With open media like/., you're dealing with people. This ranges from those who always get (5; Insightful) to those who get (-1; Troll) and everywhere in between. With any matters on law, the comments do more to obfuscate than enlighten. (/. should put sound in the background to chant "IANAL" over and over. It would save posters the trouble.) All news on/. is secondary, often taken from the NY Times or Wired.
Closed media has the reporters and the funding to give us news about the Foreign Enemy of the Week, but it loses a lot of the flavor of open media: there aren't any "real" people involved. The price of this is that the news is denser, and usually believable because of journalistic review. Also, you don't miss the news if you're working late. Their major problem is that when they put up a "partners" subdomain for their partners to get stories without an inconvenient login, thousands of karma whores start their Karma Generator auto-posting the link on an open media site. (Sorry, little sarcastic there.)
So what will happen is that closed media will have a certain audience, and so will open media. "Both" is also a viable option for many, especially when taking into account that/. is for geeks and doesn't carry any local news.
When we installed Linux (Red Hat 5.2 deluxe) for class in college, we clicked "Everything" for services to start at boot-time, and the boot-time wasn't noticeably longer than Win95 (although it wasn't booting to X.)
So if you turn off most everything (sendmail, named, finger, etc.), it should boot pretty quickly, and be a lot more secure.
you can get a good standard desktop pc for 400 dollars
Yeah, but how far can you go on a 200 MHz Pentium? Back in The Day(tm), you could grab a low-end Amiga for $600, plug it into your TV, and kick $2000 PC butt.
but in fairness, I'd call Win95 much more stable than the Amiga OS...hey, the truth hurts sometimes...
What!? The only problem I ever had with the Amiga 500 (that I didn't create myself via Assempro) was with a faulty autoboot ROM in the hard disk controller. Windoze, OTOH, crashes only once... on a good day.
Is there anything more to Amiga than a brand name and a bunch of fanatical, loudmouthed Amigans who promote which ever company waves the flag.
Uh, yes, me... I just sit here quietly wishing for depth gadgets on my windows, a powerful scripting language, and an operating system less than 288 MB (that's the Windows folder and all its subdirectories).
There seems to be a common thread running through censorware: it doesn't work.
Look at the recent/. story on image filtering. Now this. There have probably been plenty in the past, too.
If any of these companies had been watching the fall of others, they would know they need to add the following things to their algorithms:
Better heuristcs, perhaps including context. The average 5-year-old isn't going to think of censored material when you say "beaver", so the word on a page or in a domain shouldn't be auto-censored. Since "wood" is likely to be part of a legit description, beaver+wood shouldn't be auto-censored either. But if the page also contains lots of (he || she || his || her || him || other censorwords), then it's safe to stop. This system does necessitate the censorware sitting between the network and the browser, but it's far more accurate. Since some caching software sits there already, this isn't impossible.
Phrase recognition. "You must be 18 years old to enter this site" for example. Might already be there.
Force access of "/" before subdirectories. As a consequence of the above; then you can make sure the 18-to-enter message isn't bypassed. A minor inconvenience to get into a geocities site, but worthwhile.
You cannot censor a URL. They're too inaccurate (cinderella.com).
Attention A. Coward: You said in this comment: This was just to see what happened if I posted a comment saying that everything in the article was wrong. Since the article references a Swedish court decision available only in Swedish, I might get away with it, at least until someone who can actually read Swedish comes along.
Stuff like that should definitely be trimmed down. If stuff is slim enough, it can be displayed facing outward, like PSX games, with its little leaflet behind it. Then you wouldn't have to knock your head over to read the boxes. Some things, though, like Mandrake 7.0, have lots of stuff and can keep the big box.
If someone puts it online, someone else will try to crack it. Since the information they're dealing with is private and must be Web-accessible, the possibility of cracking is that much more attractive.
On the optimistic side, could the government finally realize that strong crypto is necessary? I'm not entrusting my SSN to a 40-bit connection!
There also needs to be a distinction between public information and art.
This is a category error.
No, it's a worldview error. I'm looking at the current world, and you're looking at one without IP.
These organizations are only problematic insofar as they are symptoms of something larger that needs to be addressed.
Let's address it One Microsoft Way.
Er, the problem is that too few are in control of the source, because that is the end result of capitalism. But I haven't found a solution.
Finally, some more food for thought: What if it was your music? Or your Web graphics? Is my freedom your slavery?
