So far, I estimate I've received a total of 2000 to 2500 of these swens...it's gotten to the point where I've had to set up a pre-fetch procmail session to run on the Linux box from which I fetchmail my mail (in addition to the one I run on my desktop Linux box to sort it into mailboxes) just to keep my download bandwidth from being swamped. Anyone who claims that Windows viruses "don't affect" Linux users is dead wrong in my book. They don't infect, maybe, but my bandwidth is definitely being affected.
And a brief side note: did anyone notice that those pictures of the virus mail were "copyright F-Prot"? As far as I know, under American copyright law, the copyright for a work resides with the creator unless he explicitly releases it. So F-Prot is actually infringing the virus author's copyright by claiming ownership.
(Not like the virus writer's going to come forward to claim infringement, but just thought it was amusing.)
I wish Andromeda were useful for me...but I have a frigging 128 kilobit upload limit. Which means any MP3s I played would be skippy-jumpy, 'cuz almost my entire collection is at a higher bitrate than that. Grumble.
OTOH, it's great for hosting a Mindterm java SSH client for me to connect in from the crippled-to-web-only check-your-mail computers at work to get my email and chat online with my friends via Tinyfugue.
Well, all right, I was exaggerating slightly (I probably just need to reinstall Windows is likely what the trouble is) but the truth is, I'm feeling kind of bitter about having been waiting for Half-Life II all this time (I even wrote a chapter of Half-Life fanfic for crying out loud) and I don't know when I'm ever going to get to play it. Sigh.
Given that I'm stuck on an old overclocked Celeron 300A/450 mHZ which has difficulty running even Half-Life one at full speed, I have a hard time feeling sorry for this fellow.
Did it have a red title bar instead of a green one? If so, that means it somehow accidentally leaked out to you before it was supposed to, while it was in the "only paid subscribers are supposed to be able to see this" period. I've seen that happen with other stories a couple of times.
Of course, BitTorrent isn't really peer-to-peer in the same sense as the rest of the apps that share that moniker. It is p2p in the truest sense, but rather than being a Kazaa or Gnutella-like app that lets you search for files, it's more of a special type of web download manager, and not all that different from posting files on a website, save for where the bandwidth comes from.
...how are you going to keep them (from) down(loading) on the farm after they've seen the lights of peer-to-peer? Apparently more people use P2P than bothered to vote in the last Presidential election. With that many people engaged in the activity, it's not like it's going to dry up and blow away because the RIAA starts cracking down. Heck, if legal crackdowns ended illicit behavior, we wouldn't have had any booze since the '20s and we wouldn't have a drug problem now.
On the other hand, there's a certain case to be made for the vast majority of those sixty million P2P users being ignorant sheep who can only use P2P in the first place because it's so easy to install the app--and who may not even be aware that they're uploading songs at the same time as they're downloading them, strange as that would seem to a Slashdot reader. And so, even if someone comes up with a totally "safe" method of filesharing, it could lose many of its prospective users if it is even slightly nontrivial to get working properly. (As an example, consider what happened to the mp3 websites after the RIAA's last legal crackdowns...they retreated behind a web of spawning browser windows, porn ads, top ten lists, and so on, until you have to be a hacker just to find where the MP3s actually are.)
So balancing the two questions...I think peer to peer will always be with us, but depending on how easy it is to use, it may lose a lot of its users--and, thus, a lot of potential sources for files.
Uhm...not necessarily to disagree with most of your points, but I guess that since Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire won a Hugo, it must be science fiction too, right?
The funny thing is, though, that they're also an example of how people don't like micropayment systems. To wit, the introduction of plans like MCI's Neighborhood, an integrated plan where $50-70 depending on what state you're in gets you unlimited local and domestic USA long distance, so you can call wherever you want for as long as you want and not have to worry about how much of a bill you might run up. People who might not even necessarily make enough LD calls to get their money's worth are signing up just so they have the peace of mind of knowing they're not on a ticking meter.
I work customer service in an MCI call center (though my opinions and viewpoints do not reflect those of MCI), so I know whereof I speak.
Someone could come along and steal the mail out of your box.
If you've sent a check to pay the bill, then they have your bank account number and whatever information you've put on the check (name, address, sometimes even DOB & SSN).
