulty in producing web pages that are no more than glorified word-processed desktop published contentless dribble.
The fact is that it isn't surprising that people are evaluating this talent as not requiring college. What is surprising is that people think that a task that will eventually be simple enough for a 5 year old to do, is also a good career choice...
As to the comp-sci degree, I was told 10 years ago that it wasn't a good criteria. I was told the masters was the lowest level one should consider as showing some merit in the field...
I thought this might have changed when I stated this recently to a number of my peers (I am modest to include anyone really as my peer... Although I hope that when I am tried for whatever they catch me at, that I will be able to have ya'll exclusively on the jury...)
The response was, are you kidding? A masters is worth garbage...
So I gather it is still the same...
As to college as a source of a free internet account... That is like saying your car came with a free radio antenna...
Never reinvent the wheel? Damn. I bought Wheel //+
on
How to Become a Hacker
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· Score: 3
Cool article. I was trying to explain that being a hacker didn't necessarily mean being the kind of guy/girl who could write an OS from scratch, but that it was the person who could solve a problem using the tools available. I generally am most proud of solutions in which I didn't have to build something from scratch but could take preexisting programs or hardware and use it in a novel way. That was HACKING it out. I have saved my clients money, and myself time, by finding solutions that let them do something with what they had. Often I could have billed higher for a product that I custom wrote, but that isn't always the right solution.
While I have enjoyed tremendously the process of writing an application in which every single line was mine, boy would I have hated it if I found out that someone else wrote the same damned program...
When I started using Linux 5 years ago, explaining to clients that I was using Linux was very difficult. It was hard enough to explain to them what the value of the WWW was, or how email could improve their relationships with their customers.
Now I tell people I use Linux and it is hard for me to avoid having to explain that it isn't like Windows where everything is done for you. That owning a computer isn't always like using an appliance... However I can also tell a client that my system is running a Linux server, that it has Apache, and thus that it is THE TOP OF THE LINE as a web host.
Furthermore now when I install a custom programmed machine controling someones exhibit, I don't have to explain that Linux DOESN'T mean that I am the only person in the world who can fix it, it means that a permanent installation can be PERMANENT.
I don't hear people responding to Linux with fear. Most people are curious, want to know whether it is worth switching to, and if there is value for them. When they bought their Windows machine it was because it was the only name in the game. The very notion that with the same hardware they can now have a choice is extrodinarily persuasive and always has been. The dual boot machine with no risk...
The basic fact is that the status of Linux as a FREE alternative would not make a difference to a first time buyer, or someone buying a new machine. No one calculates the cost of Windows. It is free cause it is on the machine when you order it. To switch and actually PAY for another OS is to much trouble.
Linux has the advantage of taking away that cost, and allowing a user to TRY IT. Anyone who is frightened of it or doesn't trust it has THAT choice.
I remember when the DOS users pshawed the Macintosh. A Windowing interface was too clunky, they were so fast with text only that it a mouse was a hindrance. I still don't understand why Macintosh doesn't have more keyboard control. It seems so sensical. Now adays, they say, you can't have a CLI it is too complicated. True enough, the GUI did make machines accessible to people who can't remember how to do things or read manuals. But to talk about the GUI for an OS being the judgement of usefulness is a joke...
I don't think that anyone is scared of Linux but people who have a stake in its failure. Everyone else sees it as part and parcel to a world in which a 300 dollar PC can do everything you ever wanted. Back when I was a teenager the C64 was like that... We are FINALLY back into a world where the cheap computer isn't a real compromise. As long as Linux works on cheap commodity hardware then in the world of the PERSONAL computer, Linux will succeed in offering its one great value... ****FREE**** CHOICE
One of the things that I always appreciated about the 'hacker' community, was that you simply couldn't establish yourself in it without the respect of your peers. The general perception that there was a desire for knowledge and a desire to share knowledge, along with a certain lack of respect for those who did not have that ideology, made for a place where one was judged by ones contributions and not by ones status.
The development of Linux and the free software movement has always seemed to me to be a culmination on the kind of G-File hacker/phreaker of the 80's, with the benefit of resources that allowed an international and inexpensive media upon which to frame our world-view. The end result has brought a commercially sound status to what was never truly a business concept. Political skill was NEVER a benefit in this case. You can be an asshole but if you are right, someone is going to know. If no one knows you are right, well you tried.
Now alot of people are "NAMES" which is often a dangerous position. I remember associating with NAME hackers and knowing that for some of them, the NAME was all they had. This is true in ANY community, where past achievement is rewarded. The person who founded X or created X or did X is remembered with respect no matter WHAT they contribute recently.