What I was ultimately trying to get at here (aside from the 1984 paraphrasing, which was purely emotional) was this: if someone enjoys IP enough, they'll want to make a donation. If my Web graphics are copied without credit, there is no way for anyone to get that donation to me. Napster is copying with credit, but it establishes a dangerous precedent. Web graphics are harder to match to the artist than, say, "The Unforgiven II". And who knows how to donate to "The Sapphire Cat" (of which there are many) if they happen to like the Heartstone image?
Musicians want paid for their music, since it is their life (think Metallica, not Pixies.) Simple love of the music won't put food on their plates, nor will the blood, sweat, and tears behind the songs. I believe that they should be paid, and that's that. I guess I'm finished with the rational arguments.
I think you must be the 200th person who has answered an argument about the legality of x with the answer that x is illegal.
If x is illegal, then it's illegal. Whether it's ethical is another matter. I happen to believe it's immoral, but my beliefs and the law have no common roots.
I think it's very important to distinguish between personal information and public information.
Definitely. There also needs to be a distinction between public information and art.
I think that corporate secrets are fair game because the information concerned is not of a personal nature.
Legally, corporations are people. But the spirit of the law is extremely abused. They should NOT be able to hold patents, because artificial people can't think... you may have noticed:)
You would answer that no, I don't have the right to protest if by doing so I harm the creator of the music.
That would be logical. If we are trying to destroy the RIAA, we should boycott CDs and attend concerts, which would benefit the artist and not their overlords.
Finally, some more food for thought: What if it was your music? Or your Web graphics? Is my freedom your slavery?
The W3C and the WWW were not created to share music, the vast majority of which is copyrighted. While Napster may not know what it's doing the humans who created it and maintain it do.
I'm beginning to get tired of Napster. Some of the universities are shutting it down not only because of the piracy liability, but because of the bandwidth that N MP3's can consume. At one place, as reported in Network Magazine, Napster traffic saturated a 34 Mbps connection.
And then there are free speech advocates. "Information wants to be free," they chant, over and over, conveniently ignoring the fact that freeing information can be stealing. If I want to share my information, I should be allowed to do that, and it should be my choice. Isn't that the idea behind online privacy complaints? If I choose tomerely share, and someone flings it far and wide, without returning anything to me, that is wrong.
And before anyone tries it, I don't care about "But I use it to preview music for my next CD purchase" arguments... all evidence I've seen is biased and anecdotal. What someone says and what they do are often two different worlds. If someone could give me real numbers from a survey of Napster users, I might reconsider. As for me, I can't afford CDs, so the RIAA is right: I would be a pirate. But stealing it in protest isn't ethical; a high-profile mass boycott would have an impact, just as the Montgomery bus boycott.
It all comes down to control. The artist should be in control because it's their copyright. The masses shouldn't be in control, and neither should the RIAA. Linus Torvalds was right when he said, "Go, Metallica. Die, RIAA."
...NetBooting over 100BT is supposed to be pretty fast.
Y'know, I wouldn't be surprised if they were running 10BT at college. The network's been around quite a while... the computers in one lab were networked LCIII's! (They were replaced this year by PC's, and Win95 won't let the data collection software work.)
Word 6 has a bad reputation in the Mac realm...
Yup, Word 6. It runs fine, it just loads slowly. As does Excel 5.x. (Can't remember the exact version.)
I'm not 100% sure what you mean by this...
The server math (which isn't all that accurate, because users don't put equal loads on the server) was based on the X Window concept. I was trying to point out that it would be better to have the apps run on the iMac than the G4 Server. I think everyone knows it's more efficient in disk space terms to put the apps on the server.
Also, get a backup system!
Do you mean backup as in "if the G4 server breaks down" or backup as in "a machine to backup the server's HD every night at 4 AM"?
"Tape drive" was what I had in mind at time of posting. But a redundant server + tape drive would work too:)
Another thing to add to the lab may be a few Zip or Superdisks. I favor Superdisks because they're a logical upgrade to floppies; but you may confuse newbies when their Superdisk doesn't work in a 1.44MB drive, or irritate Zip owners. Oh well, can't please everyone...
You can netboot the iMacs over a 100BT LAN, and each user would have his own space to do stuff in on the server (so you can use whatever Mac you want), as well as shared applications that everyone can have access to.
I'm not sure how fast our LAN at college is, but I know it's based on Cat5 cable. Anyway, we have a bunch of Power Macs in the physics lab, and the applications are hosted on a "phys-apps" server. And they are slow. So slow, it takes almost as long to net-load Word as to boot locally. That's probably Word's fault, since only Word and Excel are like that, but I thought I'd bring it up anyway.
Another thing to consider is the point of execution. At college, everything runs locally, so it's reasonably fast once loaded. If you put N people on a single server, they get 1/N of the computing time.
