An extremely detailed map would allow for planning a more in-depth mission. Possibly for mineral/metal prospecting for futuremining missions. For a corporation the moon may be the most valuable untapped resource EVER.
Hey, you're right! With just a few hundred billion dollars of VC money, we could build the biggest volcanic-ash mine in history! Think of all the Lava-brand soap we could make!
Okay, okay... Seriously, whenever anybody talks about terraforming Mars, building moon colonies, or mining asteroids, I think we should step back and apply this simple proof-of-concept test:
Would it be feasable to do this right now at the South Pole?
Keeping people alive in Antarctica is much, much cheaper than out in deep space or on our neighboring planets. Transportation and communication costs are also an order of magnitute lower. Don't even get me started on the costs of replacing equipment, or letting people visit their extended families over Christmas.
Even if a major catastrophe happened (big rock hits us, large-scale nuclear war, "Patch Adams II" is made, etc.), it would still be far easier to restore Earth's biosphere to a state that lets us survive than it would be to build a colony on one of Jupiter's moons.
Nobody is seriously suggesting that we should build permanent hydroponic farms in Antarctica, or housing projects on the ocean floors, or shopping malls in the Saharah desert... so why are so many people convinced that we will have entire cities on the Moon within a generation or two?
Is there an implication here that computers need to be this powerful to be real (or "actual", as you say)? I recently gave up my laptop for a handheld computer...
No implication was intended. Handhelds rock. That said, the usefulness of handheld system to hardcore geeks depends on the ability to write programs for them. Until Palm or WinCE includes a really good on-board C compiler, I think that palmtops will continue to be used in addition to another computer, not as a replacement. They do make successful replacement for Franklin Day Planner notebooks, though.:)
My point was that the NIC is no less a functional computer than any Wintel, Mac, or Unix-based desktop computer. You can browse, run office apps, write code, etc. on these boxes just as you could with any other desktop platform.
Okay, your legal defense should probably rely on several factors here:
1. You are a common carrier of information that does not own, nor does it edit, the content of user posts. (This might be a good time to suggest that you kill the Katz book you were plugging a couple weeks ago.)
2. User posts really amounts to on-line chat, and saved articles contain a log of what was said. This is not really publishing, but is archival.
3. If you accept liability for the Micros~1 comments, you expose yourself to litigation for every naked Natalie Portman post and every mean thing said about RMS (Including my post from last week, where I jokingly called him Richard M. Stalin).
4. Check with your lawyers and make damn sure that the posts in question constitute fair use in the context of criticism of a product. If they do, you have a final line of argument of the others fail.
The most effective thing you can do, as I see it, is send out a press release... not just to folks like Wired and C|Net, but to all the major dead-tree news services. Include the e-mail. Include links to the offending sites. State your case to the press. Include an explanation of the DMCA, and how it is being used by some companies against free speech and fair use.
This might have the dual effect of getting Micros~1 to back off (they really don't want to look like bullies again right now), while calling the attention of the mainstream press to DMCA issues.
Well, they need permission... but unlike your church group, they do not need to pay royalties for most music. In fact, until laws against "payola" were written, it was very common for record labels to pay the station in exchange for playing songs by an artist they wanted to promote.
I did some radio work in college, and indie labels were always pushing us to play their stuff as often as possible.
Radio (and MTV) are critical to reaching a mass audience, and so stations are actually sent free copies of the albums. (When you shop for CD's you will occationally see one that says "Promotional Copy. Not for resale" stamped on it. Chances are good that it came from a DJ that perloined it from the station they work at.)
Church music is different. With the exception of a few "big-name" recording artists like Steve Camp, most church music was written specifically to be sold to churches for worship services. They depend on sheet music sales to put food on the table, and go broke if the youth pastors and choir leaders don't pay up.
Well, I was in a band once, and here's how it works. Everyone gets a tape from the person who owned the album. Then we all learned the song. Are you going to tell me that you didn't ever do this?
This is a really good question that speaks to a certain cognitive disconnect on the part of the band. I really hope that one version or another of this question gets asked.
