If I didn't have a ReplayTV I would not have a land line at all. And as soon as I have the time to monkey around with an in-home PPP server for it, I may rectify that situation.
Before the Replay, I was cell-only for about a year and it was GREAT. It felt really weird ditching that land line at first, but it worked out famously.
Around here there is a vocal minority that is always saying "if you have nothing to hide, what's the problem?"
I haven't seen any of those posts in this thread. Interesting. Where are all the security camera lovin' posters today? I bet they are busy burning their MP3s to CD, or reading up on firewalls.
Those are cool, but the cost is too high for me. I'm an early adopter in some fronts, but a camcorder will be just a toy, so I will wait it out a while longer.:)
To each his own. I prefer digital. My camera cost $800, but there are NO ongoing costs. I just recharge the batteries once in a while. I'm cheap, and that is important to me.
I have also found that if I am lucky 20% of the photos I take are worth keeping. I would really hate to blow all that money on FILM for only a handful of pics worth holding on to.
Polaroid instant pics have always looked really skunky to me, too. Weird color, bad contrast... Ick. Maybe it's better now, I haven't used an instant camera for years.
I want a video camera now, but digital video tape is a crummy medium. You can't re-use the tapes much, I hear, because they wear easily. So I am waiting for a digital camcorder that has a hard drive in it... I am ALL about eliminating the ongoing costs.
That may be true to some degree, but I also think this was a factor: Linux had (has) more mindshare than ___BSD. When choosing a bandwagon to jump on, you pick the one that's most full.
Not that I am complaining that free software has some corporate supporters. Rah, rah. But c'mon, Linux is "hot" and that has GOT to account for a lot of the corporate interest.
A friend of mine works at Cal Poly Pomona and their whole campus intranet runs on some kind of Distributed Computing Environment. Each server in the system is a "node" in a Borg-like network. If a box melts down, things keep chugging. To reinstall, pop in one CD and the system will update itself from its peers within minutes. It's quite slick, and I think the whole thing is Free and running on FreeBSD and Solaris.
I couldn't find any good links just now that talk about it, but if anyone is interested I will talk to my buddy and get some.
I guess this isn't the same thing he was talking about in the article, because I don't think that any arbitrary data object or stream can be moved from one box to another, but it's still pretty cat.
Companies are like giant stellar masses. When they get too big, they collapse into a superdense structure from which no customer service can escape.
The exact threshold for this can probably be determined mathematically. IBM has clearly exceeded it. ATT certainly has... even their broadband sales people are clueless about the services they are offering.
These days, I expect aggravation, not satisfaction, from any big company. More and more of them are proving unable to answer even the simplest questions. Companies that surprise me with good service (most recently, Speakeasy) quickly earn my loyalty.
As a side rant, the bigger a company is the worse their web sites get. The biggest, most expensive sites seem to be utterly useless for anything but driving you mad, with irrelevant search results and incomplete specifications. (ATT@Home comes to mind again.)
I look forward to the day when my small company has grown up, and we can just exist without needing to really care about the quality of what we are doing. It must be a wonderful position to be in.;)
I'll posit that within 10 years, all this 'copy protection' / 'Digital Rights Management' hooha will be seen for what it is--bullshit and lies, and the companies peddling it will fade out of business.
I'm a cynic, and I posit the opposite:
DRM will permeate every aspect of our lives. You'll be charged a per-use fee on every song and movie you own. All computers will need to support DRM, within every component, by force of law. All software will need to support DRM as well; any program as simple as a WAV player will need this technology built in, which will hamper the development of free software, since it is unlikely that the standards and APIs will be freely available. Instead, the gov't will mandate that some company's proposal be incorporated into the law, and you'll be paying Microsoft or Macrovision outrageous fees in order to get the mandated DRM module that lets you release your freeware MPEG viewer.
(There is precedent for this. Building codes, for example, are drafted by professional's groups, incorporated into the law, and then SOLD to the people who need to refer to them. The entire body of the law is therefore NOT freely available. It doesn't seem like a stretch that down the road you might need to pay for some piece of software that you need to build an application that complies with the law.)
A huge new class of criminals will be created from people who want to continue to do things the "old way." Federal law enforcement will vigorously prosecute this new class of criminals, and ISPs will cooperate under force of law, narcing on people who use P2P services or otherwise exchange media files.
OK, so I'm a cynic. But this seems far too possible to me. Probable, even.