Not so with Hackers. Respect for knowledge and skill is always there, and we worship some of the same idols, but to sustain a name in a world in which anyone can take your intellectual contribution, and modify it and make it theirs, requires a certain sense of promotion either by ones own effort, or by others.
The fact is that when I choose a product, I rarely base my opinion on that product on the specific person who invented it or the person who made it. We rely on umbrella organizations, corporations, research institutes, to give a mark of quality.
In the case of the Slashdot world, the people arguing over such things as the merits of different licenses to some extent are a rarefied breed. The majority of linux users don't care about the legal ramifications of using software because they would have taken it whether the license permitted it or not. By showing source code, it is all over. The license be damned. The fact that the corporate world needs those licenses to contribute to the movement, and the fact that the corporate world is BUYING the concept that those licenses have some value and that equivalent licenses (Apples) with certain restrictions, will be honestly followed, is a bunch of SHIT. Once I have your source code, you have to prove I have it. The hacker outside of the US doesn't have any obligations. The only thing that prevents abuse is HONOR, and that is a case in which any LEGAL effort is immediately suspect.
Control of information is not truly possible. Just as Microsofts patent on use of XOR to allow proper rendering of an onscreen pointer is absurd, so is the licenses. Those who create this show of legalese with terms like free or open as the adjective are marketing. The news sees the marketeers, they see the hype, then they realize that those 'hyping' are not really altruistic, despite the common sense that says that NO ONE who fights for abstracts is truly altruic, then they are offended by arrogance, aggressiveness, a sense of cockiness, that was part of our community when the term hacker wasn't even used in movies, let alone in boardrooms...
Every piece of software I design I provide legal protection for MY right to reuse code I developped. I attempt to avoid stealing other peoples code, but I often learn techniques of coding by looking at source code. In the end, I protect myself.
That is the goal of most of the public voices, as far as the press is concerned. Most of us are just taking advantage of every resource we have, and our interest in being a public face on a community so self-interested is not there. We are too busy... We contribute to the movement because when we find a solution to a problem, we contact others and let them have our fix. When we take someone elses work and make it prettier, we thank the person who gave us that original work by returning the effort. But it is all self-interest. We are all arrogant thieves, stealing from each other, and happily calling it freedom and openness. If the walls came down, we would grab all the free software before it stopped being free and would hide it and share it more carefully, but we wouldn't lose a step. We would simply develop technical methods of protecting ourselves where legal methods failed...
A bizarre little rant cause I think it is time to stop patting ourselves on the back. I have been programming for 20 years and I want to remind folks that Apple ][+ came with a reference manual with the entirity of the intellectual property of Apples chip design, rom design, and listings for their OS, and basic. Open source isn't new. I used to type in programs from magazines. We aren't special. We are lucky to have seen in 30 years a transformation of computers into community builders, from corporate slaves.
Lucky... Not better or special...
Any sense of arrogance was there from the begining. It isn't new, and it isn't controllable.
It seems to me that the broadcast industry has spent an extrodinary amount of money as a whole to create a free distribution network. Radio and Music Video TV have taught us to expect that cost-free entertainment. Certainly revenue is generated by advertising, however anyperson with real desire could tape all their favorite songs they hear on the radio as well as the ones they see on MTV (as if MTV still played videos...). This ability has been available for as long as I can recall. I remember radio stations playing ENTIRE ALBUM SIDES without break. If that isn't GIVING the music away than what is?
So what is the issue with mp3? Well it is not really that the industry sees a threat, but that they see a cheaper easier distribution method that they want to take advantage of but have not yet put the resources together to create. They are waiting for a cultural transformation and refuse to invest in starting it. Now it has taken hold, and they have realized that their unwillingness to transform their business models before it had an immediate reward will cost them. There are so many ways that music could be distributed pay per song, that it almost staggers one. The problem is that someone came out with a method that they couldn't control. Time for them to stop whining and put their money into the mix somewhere else then in the lawyers pockets. If they want an industry standard then it better have value beyond the value to them. The dread of the digital perfect copy may be merely a smokestream to keep potentially valuable artists from risking the same free exposure they would recieve from Radio, without the executive decision making we all know and abhor... See when a musician releases a song without a label or with a small label, and a big company "discovers" them, it is likely that the big company won't push music that was already distributed and will require new songs... Now if an artist struggling for exposure makes her work known through this method, a label could very well refuse to publish those songs on the grounds that they are essentially public domain. Lets see just how much of a hammer the record industry can muster..
On the other hand, what about us consumers. Will we really support independent musicians in a shareware or pay-per-song model, that isn't controlled by the industry? If not, then those starving musicians will eventually have to realize that their internet fans don't really support their effort.