Oh, and since you have $56,325 left over, you might want to consider G4 instead for the server. I'm not sure it's strictly necessary, but it sounds cool:) Also, get a backup system!
Lots of people think it is immoral to let you have anything for free.
Which is where TANSTAAFL came from. What they miss, however, is who's paying. If I pay, it's free for you.
This brings out a central point of the Internet: it does not need to make money to survive. If businesses can't use it to make money, that's too bad. In the real world, a large percentage of businesses fail; why should the Internet be any different? Some will say you get a larger audience, and you do, as long as somebody knows it's there. But you also get larger overhead: more fraud and more shipping costs. The costs of the servers and warehouses (if you get popular enough) make up for not owning a storefront. Finally, there's the problem of rapid changes in demand.
Like free software, the Internet is just an alternative business model. It will never replace real-world business, since e-shopping can't give a good sense of quality of goods. You can do anything with Photoshop and enough money. Also, it's too hard to comparison shop on the Internet; as a programmer, I refuse to trust a bot... even if it wasn't written by MS.
Alright, since someone marked me OT, I'll explain better. From the parent:
RAMBUS has a patent on sending data on both the rising and the falling edge of the clock, which is exactly what DDR-SDRAM is using.
Transferring data on the rising and falling edge of the clock is also what Intel does with its Accelerated Graphics Port (which is more like a bus than a port) in the 2x and 4x flavors. (4x uses 2 channels, and is part of the AGP 2.0 specs.) If the parent post is correct, Rambus should also be charging Intel for the patent license.
But sdram has been produced for years with no lawsuits or harrasment from Rambus.
And GIFs were created in 1987 (hence the 87a version). But Unisys didn't start defending their LZW patent until 1995, when the format was well established.
If an aurora or EMP trashed my computer, I would be rather upset.
Another consideration: can magram be built on the ungodly-number-of-bits-per-inch scale required to beat hard drives? I should think the superparamagnetic effect would apply equally to both magram and disks.
Slashdot Mirror
I see a future for both open and closed media.
With open media like /., you're dealing with people. This ranges from those who always get (5; Insightful) to those who get (-1; Troll) and everywhere in between. With any matters on law, the comments do more to obfuscate than enlighten. (/. should put sound in the background to chant "IANAL" over and over. It would save posters the trouble.) All news on /. is secondary, often taken from the NY Times or Wired.
Closed media has the reporters and the funding to give us news about the Foreign Enemy of the Week, but it loses a lot of the flavor of open media: there aren't any "real" people involved. The price of this is that the news is denser, and usually believable because of journalistic review. Also, you don't miss the news if you're working late. Their major problem is that when they put up a "partners" subdomain for their partners to get stories without an inconvenient login, thousands of karma whores start their Karma Generator auto-posting the link on an open media site. (Sorry, little sarcastic there.)
So what will happen is that closed media will have a certain audience, and so will open media. "Both" is also a viable option for many, especially when taking into account that /. is for geeks and doesn't carry any local news.
-- LoonXTall
When we installed Linux (Red Hat 5.2 deluxe) for class in college, we clicked "Everything" for services to start at boot-time, and the boot-time wasn't noticeably longer than Win95 (although it wasn't booting to X.)
So if you turn off most everything (sendmail, named, finger, etc.), it should boot pretty quickly, and be a lot more secure.
-- LoonXTall
you can get a good standard desktop pc for 400 dollars
Yeah, but how far can you go on a 200 MHz Pentium? Back in The Day(tm), you could grab a low-end Amiga for $600, plug it into your TV, and kick $2000 PC butt.
-- LoonXTall
but in fairness, I'd call Win95 much more stable than the Amiga OS...hey, the truth hurts sometimes...
What!? The only problem I ever had with the Amiga 500 (that I didn't create myself via Assempro) was with a faulty autoboot ROM in the hard disk controller. Windoze, OTOH, crashes only once... on a good day.
-- LoonXTall
Is there anything more to Amiga than a brand name and a bunch of fanatical, loudmouthed Amigans who promote which ever company waves the flag.
Uh, yes, me... I just sit here quietly wishing for depth gadgets on my windows, a powerful scripting language, and an operating system less than 288 MB (that's the Windows folder and all its subdirectories).
-- LoonXTall
There seems to be a common thread running through censorware: it doesn't work.
Look at the recent /. story on image filtering. Now this. There have probably been plenty in the past, too.