Governments tend towards control. Media companies want to control your use of their goods; the two are already making a dandy combination and I see no reason why the trend might reverse itself. Consumers are right now the proverbial frog in the pot of warm water. By the time it's boiling, it will be too late to do anything and our rights will be cooked.
Thinking this trend will reverse itself is, IMHO, wishful thinking. If it can be defeated it will only be with great effort from consumer advocates. If the trend does reverse itself, it will only be after things have become darkest -- the pendulum swinging back. We're still on the downswing, folks, gaining speed...
...I don't want to end up owning something that I can't make a copy of, even though I have the right to do so...
But there's the crappy thing: if it is protected, you don't have that right. Manufacturers have been legally granted a way to deny you rights that you have under other circumstances. That's the DMCA. Fair use has been taken out of the equation. Legal, but it sure is a dick maneuver!
Ripping a CD to MP3s as a back-up, or using them instead of the normal CD, is ENTIRELY legal.
Ripping isn't legal if you have to break an encryption or other protection scheme in order to do it. That's why the DMCA sucks: the manufacturer's rights trump yours... their right to control how you use the product supercedes your normal "fair use" rights.
Ripping these tracks for personal use IS illegal, even though it isn't illegal for your other CDs.
It's not the decoding of binhex files that's a problem. The Mac has been automagically uncompressing downloads for a long time, but the automatic launching of a new executable is a lovely new Microsoftism.
Note the 'llc' instead of 'inc', this is usually a pretty clear sign) for an individual or law firm that decided they wanted to make a quick buck.
Now that's just low, smearing LLCs. There are a lot of reasons to choose an LLC as opposed to an Inc. LLCs tend to be smaller, but that doesn't mean they are dishonest. I own an LLC, and we aren't a load of bastards.
All of these mechanisms are obvious, because they would be generated in a short brainstorming session with a small random selection of video engineers (i.e. people with ordinary skill in the relevant art)...
I read that to save money the Patent Office has stopped consulting with experts. Instead, they have taken a pool of homeless people and cross-trained them in a little bit of every field. To keep them working, all it takes are some smokes and cheap wine.
The math is pretty simple, but I keep seeing EQ/Sony/Verant apologists on the message boards claiming that the company is making almost no money on the game, that the servers cost soooo much to run, that there's soooo much staff, and poor Sony and we should all be happy they don't raise prices.
What are they smoking? $44M off subscriptions. Yeah, poor Verant all right! Sheesh.
Glad I kicked, anyway. More time for... uh... oher games, I guess...
No, no suggestion. Just an observation. IE is really all I have used on the mac. I have tried OmniWeb in OSX, but I haven't messed with it much so I have no opinion of it yet.
I have often wondered what they were smoking in Cupertino when they cooked up Aqua. Whatever it is, there should be a War on Drugs against it.
OSX has some amazingly cool technical underpinnings. I love having a bash prompt on my Mac, and protected memory and all that jive. But Apple has abandoned more than a decade of UI work in favor of that old NeXT crapola.
Aqua is a poor replacement for MacOS 9.2. Gimme 9.2 with the OSX underpinnings and I'd be in hog heaven. I do not know a single Mac junkie that has really embraced Aqua. We all merely tolerate it. At best.
(NeXT purists will disagree with my diatribe. I guess it's all what you are used to. But imagine if Ford suddently replaced steering wheels with a wacky slider for steering the car, and moved the transmission controls to the dash board. Better? Who cares? It's TOO DAMN DIFFERENT.)
In a decade, OS X's GUI will probably rock. And that's when I'll give up my OS9.
Mac MSIE5 does indeed rock, but I have noticed that it chokes, and badly, on big HTML pages. For example, a big/. forum page will grind IE5 to a halt for a minute or more as it parses and renders or whatever the hell it is doing. A REALLY big page, like 1MB of HTML, can lock it up. Time for a force-quit.
This is on a well-tuned Pismo (400MHz G3, 320MB RAM), and I have done a lot of experimentation with memory settings and other stuff. But it's totally repeatable. Drives me nuts.
OK, so which OS is the "real house?" MacOS? Windows? Solaris? Which OS is licensed under terms providing you with someone to sue when there's a security flaw?
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Entourage and Outlook Express for the Mac can cause some POP daemons to dump core when they check mail. It's faaaaaaaantastic!
If I didn't have a ReplayTV I would not have a land line at all. And as soon as I have the time to monkey around with an in-home PPP server for it, I may rectify that situation.
Before the Replay, I was cell-only for about a year and it was GREAT. It felt really weird ditching that land line at first, but it worked out famously.