And if you're sending back something valuable, such as a Netflix or Greencine rental DVD, they could snag it for themselves.
And even if you did insure it, they wouldn't necessarily do anything about it. When I shipped a laptop at the UPS Store recently, when I insured it I had to sign a disclaimer stating that the insurance would only pay off if it was lost, not if it was broken in transit. Apparently they've had a lot of people shipping pre-broken computers to claim the insurance payoffs.
The funny thing is, there's already at least one school in New Hampshire that integrates laptops in its education program quite well. Some friends of mine work there; it's a private school, grades 9-12, called Brewster Academy in Wolfeboro. This school is very forward-thinking in its computer-enhanced curriculum and is constantly being written up in journals, magazines, newspapers, etc. for it.
I wonder if the NH school folks have consulted with, or researched about, Brewster? It'd be nice to think they would, given that it's right there in their state and all, but the real world being how it is, I don't know if that's likely.
Another amusing thing is that there are ads on the right margin which talk about "Free Kazaa Lite Downloads" and so forth. So on the one hand, they've blocked these sites under the DMCA...and on the other, other sites are advertising the same things.
Presumably leasing the routers from somewhere. I can only guess that maybe really big LANs need to use the kind of routers that cost enough that it would be less expensive (in terms of depreciation) to lease than to buy. As for smaller LANs, if you pay $100 for a router that you decide declines in value (depreciates) at a rate of $20 a year, you get taxed on that $20. I think. Or something. It's been a while since my accounting class.
The funny thing is, this must have been inspired, at least in part, by a 1991 anime called Roujin Z in which an elderly invalid's robotic caretaker/bed goes berzerk and menaces a city. Heh. Life imitates art.
Yep, just as low as that Slashdot story last year or so about the fellow who recovered his girlfriend's computer because it was set to connect to the Internet in a certain way on boot.
Sure, cracks can have legitimate uses. But that doesn't mean everybody who's cracked the program is using it legitimately.
The funny thing is that movie industry people do regard word of mouth as one of the more powerful marketing tools out there. And there have been all sorts of campaigns, both grass-roots and "astroturf," to try to build word-of-mouth publicity for media projects.
What they're complaining about here isn't so much the word of mouth, which they expect for good or ill...it's the speed of that word of mouth compared to how things used to be. They can no longer count on making what they can on the first weekend before word gets around that the movie sucks.
Far from complaining about rectocranially-inverted media people's "bashing free speech," I actually think it's really interesting to consider these little unintended effects that arise out of the use of new technologies. Just a little reminder that everything has consequences, both intentional and not, and those consequences can't always be predicted.
I purchased a refurb Wallstreet G3/266 Powerbook, slapped 512 megs of RAM in it, and put OS X 10.2.6 on it, and it runs like a dream. Sure, it's a bit slow, particularly when OS X tries to do the funky window zoom effects that undoubtedly look stunning on faster Macs, and it doesn't play the more recent Quicktime movies flawlessly...but it's 266 frickin' megahertz, what do they expect?
The concept may seem silly to you, but I might suggest that the simple fact that the practice is wide-spread enough to merit articles in Slate and the New York Times would seem to indicate that a whole lot of people don't feel the same way you do.
I quite enjoy reading books on my PDA...I can carry about a zillion of them in my pocket that way, so I'm never without something interesting to read. I realize that not everybody feels that way, but I think enough do that it's only going to get more prevalent.
I have a few friends who work in the computer department of the prestigous Brewster Academy in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire--a private prep school where motion picture actors (if you can attach that sobriquet to Stephen Seagal, anyway) send their kids, and that regularly gets written up in papers and journals for its progressive stance on computerizing the classroom. Each student is either issued or brings to school his own Apple Powerbook, and they're fully integrated into the class curricula.
Of course, their use of those computers is strictly controlled--no computer games, for instance, and I believe instant messaging services are blocked at the firewall. But still, just imagine the sort of things you can do, educationally, when everyone in the class has his own computer...