If any of these companies had been watching the fall of others, they would know they need to add the following things to their algorithms:
-- LoonXTall
Attention A. Coward: You said in this comment: This was just to see what happened if I posted a comment saying that everything in the article was wrong. Since the article references a Swedish court decision available only in Swedish, I might get away with it, at least until someone who can actually read Swedish comes along.
Give up.
-- LoonXTall
I'd say that, yeah, 128 bit keys still suck.
Be sure to check how long dnet has been working on 64 bits. Granted, it's RC5, but still...
-- LoonXTall
Stuff like that should definitely be trimmed down. If stuff is slim enough, it can be displayed facing outward, like PSX games, with its little leaflet behind it. Then you wouldn't have to knock your head over to read the boxes. Some things, though, like Mandrake 7.0, have lots of stuff and can keep the big box.
-- LoonXTall
If someone puts it online, someone else will try to crack it. Since the information they're dealing with is private and must be Web-accessible, the possibility of cracking is that much more attractive.
On the optimistic side, could the government finally realize that strong crypto is necessary? I'm not entrusting my SSN to a 40-bit connection!
-- LoonXTall
This is a category error.
No, it's a worldview error. I'm looking at the current world, and you're looking at one without IP.
These organizations are only problematic insofar as they are symptoms of something larger that needs to be addressed.
Let's address it One Microsoft Way.
Er, the problem is that too few are in control of the source, because that is the end result of capitalism. But I haven't found a solution.
What I was ultimately trying to get at here (aside from the 1984 paraphrasing, which was purely emotional) was this: if someone enjoys IP enough, they'll want to make a donation. If my Web graphics are copied without credit, there is no way for anyone to get that donation to me. Napster is copying with credit, but it establishes a dangerous precedent. Web graphics are harder to match to the artist than, say, "The Unforgiven II". And who knows how to donate to "The Sapphire Cat" (of which there are many) if they happen to like the Heartstone image?
Musicians want paid for their music, since it is their life (think Metallica, not Pixies.) Simple love of the music won't put food on their plates, nor will the blood, sweat, and tears behind the songs. I believe that they should be paid, and that's that. I guess I'm finished with the rational arguments.
-- LoonXTall
Hotmail is (not) reacting to a technical challenge that could easily be fixed by a management that cared enough
Get some RAID and kill those bugs!
-- LoonXTall
I think you must be the 200th person who has answered an argument about the legality of x with the answer that x is illegal.
If x is illegal, then it's illegal. Whether it's ethical is another matter. I happen to believe it's immoral, but my beliefs and the law have no common roots.
I think it's very important to distinguish between personal information and public information.
Definitely. There also needs to be a distinction between public information and art.
I think that corporate secrets are fair game because the information concerned is not of a personal nature.
Legally, corporations are people. But the spirit of the law is extremely abused. They should NOT be able to hold patents, because artificial people can't think... you may have noticed :)
You would answer that no, I don't have the right to protest if by doing so I harm the creator of the music.
That would be logical. If we are trying to destroy the RIAA, we should boycott CDs and attend concerts, which would benefit the artist and not their overlords.
Finally, some more food for thought: What if it was your music? Or your Web graphics? Is my freedom your slavery?
-- LoonXTall
The W3C and the WWW were not created to share music, the vast majority of which is copyrighted. While Napster may not know what it's doing the humans who created it and maintain it do.
-- LoonXTall
I'm beginning to get tired of Napster. Some of the universities are shutting it down not only because of the piracy liability, but because of the bandwidth that N MP3's can consume. At one place, as reported in Network Magazine, Napster traffic saturated a 34 Mbps connection.
And then there are free speech advocates. "Information wants to be free," they chant, over and over, conveniently ignoring the fact that freeing information can be stealing. If I want to share my information, I should be allowed to do that, and it should be my choice. Isn't that the idea behind online privacy complaints? If I choose tomerely share, and someone flings it far and wide, without returning anything to me, that is wrong.
And before anyone tries it, I don't care about "But I use it to preview music for my next CD purchase" arguments... all evidence I've seen is biased and anecdotal. What someone says and what they do are often two different worlds. If someone could give me real numbers from a survey of Napster users, I might reconsider. As for me, I can't afford CDs, so the RIAA is right: I would be a pirate. But stealing it in protest isn't ethical; a high-profile mass boycott would have an impact, just as the Montgomery bus boycott.
It all comes down to control. The artist should be in control because it's their copyright. The masses shouldn't be in control, and neither should the RIAA. Linus Torvalds was right when he said, "Go, Metallica. Die, RIAA."
-- LoonXTall
I find it easier to slap Esc than move the mouse. Unless you have a stupid Gateway keyboard with F11 in the corner.