In the long run, with the miniaturization of storage and processing, eventually all of us will have the wearable computer power to, as a side, provide us with an unlimited amount of music anywhere we want. There isn't anything that can stop that. I would not mind if a musician automatically recieved.05 cents every time I listened to their song if the technology is simple and unrestrictive. Maybe it is time for us geeks to support the underground and indie musicans with a nice mp3+ with auditing capabilities. In any case enjoy your tunes...
Slashdot Mirror
Reading this review points a few things that might be relevant.
1. 2.7 pounds.
2. No touchscreen.
3. Full keyboard.
This is NOT a palmtop folks. As a handheld it is more like a low power low graphic low memory low expansion ultralight, than a color palmpilot.
Certainly I could see some uses for a product like this, but since I see people in this discussion talking about handwriting recognition I would like to suggest they make sure they understand the specs. This one uses a nubby eraser pointer like thinkpads and such do.
For some reason the performance chart for this says it has handwriting recognition but since it doesn't have a touch screen that seems sort of a part of the OS and not really relevant to the piece of hardware we are talking about.
D
I would say that there was more to the issue than for exploration.
While a number of people have raised the point of the woman playing a man to avoid sexual passes and so on, there has always been a tactical advantage as a hacker to pretending female gender. In the eighties most of my friends had gotten free accounts on systems with special features by finding a girl to talk on the phone and 'Prove' they were female, at any number of systems.
The fact is that having females on a BBS was a huge draw, and sysops were VERY horny boys most of the time.
Exploiting this issue has always been one of the humorous side-effects of a desperation for female attention even in a virtual world.
In recent play on Everquest I found that as a female I was FAR more likely to be simply GIVEN stuff because I was in a female character. I actually stopped playing female characters because I felt that it was in some ways a cheat. The females are projected on the screen as scantily clothed buxom lasses, who despite the fact that they might be 50th level warriors, might not have had the wearwithal to buy pants.
In Clan Lords (another multiplayer game) I found that by creating a female character I was absolutely treated better than the males. In a game where I was represented by a 32 by 32 icon of an elf in a dress, guys would go out of their way to help me.
As a former administrator on a mush for 6 years, I have seen a number of players be given advantages based on their gender.
In truth, as a 14 year old boy, I used to log into DDials as Generic Girl and log the disturbing modemsex so that I could show it to the other members of the systems I was on.
And as to getting away with pretending female gender, I found that it was easy. Just act like a person and don't make a big fuss over your gender. Most people don't actually pay much attention to their gender until it is brought into question.
As I like to say, "Actually I am a superintelligent blue hamster developed at MIT."
While I recognize that SUN might have strategic problems with Linux and open source in general, I would like to point out that they seem to be supporting Java for that platform.
Check out the Macintosh support. Not Open Source at all.
If Java actually ran on multiple platforms with any performance, it would make the question of Platform old fashioned. However instead they work hard to push it on the majority platform, Windows.
D
I appreciated hearing from one of my early day heroes. I own an Apple ][+ and one of the great things about it was that the ROM's were listed in the manual as where the schematics. It let me understand what a computer is, back when I was 11 years old. Further the fact that it included 2 flavors of basic (I had a language card (16k!!!)) and the monitor(programming environment for writing code to memory with hex) and the miniassembler which actually let me use mnemonics, all in the inital box, was great. When the first Macintosh came out, I was very unhappy to see that the schematics were in a 50 dollar book, and there was NO programming language. While I do love the Mac, I have always felt that the difficulty programming it for the begining coder is prohibitive. Where Microsoft gave us Visual Basic, It took years to match that kind of easy novice development system. Microsoft Basic infact was the first language I bought for the Mac. It has always been my feeling that an OS provider had a responsibility to see that there were development tools available to get the greatest application library, and from the Apple][+ with 10000+ programs to the Mac which for a long time had one app in any given category, It is clear how long it has taken for the Mac to really gain market parity.
I do not think that Steve Wozniak has to prove his comittment to hobbyist computing and programming. I think his efforts there made alot of programmers out of kids in the 80's. Whether he has the power to influence modern apple towards his early and it seems current philosophies, he is a real hero in my book and he doesn't need to do a damned thing.
The thing that was clearest in this Q&A session was the overwhelming difference between the 80's hacker and the 90's netgeek. The days when hacking meant figuring out how shit works, and when the morality of it was based on information must be free without any real other goals or intents was never as clear as it seems. There were always kids who attacked other sites for no good reason but a desire to show their stuff, wave their dick, be assholes without being caught. The same vandals who would egg a passing bus might take down a bbs using 99e99 or p1tt...