Slashdot Mirror
So far, I estimate I've received a total of 2000 to 2500 of these swens...it's gotten to the point where I've had to set up a pre-fetch procmail session to run on the Linux box from which I fetchmail my mail (in addition to the one I run on my desktop Linux box to sort it into mailboxes) just to keep my download bandwidth from being swamped. Anyone who claims that Windows viruses "don't affect" Linux users is dead wrong in my book. They don't infect, maybe, but my bandwidth is definitely being affected.
And a brief side note: did anyone notice that those pictures of the virus mail were "copyright F-Prot"? As far as I know, under American copyright law, the copyright for a work resides with the creator unless he explicitly releases it. So F-Prot is actually infringing the virus author's copyright by claiming ownership.
(Not like the virus writer's going to come forward to claim infringement, but just thought it was amusing.)
I wish Andromeda were useful for me...but I have a frigging 128 kilobit upload limit. Which means any MP3s I played would be skippy-jumpy, 'cuz almost my entire collection is at a higher bitrate than that. Grumble.
OTOH, it's great for hosting a Mindterm java SSH client for me to connect in from the crippled-to-web-only check-your-mail computers at work to get my email and chat online with my friends via Tinyfugue.
Well, all right, I was exaggerating slightly (I probably just need to reinstall Windows is likely what the trouble is) but the truth is, I'm feeling kind of bitter about having been waiting for Half-Life II all this time (I even wrote a chapter of Half-Life fanfic for crying out loud) and I don't know when I'm ever going to get to play it. Sigh.
Given that I'm stuck on an old overclocked Celeron 300A/450 mHZ which has difficulty running even Half-Life one at full speed, I have a hard time feeling sorry for this fellow.
Did it have a red title bar instead of a green one? If so, that means it somehow accidentally leaked out to you before it was supposed to, while it was in the "only paid subscribers are supposed to be able to see this" period. I've seen that happen with other stories a couple of times.
Of course, BitTorrent isn't really peer-to-peer in the same sense as the rest of the apps that share that moniker. It is p2p in the truest sense, but rather than being a Kazaa or Gnutella-like app that lets you search for files, it's more of a special type of web download manager, and not all that different from posting files on a website, save for where the bandwidth comes from.
...how are you going to keep them (from) down(loading) on the farm after they've seen the lights of peer-to-peer? Apparently more people use P2P than bothered to vote in the last Presidential election. With that many people engaged in the activity, it's not like it's going to dry up and blow away because the RIAA starts cracking down. Heck, if legal crackdowns ended illicit behavior, we wouldn't have had any booze since the '20s and we wouldn't have a drug problem now.
On the other hand, there's a certain case to be made for the vast majority of those sixty million P2P users being ignorant sheep who can only use P2P in the first place because it's so easy to install the app--and who may not even be aware that they're uploading songs at the same time as they're downloading them, strange as that would seem to a Slashdot reader. And so, even if someone comes up with a totally "safe" method of filesharing, it could lose many of its prospective users if it is even slightly nontrivial to get working properly. (As an example, consider what happened to the mp3 websites after the RIAA's last legal crackdowns...they retreated behind a web of spawning browser windows, porn ads, top ten lists, and so on, until you have to be a hacker just to find where the MP3s actually are.)
So balancing the two questions...I think peer to peer will always be with us, but depending on how easy it is to use, it may lose a lot of its users--and, thus, a lot of potential sources for files.
Uhm...not necessarily to disagree with most of your points, but I guess that since Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire won a Hugo, it must be science fiction too, right?
"...the only way to know what's good is to read it yourself..."
Not quite true...
The funny thing is, though, that they're also an example of how people don't like micropayment systems. To wit, the introduction of plans like MCI's Neighborhood, an integrated plan where $50-70 depending on what state you're in gets you unlimited local and domestic USA long distance, so you can call wherever you want for as long as you want and not have to worry about how much of a bill you might run up. People who might not even necessarily make enough LD calls to get their money's worth are signing up just so they have the peace of mind of knowing they're not on a ticking meter.
I work customer service in an MCI call center (though my opinions and viewpoints do not reflect those of MCI), so I know whereof I speak.
Someone could come along and steal the mail out of your box.
If you've sent a check to pay the bill, then they have your bank account number and whatever information you've put on the check (name, address, sometimes even DOB & SSN).
And if you're sending back something valuable, such as a Netflix or Greencine rental DVD, they could snag it for themselves.