Around here there is a vocal minority that is always saying "if you have nothing to hide, what's the problem?"
I haven't seen any of those posts in this thread. Interesting. Where are all the security camera lovin' posters today? I bet they are busy burning their MP3s to CD, or reading up on firewalls.
Those are cool, but the cost is too high for me. I'm an early adopter in some fronts, but a camcorder will be just a toy, so I will wait it out a while longer.
To each his own. I prefer digital. My camera cost $800, but there are NO ongoing costs. I just recharge the batteries once in a while. I'm cheap, and that is important to me.
I have also found that if I am lucky 20% of the photos I take are worth keeping. I would really hate to blow all that money on FILM for only a handful of pics worth holding on to.
Polaroid instant pics have always looked really skunky to me, too. Weird color, bad contrast... Ick. Maybe it's better now, I haven't used an instant camera for years.
I want a video camera now, but digital video tape is a crummy medium. You can't re-use the tapes much, I hear, because they wear easily. So I am waiting for a digital camcorder that has a hard drive in it... I am ALL about eliminating the ongoing costs.
Talking to strangers? My mommy told me never to do that!
That may be true to some degree, but I also think this was a factor: Linux had (has) more mindshare than ___BSD. When choosing a bandwagon to jump on, you pick the one that's most full.
Not that I am complaining that free software has some corporate supporters. Rah, rah. But c'mon, Linux is "hot" and that has GOT to account for a lot of the corporate interest.
...and Tandem systems won't go down even if you start smashing processors with a mallet.
Man, I would love to see the white paper on that!
A friend of mine works at Cal Poly Pomona and their whole campus intranet runs on some kind of Distributed Computing Environment. Each server in the system is a "node" in a Borg-like network. If a box melts down, things keep chugging. To reinstall, pop in one CD and the system will update itself from its peers within minutes. It's quite slick, and I think the whole thing is Free and running on FreeBSD and Solaris.
I couldn't find any good links just now that talk about it, but if anyone is interested I will talk to my buddy and get some.
I guess this isn't the same thing he was talking about in the article, because I don't think that any arbitrary data object or stream can be moved from one box to another, but it's still pretty cat.
I have difficulty imagining any presentation that would be helped by the sound of machinegun fire.
I have been to many presentations that would have been improved were I there with an actual machine gun, making noises with it.
Companies are like giant stellar masses. When they get too big, they collapse into a superdense structure from which no customer service can escape.
;)
The exact threshold for this can probably be determined mathematically. IBM has clearly exceeded it. ATT certainly has... even their broadband sales people are clueless about the services they are offering.
These days, I expect aggravation, not satisfaction, from any big company. More and more of them are proving unable to answer even the simplest questions. Companies that surprise me with good service (most recently, Speakeasy) quickly earn my loyalty.
As a side rant, the bigger a company is the worse their web sites get. The biggest, most expensive sites seem to be utterly useless for anything but driving you mad, with irrelevant search results and incomplete specifications. (ATT@Home comes to mind again.)
I look forward to the day when my small company has grown up, and we can just exist without needing to really care about the quality of what we are doing. It must be a wonderful position to be in.
Amber rules! My favorite fantasy series of all time. Fantasy, sci-fi... it blurs the line.
I don't think that's true. You don't accept an EULA when you take home a paycheck, yet cheating on your taxes is still illegal.
Ignorance of the law has never been a good legal defense. And music CDs have not been treated like software in the past.
I'll posit that within 10 years, all this 'copy protection' / 'Digital Rights Management' hooha will be seen for what it is--bullshit and lies, and the companies peddling it will fade out of business.
I'm a cynic, and I posit the opposite:
DRM will permeate every aspect of our lives. You'll be charged a per-use fee on every song and movie you own. All computers will need to support DRM, within every component, by force of law. All software will need to support DRM as well; any program as simple as a WAV player will need this technology built in, which will hamper the development of free software, since it is unlikely that the standards and APIs will be freely available. Instead, the gov't will mandate that some company's proposal be incorporated into the law, and you'll be paying Microsoft or Macrovision outrageous fees in order to get the mandated DRM module that lets you release your freeware MPEG viewer.
(There is precedent for this. Building codes, for example, are drafted by professional's groups, incorporated into the law, and then SOLD to the people who need to refer to them. The entire body of the law is therefore NOT freely available. It doesn't seem like a stretch that down the road you might need to pay for some piece of software that you need to build an application that complies with the law.)