-- LoonXTall
NS 4.x: View->Stop Animations will (logically) stop animations on the current page. The closest thing you get to a keyboard shortcut is Alt+V->A.
-- LoonXTall
Y'know, I wouldn't be surprised if they were running 10BT at college. The network's been around quite a while... the computers in one lab were networked LCIII's! (They were replaced this year by PC's, and Win95 won't let the data collection software work.)
Word 6 has a bad reputation in the Mac realm...
Yup, Word 6. It runs fine, it just loads slowly. As does Excel 5.x. (Can't remember the exact version.)
I'm not 100% sure what you mean by this...
The server math (which isn't all that accurate, because users don't put equal loads on the server) was based on the X Window concept. I was trying to point out that it would be better to have the apps run on the iMac than the G4 Server. I think everyone knows it's more efficient in disk space terms to put the apps on the server.
Do you mean backup as in "if the G4 server breaks down" or backup as in "a machine to backup the server's HD every night at 4 AM"?"Tape drive" was what I had in mind at time of posting. But a redundant server + tape drive would work too :)
Another thing to add to the lab may be a few Zip or Superdisks. I favor Superdisks because they're a logical upgrade to floppies; but you may confuse newbies when their Superdisk doesn't work in a 1.44MB drive, or irritate Zip owners. Oh well, can't please everyone...
-- LoonXTall
But if you're stuck using Win9x, permissions don't exist and users are free to trash computers and install all sorts of crap...
I could even set something to run as a service, even though the System Policy Editor (tm) was used to disable registry editing. Here's to Notepad!
-- LoonXTall
You can netboot the iMacs over a 100BT LAN, and each user would have his own space to do stuff in on the server (so you can use whatever Mac you want), as well as shared applications that everyone can have access to.
I'm not sure how fast our LAN at college is, but I know it's based on Cat5 cable. Anyway, we have a bunch of Power Macs in the physics lab, and the applications are hosted on a "phys-apps" server. And they are slow. So slow, it takes almost as long to net-load Word as to boot locally. That's probably Word's fault, since only Word and Excel are like that, but I thought I'd bring it up anyway.
Another thing to consider is the point of execution. At college, everything runs locally, so it's reasonably fast once loaded. If you put N people on a single server, they get 1/N of the computing time.
Oh, and since you have $56,325 left over, you might want to consider G4 instead for the server. I'm not sure it's strictly necessary, but it sounds cool :) Also, get a backup system!
Other than that, it sounds like a good idea.
-- LoonXTall
Lots of people think it is immoral to let you have anything for free.
Which is where TANSTAAFL came from. What they miss, however, is who's paying. If I pay, it's free for you.
This brings out a central point of the Internet: it does not need to make money to survive. If businesses can't use it to make money, that's too bad. In the real world, a large percentage of businesses fail; why should the Internet be any different? Some will say you get a larger audience, and you do, as long as somebody knows it's there. But you also get larger overhead: more fraud and more shipping costs. The costs of the servers and warehouses (if you get popular enough) make up for not owning a storefront. Finally, there's the problem of rapid changes in demand.
Like free software, the Internet is just an alternative business model. It will never replace real-world business, since e-shopping can't give a good sense of quality of goods. You can do anything with Photoshop and enough money. Also, it's too hard to comparison shop on the Internet; as a programmer, I refuse to trust a bot... even if it wasn't written by MS.
-- LoonXTall
Alright, since someone marked me OT, I'll explain better. From the parent:
RAMBUS has a patent on sending data on both the rising and the falling edge of the clock, which is exactly what DDR-SDRAM is using.
Transferring data on the rising and falling edge of the clock is also what Intel does with its Accelerated Graphics Port (which is more like a bus than a port) in the 2x and 4x flavors. (4x uses 2 channels, and is part of the AGP 2.0 specs.) If the parent post is correct, Rambus should also be charging Intel for the patent license.
-- LoonXTall
But sdram has been produced for years with no lawsuits or harrasment from Rambus.
And GIFs were created in 1987 (hence the 87a version). But Unisys didn't start defending their LZW patent until 1995, when the format was well established.
-- LoonXTall
If an aurora or EMP trashed my computer, I would be rather upset.
Another consideration: can magram be built on the ungodly-number-of-bits-per-inch scale required to beat hard drives? I should think the superparamagnetic effect would apply equally to both magram and disks.
-- LoonXTall
Address bus width: 36 bit
Data bus width: 64 bit (times 2 busses: cache and motherboard)
Register sizes:
-- LoonXTall