Hell, the notion that there were switches between me and the longdistance call was cool. The fact that you knew that somewhere there was a computer keeping track of billing was cool. The fact that you knew that it wasn't just magic was a big reason why hackers did what they did. To show that all the things that we take for granted are really exciting if you look at them, and the tricks you can do once you do that are amusing too!
Still I can't forget red blue rainbow black white lemonscented boxes that were supposed to do any number of things if you just followed these instructions and had a soldering iron. Script kiddies of the past.
What amuses me most in seeing this dialog is the sense that there is a productivity to programming something for someone else, that doesn't exist in the explaining the basis of such programs. cDc always was about the how it works and not how to do it. It was about giving you the manual, not selling you the source. OpenSource software is built on OpenSource knowledge of underlying systems. If we don't have the information we don't have the programs. To require a hacker to program for someone else is nonsense. The way you become a hacker is by having other hackers see you can do it yourself. Then they say, "He is a hacker" and you are. If you think you can become a hacker by doing it someone elses way, then you are silly. Original thought, exploration, lack of interest in authority, and a little bit of a desire to show off to people who might actually understand what you are talking about is what fueled the 'hacker' of the 80's.
The geek of the 90's is a different animal, with pratical usage of opensource being a commercial reality, productivity being a primary force behind contribution to a movement, love for knowledge being a real secondary. How many of the people on this channel have actually read their source code cause they wanted to know how it was done? As much as most of ya'll want to feel good because you know how to code, you don't NEED to code most of the time because someone else has done it, or done something close to it before. Hell the art of Unix is to take 5 programs that other people wrote and pipe your data through em without writing a bit of code.
Getting on cDc for being script kiddies is a joke. I am not even sure why we call them script kiddies. Using canned software is as old as the day. Yeah when I got my first modem I had to patch the thing through my game controler port to get dial tone detection, and wrote my first comm program in basic and assembler. When AE came into my hands, I never went back. Fact is that cDc may write tools that people who couldn't normally write, might find useful. Maybe cDc drops a few trojans into the mix... Maybe Microsoft gets burned on the ass because their marketers have whipped their techs in the internal battles so that nothing works right, but atleast it has the 'features'. cDc does what it does and doesn't apologize. The question of why they don't do more is very very well returned. Why don't you!
DLG
Athlon killer? Who even has one yet? Where do I get a mother board for an Athlon? I know this isn't the point of the thread but the fact is that I have had an Athlon 500mhz for 2 weeks now. It runs great, and was no problem finding. I believe IBM has an K7 based Aptiva on the consumer market as well. (I picked up mine at 5oclock.com, and put it together myself so I wouldn't have to wait for 2 weeks for someone to do what I can do in 2 hours. Just remember to buy a CPU fan) ------- I do not trust announcement of chips. The basic fact is that a chip being produced doesn't have anything to do with a chip being available. There were Alpha's being demonstrated at a gigahertz last year. Intel showed 700mhz stuff this year. I see no product. Apple just got into trouble because they tried to sell G4 500's without auppliers. I have to say that Athlon is a great chip because it is a real chip. I was glad the company that was selling me a K6-3 screwed up my order so bad I had to cancel it. It forced me to wait the 3 weeks it took to get the K7 into the marketplace. The best thing is that my mobo is rated to the 700 (which costs 3 times as much as the 500)... When the 700 drops to 200 bucks or so I can bring my box up to 700mhz without any major effort. Meanwhile I have a pretty good development machine (not to mention the game performance. Hell Windows actually feels responsive at this speed.) Anyhow, if you want an Athlon they are out there. I may be the first person I know who has one, but unless I am mistaken, I won't be the last. D
Just so you know, Zaibatsu are merely the 4 japanese companies that controlled the Japanese economy prior to world war 2. I forget which they are but Mitsubishi was one of them.
Microsoft offers a server and asks that folks take a shot at gaining access to things Microsoft wouldn't want folks to have access to in a commercial product.
Some people yelp, "Screw Microsoft, let em do their own dirty work."
Others tut tut, "This is just like Open Source! This is a step in the right direction."
What to do!?! Is Microsoft challenging us to stick by our Morals? Or are we being "used" by a corporate entity. Even worse, are the logs of this attempt at hackign the system going to represent evidence?
#1. If you can't avoid a simple tcp/ip packet sniffer from tracking you down, then you are unlikely to be the ones the FBI cares about.