A huge new class of criminals will be created from people who want to continue to do things the "old way." Federal law enforcement will vigorously prosecute this new class of criminals, and ISPs will cooperate under force of law, narcing on people who use P2P services or otherwise exchange media files.
OK, so I'm a cynic. But this seems far too possible to me. Probable, even.
Governments tend towards control. Media companies want to control your use of their goods; the two are already making a dandy combination and I see no reason why the trend might reverse itself. Consumers are right now the proverbial frog in the pot of warm water. By the time it's boiling, it will be too late to do anything and our rights will be cooked.
Thinking this trend will reverse itself is, IMHO, wishful thinking. If it can be defeated it will only be with great effort from consumer advocates. If the trend does reverse itself, it will only be after things have become darkest -- the pendulum swinging back. We're still on the downswing, folks, gaining speed...
...I don't want to end up owning something that I can't make a copy of, even though I have the right to do so...
But there's the crappy thing: if it is protected, you don't have that right. Manufacturers have been legally granted a way to deny you rights that you have under other circumstances. That's the DMCA. Fair use has been taken out of the equation. Legal, but it sure is a dick maneuver!
Ripping a CD to MP3s as a back-up, or using them instead of the normal CD, is ENTIRELY legal.
Ripping isn't legal if you have to break an encryption or other protection scheme in order to do it. That's why the DMCA sucks: the manufacturer's rights trump yours... their right to control how you use the product supercedes your normal "fair use" rights.
Ripping these tracks for personal use IS illegal, even though it isn't illegal for your other CDs.
When did things start to suck so bad?
It's not the decoding of binhex files that's a problem. The Mac has been automagically uncompressing downloads for a long time, but the automatic launching of a new executable is a lovely new Microsoftism.
Note the 'llc' instead of 'inc', this is usually a pretty clear sign) for an individual or law firm that decided they wanted to make a quick buck.
Now that's just low, smearing LLCs. There are a lot of reasons to choose an LLC as opposed to an Inc. LLCs tend to be smaller, but that doesn't mean they are dishonest. I own an LLC, and we aren't a load of bastards.
All of these mechanisms are obvious, because they would be generated in a short brainstorming session with a small random selection of video engineers (i.e. people with ordinary skill in the relevant art)...
I read that to save money the Patent Office has stopped consulting with experts. Instead, they have taken a pool of homeless people and cross-trained them in a little bit of every field. To keep them working, all it takes are some smokes and cheap wine.
The math is pretty simple, but I keep seeing EQ/Sony/Verant apologists on the message boards claiming that the company is making almost no money on the game, that the servers cost soooo much to run, that there's soooo much staff, and poor Sony and we should all be happy they don't raise prices.
What are they smoking? $44M off subscriptions. Yeah, poor Verant all right! Sheesh.
Glad I kicked, anyway. More time for... uh... oher games, I guess...
In my experience at least, more memory hasn't helped the problem. I think I have 40MB assigned to IE5 right now.
I will check out the leak issue too.
No, no suggestion. Just an observation. IE is really all I have used on the mac. I have tried OmniWeb in OSX, but I haven't messed with it much so I have no opinion of it yet.
I have often wondered what they were smoking in Cupertino when they cooked up Aqua. Whatever it is, there should be a War on Drugs against it.
OSX has some amazingly cool technical underpinnings. I love having a bash prompt on my Mac, and protected memory and all that jive. But Apple has abandoned more than a decade of UI work in favor of that old NeXT crapola.
Aqua is a poor replacement for MacOS 9.2. Gimme 9.2 with the OSX underpinnings and I'd be in hog heaven. I do not know a single Mac junkie that has really embraced Aqua. We all merely tolerate it. At best.
(NeXT purists will disagree with my diatribe. I guess it's all what you are used to. But imagine if Ford suddently replaced steering wheels with a wacky slider for steering the car, and moved the transmission controls to the dash board. Better? Who cares? It's TOO DAMN DIFFERENT.)
In a decade, OS X's GUI will probably rock. And that's when I'll give up my OS9.
Mac MSIE5 does indeed rock, but I have noticed that it chokes, and badly, on big HTML pages. For example, a big
This is on a well-tuned Pismo (400MHz G3, 320MB RAM), and I have done a lot of experimentation with memory settings and other stuff. But it's totally repeatable. Drives me nuts.
OK, so which OS is the "real house?" MacOS? Windows? Solaris? Which OS is licensed under terms providing you with someone to sue when there's a security flaw?
I don't think such a beast exists.