And even if you did insure it, they wouldn't necessarily do anything about it. When I shipped a laptop at the UPS Store recently, when I insured it I had to sign a disclaimer stating that the insurance would only pay off if it was lost, not if it was broken in transit. Apparently they've had a lot of people shipping pre-broken computers to claim the insurance payoffs.
Speaking for myself, I'd like to know what that $29.99 was paid for, and to whom. Last I heard, Kazaa and Kazaa-Lite were free downloads.
The funny thing is, there's already at least one school in New Hampshire that integrates laptops in its education program quite well. Some friends of mine work there; it's a private school, grades 9-12, called Brewster Academy in Wolfeboro. This school is very forward-thinking in its computer-enhanced curriculum and is constantly being written up in journals, magazines, newspapers, etc. for it.
I wonder if the NH school folks have consulted with, or researched about, Brewster? It'd be nice to think they would, given that it's right there in their state and all, but the real world being how it is, I don't know if that's likely.
Another amusing thing is that there are ads on the right margin which talk about "Free Kazaa Lite Downloads" and so forth. So on the one hand, they've blocked these sites under the DMCA...and on the other, other sites are advertising the same things.
Presumably leasing the routers from somewhere. I can only guess that maybe really big LANs need to use the kind of routers that cost enough that it would be less expensive (in terms of depreciation) to lease than to buy. As for smaller LANs, if you pay $100 for a router that you decide declines in value (depreciates) at a rate of $20 a year, you get taxed on that $20. I think. Or something. It's been a while since my accounting class.
Right idea, wrong anime. Try Roujin Z .
The funny thing is, this must have been inspired, at least in part, by a 1991 anime called Roujin Z in which an elderly invalid's robotic caretaker/bed goes berzerk and menaces a city. Heh. Life imitates art.
Yep, just as low as that Slashdot story last year or so about the fellow who recovered his girlfriend's computer because it was set to connect to the Internet in a certain way on boot.
Sure, cracks can have legitimate uses. But that doesn't mean everybody who's cracked the program is using it legitimately.
The funny thing is that movie industry people do regard word of mouth as one of the more powerful marketing tools out there. And there have been all sorts of campaigns, both grass-roots and "astroturf," to try to build word-of-mouth publicity for media projects.
What they're complaining about here isn't so much the word of mouth, which they expect for good or ill...it's the speed of that word of mouth compared to how things used to be. They can no longer count on making what they can on the first weekend before word gets around that the movie sucks.
Far from complaining about rectocranially-inverted media people's "bashing free speech," I actually think it's really interesting to consider these little unintended effects that arise out of the use of new technologies. Just a little reminder that everything has consequences, both intentional and not, and those consequences can't always be predicted.
I purchased a refurb Wallstreet G3/266 Powerbook, slapped 512 megs of RAM in it, and put OS X 10.2.6 on it, and it runs like a dream. Sure, it's a bit slow, particularly when OS X tries to do the funky window zoom effects that undoubtedly look stunning on faster Macs, and it doesn't play the more recent Quicktime movies flawlessly...but it's 266 frickin' megahertz, what do they expect?
...that even SCO would be that stupid. This story sounds a lot to me like someone garbled details of a legal brief in transmission.
The concept may seem silly to you, but I might suggest that the simple fact that the practice is wide-spread enough to merit articles in Slate and the New York Times would seem to indicate that a whole lot of people don't feel the same way you do.
I quite enjoy reading books on my PDA...I can carry about a zillion of them in my pocket that way, so I'm never without something interesting to read. I realize that not everybody feels that way, but I think enough do that it's only going to get more prevalent.
Here's an interesting article from the New York Times about the Harry Potter situation.
I have a few friends who work in the computer department of the prestigous Brewster Academy in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire--a private prep school where motion picture actors (if you can attach that sobriquet to Stephen Seagal, anyway) send their kids, and that regularly gets written up in papers and journals for its progressive stance on computerizing the classroom. Each student is either issued or brings to school his own Apple Powerbook, and they're fully integrated into the class curricula.
Of course, their use of those computers is strictly controlled--no computer games, for instance, and I believe instant messaging services are blocked at the firewall. But still, just imagine the sort of things you can do, educationally, when everyone in the class has his own computer...