#2. If you believe that this is closer to open source than before, try a breath deep too. Oxygen is good. Yes.. It burns stuff... Anyone can torture test any product they buy. There is nothing open source about that. The issue of Open Source is that modifications we as hackers might make after finding bugs, are owned by the community, as is the original software to some extent. The notion that this method of security analysis is any different than normal practice of Microsoft is laughable. The question is HOW the software is being tested, not WHO is testing it.
#3. I will note that it is rare for a Linux machine to HAVE to be advertised to be crashed. That is because if you want to test out a security flaw you can create your own test machine with no cost. Thats the joy of OPEN SOURCE. You can truly know what you are getting, try it before spending money, and even fix problems yourself rather than having to wait for a company to respond to your bug report.
#4. I still have doubts that this product ever will exist. The fact is that if no one hacks the software, then Microsoft can claim their non-released software that probably will not be really implemented before some serious bug fixing, is secure within the context of 1999's security issues and protocols. With new services being added regularly and custom software being thrown into the mix, this is relatively vapor ware benchmarking...
Whatever,
dlg
I have been running a linux webserver in various incarnations and machines since 1993. I started on a 486 with some decent scsi (vl-bus) and 8 megs of ram, with a 28.8 hayes modem, matching the isp's.
I generally ran 3.6 kilobytes per second of bandwidth at the time, which wasn't bad for a 100 dollar a month dedicated line.:)
Now adays we use an alpha (for past 2 years) with 128 megs of ram and a T1. One day (and I really mean one 5 minute period) our line was saturated by what seemed to be a webcrawler from taiwan which literally downloaded the entire site. It filled our pipe. That is the only time that such a thing happened and my apache server didn't even blink. I wouldn't have known but I tend to analyze my peak times.
After we decided to upgrade the software on the alpha (redhat 4.2 being a bit old ) I moved the entire site over to a k6-2 running at 300 with 156 megs of ram or something... That hardware cost about 700 all together. (the alpha cost 5000 2 years ago..) It performs fine. I have never seen the apache webserver crash or not respond based on overusage although sometimes dynamic content will slow down (and that is because we don't really optimize for speed). In any case the performance is great for the price. I have bought one copy of redhat 5.0 and have 3 servers all running great. (Finally retired the 486 cause it was hard to find vlbus hardware)...
The basic fact is that the webserver has NEVER been a crisis point or even a decision point. When we went to shttp we went to stronghold as it was the only easy solution at the time. It has never caused us problem.
Further we serve realaudio, handle telnet sessions. handle email, handle pretty much any protocol a client wants. mysql, php, perl, c compilers...
There is literally nothing that we have needed to do that our linux boxes haven't handled. I am so comfortable with them that I have placed linux boxes as controlers for permanent automated exhibits, and have so far only had one hardware crash even.
The notion that NT would be easier for me to maintain, easier for my clients to interact with, or in any way a more efficient use of money is absurd. I don't even know what they charge for NT, but I believe I would rather purchase an extra 256 megs of ram per machine, or a faster processor, then pay to be a beta tester.
I know I am preaching to the converted here, but I started laughing the first time I saw the comparisons. While I WOULD like linux to catch up with SMP and such, and certainly would like to see it scale better, I happen to like being able to buy a 500 dollar computer when I need more processing, and have it up and running in 2 hours (and that because I generally do a redhat ftp instalation)
I betcha you can't do that with a win NT install.
While I do lookforward to an OC-3, I imagine the price of leasing it will be expensive enough that I can afford any number of widdle iddy biddy linux machines to serve up pages. The days of big iron may not be over, but I don't need a mainframe to do something as brain dead as serving static pages.
D
Since I have been doing this crazy online thing (1982) it has been absolutely positively known, and I believe impossible for a company to assert otherwise, that electronic mail is viewable by the administrator of the system. Now perhaps outgoing mail might be less available to a particular admin but the fact is that the information is sitting on someones computer... FURTHERMORE since folks don't seem to get it, I will repeat something I used to say on IRC back in 1993... EVERYTHING I SAY IS EASILY MONITORED BY ANYONE WHO GIVES A DAMN. There are too many access points to monitor any given persons communications. Thats why we needed PGP and why the battle for encryption is so important. The issue of merely logging sendmail or otherwise is trivial. It is my mailserver. I definately want to know what is going on with it. Personally I don't read my users mail, but sometimes they ASK me to check something that is wrong with their mail. Sometimes they DON'T want that 6meg file that some idiot sent them which is beating on their poor windows ppp session. So as an administrator, the fact is that I got ROOT for a reason. How I USE the information I have access to is what is important. If Dejanews is doing something with the info they are collecting that is counter to the wellbeing of those who are using their services then by all means make a fuss, and tell people. But if what they are doing is collecting data to analyze for the purposes generally suspected, that of usage monitoring, security, optimization, well who the hell cares.
The fact is that one cannot technically prove anything based on logs. Those logs can be forged, or tampered with. There is no verification that the person who sent the email was represented appropriately, or that the person recieving the email ever truly did. Email is still a format that has not been defined well officially. Until we see official signatures and other methods, we are in a zone where the legality of an email message is dependent on many things that can't be controled by the user or admin...
I have spoken to friends about this, people who handle the email of law firms and security traders... The lawfirms try to clear the email off the systems because of discovery (if they deleted the message then a subpoena doesn't matter). The ones with the brokerages have to back up every email sent in or out, because THEY are required to have all communications documented by the the SEC...
So go figure. And truly, free email accounts cost you nothing and while they don't cost MUCH for the server, they do cost something. It is easy enough for a person to get a tcp/ip connection, and hook up a linux box to have their own mail server. Then log all you want or don't want...
Blah...
------
This message is under surveilance by the NSA. If you are reading this message you will be contacted by the NSA. The code word is 'excuse me'... If someone contacts you with this information, you submit immediately to a fullcavity strip search...
Thank you for your cooperation.
I don't really know why it would be American versus the rest of the world or whatever, but I have always considered laziness as a virtue. Generally it motivates people to produce time/energy savers such as cars, compilers (I know, some of us just love to handcode stuff in whatever our favorite executible format is, but personally I dig how much C and perl accomplish...) and toilets.
I cannot even vote for how many lines of code I have written. Probably 100 different projects between 10 and 1000 lines of code, but most of them really involve cutting and pasting. Hell, if I wasn't so lazy I would probably be using more modular code than I already do and thus write even FEWER lines of code.
I expect on the otherhand that they didn't actually ask any of the Microsoft OS developers. From what I understand they write kajillions of lines of code, as they have to rewrite the OS over again everytime they make a revision.
Wheras with Linux generally you take someone elses code and rewrite the important differences.
So is OpenSource's real value the way it supports laziness? I mean there are all sorts of projects I have done where I have looked for appropriate open sourced code before hand coding. Is this wrong? I would say that a real measurement of productivity would be how much a single programer could accomplish with the fewest number of lines but since the majority of the lines of code written by US programmers are actual productivity wasters like games it is somewhat ironic...
Productivity is measured by how much work an individual can accomplish in a consistent amount of time. The notion that writing more lines of code as getting MORE done in less time is far fetched.
Lazy=good or we would still be hunter gatherers.
DLG
There are three aspects in evaluating college education.
#1. The value of education without reference to practicality.
#2. The value of the degree as representing that education.
#3. The value of the relationships one forms in the process of getting #1 or #2
In the case of most people, the education has a value as experience but that never relates to financial benefit...
The other 2 items are where the financial value can be measured..
The top tier lawschool average salary after graduation can be $30000 dollars greater (or more) than the second tier school.
The reason for this is that when someone hires from a school based on the degree they are saying "I need predictable value based on my investment. As I see 0 job experience I need to evaluate based not on any qualification but on the statistical likelyhood that someone from a school I am familiar with as a good school will be like the majority of other people from that school.
I am a high school and college drop out who gets hired by people who are looking for things that NO ONE ELSE HAS DONE. Finding someone who is educated in doing things others have done is of no worth.
While a college education might benefit me (by giving me a broader range of experience and skills including communication, and more contacts with people who might hire me or contribute talent in my projects) it is not a good indicator of my core value, which is technical in nature and yet is not expressedly formalized as an engineer or other professional might be.
In truth college has many merits, but few are financial. I have always considered my college education a luxury that I could seek when my financial responsibilities were relatively settled. I enjoy learning and enjoy being in a group of people learning. However I don't see how my philosophy degree would help in anything beyond bio-ethics (which I dread)...
What sort of degree would you want for someone in this so called WEB industry? The ability to type? Clearly design is not primary as we can see from the high quantity of really nasty looking poorly behaved web pages. Clearly no technical skill is necessary as there is negligible difficulty in producing web pages that are no more than glorified word-processed desktop published contentless dribble.
The fact is that it isn't surprising that people are evaluating this talent as not requiring college. What is surprising is that people think that a task that will eventually be simple enough for a 5 year old to do, is also a good career choice...
As to the comp-sci degree, I was told 10 years ago that it wasn't a good criteria. I was told the masters was the lowest level one should consider as showing some merit in the field...
I thought this might have changed when I stated this recently to a number of my peers (I am modest to include anyone really as my peer... Although I hope that when I am tried for whatever they catch me at, that I will be able to have ya'll exclusively on the jury...)
The response was, are you kidding? A masters is worth garbage...
So I gather it is still the same...
As to college as a source of a free internet account... That is like saying your car came with a free radio antenna...
Cool article. I was trying to explain that being a hacker didn't necessarily mean being the kind of guy/girl who could write an OS from scratch, but that it was the person who could solve a problem using the tools available. I generally am most proud of solutions in which I didn't have to build something from scratch but could take preexisting programs or hardware and use it in a novel way. That was HACKING it out. I have saved my clients money, and myself time, by finding solutions that let them do something with what they had. Often I could have billed higher for a product that I custom wrote, but that isn't always the right solution.
While I have enjoyed tremendously the process of writing an application in which every single line was mine, boy would I have hated it if I found out that someone else wrote the same damned program...
When I started using Linux 5 years ago, explaining to clients that I was using Linux was very difficult. It was hard enough to explain to them what the value of the WWW was, or how email could improve their relationships with their customers.
Now I tell people I use Linux and it is hard for me to avoid having to explain that it isn't like Windows where everything is done for you. That owning a computer isn't always like using an appliance... However I can also tell a client that my system is running a Linux server, that it has Apache, and thus that it is THE TOP OF THE LINE as a web host.
Furthermore now when I install a custom programmed machine controling someones exhibit, I don't have to explain that Linux DOESN'T mean that I am the only person in the world who can fix it, it means that a permanent installation can be PERMANENT.
I don't hear people responding to Linux with fear. Most people are curious, want to know whether it is worth switching to, and if there is value for them. When they bought their Windows machine it was because it was the only name in the game. The very notion that with the same hardware they can now have a choice is extrodinarily persuasive and always has been. The dual boot machine with no risk...
The basic fact is that the status of Linux as a FREE alternative would not make a difference to a first time buyer, or someone buying a new machine. No one calculates the cost of Windows. It is free cause it is on the machine when you order it. To switch and actually PAY for another OS is to much trouble.
Linux has the advantage of taking away that cost, and allowing a user to TRY IT. Anyone who is frightened of it or doesn't trust it has THAT choice.
I remember when the DOS users pshawed the Macintosh. A Windowing interface was too clunky, they were so fast with text only that it a mouse was a hindrance. I still don't understand why Macintosh doesn't have more keyboard control. It seems so sensical. Now adays, they say, you can't have a CLI it is too complicated. True enough, the GUI did make machines accessible to people who can't remember how to do things or read manuals. But to talk about the GUI for an OS being the judgement of usefulness is a joke...
I don't think that anyone is scared of Linux but people who have a stake in its failure. Everyone else sees it as part and parcel to a world in which a 300 dollar PC can do everything you ever wanted. Back when I was a teenager the C64 was like that... We are FINALLY back into a world where the cheap computer isn't a real compromise. As long as Linux works on cheap commodity hardware then in the world of the PERSONAL computer, Linux will succeed in offering its one great value... ****FREE**** CHOICE
One of the things that I always appreciated about the 'hacker' community, was that you simply couldn't establish yourself in it without the respect of your peers. The general perception that there was a desire for knowledge and a desire to share knowledge, along with a certain lack of respect for those who did not have that ideology, made for a place where one was judged by ones contributions and not by ones status.
The development of Linux and the free software movement has always seemed to me to be a culmination on the kind of G-File hacker/phreaker of the 80's, with the benefit of resources that allowed an international and inexpensive media upon which to frame our world-view. The end result has brought a commercially sound status to what was never truly a business concept. Political skill was NEVER a benefit in this case. You can be an asshole but if you are right, someone is going to know. If no one knows you are right, well you tried.
Now alot of people are "NAMES" which is often a dangerous position. I remember associating with NAME hackers and knowing that for some of them, the NAME was all they had. This is true in ANY community, where past achievement is rewarded. The person who founded X or created X or did X is remembered with respect no matter WHAT they contribute recently.
Not so with Hackers. Respect for knowledge and skill is always there, and we worship some of the same idols, but to sustain a name in a world in which anyone can take your intellectual contribution, and modify it and make it theirs, requires a certain sense of promotion either by ones own effort, or by others.
The fact is that when I choose a product, I rarely base my opinion on that product on the specific person who invented it or the person who made it. We rely on umbrella organizations, corporations, research institutes, to give a mark of quality.
In the case of the Slashdot world, the people arguing over such things as the merits of different licenses to some extent are a rarefied breed. The majority of linux users don't care about the legal ramifications of using software because they would have taken it whether the license permitted it or not. By showing source code, it is all over. The license be damned. The fact that the corporate world needs those licenses to contribute to the movement, and the fact that the corporate world is BUYING the concept that those licenses have some value and that equivalent licenses (Apples) with certain restrictions, will be honestly followed, is a bunch of SHIT. Once I have your source code, you have to prove I have it. The hacker outside of the US doesn't have any obligations. The only thing that prevents abuse is HONOR, and that is a case in which any LEGAL effort is immediately suspect.
Control of information is not truly possible. Just as Microsofts patent on use of XOR to allow proper rendering of an onscreen pointer is absurd, so is the licenses. Those who create this show of legalese with terms like free or open as the adjective are marketing. The news sees the marketeers, they see the hype, then they realize that those 'hyping' are not really altruistic, despite the common sense that says that NO ONE who fights for abstracts is truly altruic, then they are offended by arrogance, aggressiveness, a sense of cockiness, that was part of our community when the term hacker wasn't even used in movies, let alone in boardrooms...
Every piece of software I design I provide legal protection for MY right to reuse code I developped. I attempt to avoid stealing other peoples code, but I often learn techniques of coding by looking at source code. In the end, I protect myself.
That is the goal of most of the public voices, as far as the press is concerned. Most of us are just taking advantage of every resource we have, and our interest in being a public face on a community so self-interested is not there. We are too busy...
We contribute to the movement because when we find a solution to a problem, we contact others and let them have our fix. When we take someone elses work and make it prettier, we thank the person who gave us that original work by returning the effort. But it is all self-interest. We are all arrogant thieves, stealing from each other, and happily calling it freedom and openness. If the walls came down, we would grab all the free software before it stopped being free and would hide it and share it more carefully, but we wouldn't lose a step. We would simply develop technical methods of protecting ourselves where legal methods failed...
A bizarre little rant cause I think it is time to stop patting ourselves on the back. I have been programming for 20 years and I want to remind folks that Apple ][+ came with a reference manual with the entirity of the intellectual property of Apples chip design, rom design, and listings for their OS, and basic. Open source isn't new. I used to type in programs from magazines. We aren't special. We are lucky to have seen in 30 years a transformation of computers into community builders, from corporate slaves.
Lucky... Not better or special...
Any sense of arrogance was there from the begining. It isn't new, and it isn't controllable.
Yuck... USB? Not exactly the kind of speed one wants to talk to a 2.2 gig storage mechanism...
It seems to me that the broadcast industry has spent an extrodinary amount of money as a whole to create a free distribution network. Radio and Music Video TV have taught us to expect that cost-free entertainment. Certainly revenue is generated by advertising, however anyperson with real desire could tape all their favorite songs they hear on the radio as well as the ones they see on MTV (as if MTV still played videos...). This ability has been available for as long as I can recall. I remember radio stations playing ENTIRE ALBUM SIDES without break. If that isn't GIVING the music away than what is?
.05 cents every time I listened to their song if the technology is simple and unrestrictive. Maybe it is time for us geeks to support the underground and indie musicans with a nice mp3+ with auditing capabilities. In any case enjoy your tunes...
So what is the issue with mp3? Well it is not really that the industry sees a threat, but that they see a cheaper easier distribution method that they want to take advantage of but have not yet put the resources together to create. They are waiting for a cultural transformation and refuse to invest in starting it. Now it has taken hold, and they have realized that their unwillingness to transform their business models before it had an immediate reward will cost them. There are so many ways that music could be distributed pay per song, that it almost staggers one. The problem is that someone came out with a method that they couldn't control. Time for them to stop whining and put their money into the mix somewhere else then in the lawyers pockets. If they want an industry standard then it better have value beyond the value to them. The dread of the digital perfect copy may be merely a smokestream to keep potentially valuable artists from risking the same free exposure they would recieve from Radio, without the executive decision making we all know and abhor... See when a musician releases a song without a label or with a small label, and a big company "discovers" them, it is likely that the big company won't push music that was already distributed and will require new songs... Now if an artist struggling for exposure makes her work known through this method, a label could very well refuse to publish those songs on the grounds that they are essentially public domain. Lets see just how much of a hammer the record industry can muster..
On the other hand, what about us consumers. Will we really support independent musicians in a shareware or pay-per-song model, that isn't controlled by the industry? If not, then those starving musicians will eventually have to realize that their internet fans don't really support their effort.
In the long run, with the miniaturization of storage and processing, eventually all of us will have the wearable computer power to, as a side, provide us with an unlimited amount of music anywhere we want. There isn't anything that can stop that. I would not mind if a musician automatically recieved