To avoid "weasel" answers, we should make sure to include this fact with the question:
The sound quality of MP3 compression is good, but not perfect, and certainly no better than a good cassette tape copy. In layman's terms, some of the sound quality is sacrificed in order to make songs easier to send over typical Internet connections.
Shouldn't we be focusing on teaching our kids how to use actual computers?
This is an actual computer. Read the faq at http://www.thinknic.com/faq.html and you will see that what we are talking about here is a fully-functional LINUX box, being sold with no strings attatched, at a price that even a struggling single parent could probably scrounge up. It ships with Ethernet for LAN's & Broadband connections, and a 56K modem for dial-up. It's a Cyrix 266, and the video can run x-windows at 1024x768, so it is a step up from the old P133 that is currently my main LINUX workhorse.
If this catches on, I could see a whole generation of C programmers, LINUX hackers, and network admins coming out of schools that never had CS programs before because they thought they could not afford it. You can insist that it is not a "real" computer if you like, but it is a heck of a lot more computer than the old Vic20 that I learned BASIC on two decades ago.
Without a paid-for monthly recurring expense you will have an essentially useless device.
The web page is very specific about this. The NIC cost $199, and you can get your net connection from anywhere you want... if you are dirt poor, you can even use one of those ad-driven "free" ISP's like NetZero.
The alternative is to hack these to run linux
They ship with LINUX on a pre-installed, bootable CD. The corporate world is too pig-headed to use linux/Macintosh where appropriate
Most corporations have Macs in their marketing and publishing divisions, and LINUX is gaining ground fast on NT when it comes to servers.
The bottom line here is that this is a $200 LINUX box. Network speed and reliability has reached the point that local storage is really not as important as it once was. Most "Office" type apps run just fine over a LAN or broadband WAN.
One thing that has escaped some people's notice is the USB port... Granted, it is not as fast as SCSI or "Firewire", but it is still an easy way to connect an external HD, CDRW, Zip, DLT, etc., if you really insist on local storage.
The knocks against this being a "real" computer are not valid. Other than the fact that you can't write to the boot drive (although you can replace it by changing CD's), it should be capable of just about everything you would really want to do with a 266MHz LINUX box.
For schools and home LAN's, this will be very cool. I would not mind having one or two for other rooms of my house.
"Your server admin informs you that he has no intention of giving every Tom Dick and Harry in the company shell access to the server..."
Were I a VP, I would fire that admin and hire one that understands how to set permissions.
UNIX was designed from the ground up to me a multiple-user OS. "Shell access" does not mean they get to log in as root. Anybody who does not understand this should get their MCSE and do tier-2 user support or something.
Windows NT is the 'Ground-up Rewrite Modern OS' version of Windows. It also shipped in 1993.
I'm pretty sure what the previous poster meant to say was that NT4 was a small and incremental step up from NT3.5 - which is very true.
I used 3.5 back in the day, and as much as I hated the klunky Windows interface, I had to admit that it was a rock-solid 32-bit platform. The NT4 client had a few improvements... most notable to the luser was that it looked like Win95 instead of Win3.x.
The older versions of Windows were a step up from DOS in some ways, but it was not until the release of Win95 that MS had a GUI that could even hold a candle to MacOS 7.0. Remember what a pain networking was on the old Win3.x boxes?
The old Mac vs. Windows debate is pretty much over as far as I'm concerned. I use NT when I need to at work (not for much longer... I'm shifting careers to UNIX Admin), LINUX for almost everything else, a G3 in my music studio, and a Win95 box for games. Once LINUX catches up in the game market, and OS X comes out for the Mac, then everything I do will be *NIX-based.
It all comes down to using the right tool for the job... and LINUX is slowly becoming the right tool for every job.:)
Cracker = someone who removes copy protection from games..
Hacker = someone who enters other peoples computers via a modem (not necessarily damaging the system, but doing it in an un-authorised manner...)
only occasionally is a hacker someone who `really likes coding`...
I'm actually from the US, and it was more or less the same for me back in the 80's. "Cracker" always meant somebody who disabled copy protection code. Even on the old Apple II's, bootleg games would proudly display "cracked by..." with the cracker's handle on the title screen.
"Hacker" typically meant a code guru who could program for the "big iron" mainframes, *NIX servers, etc. who got their knowledge through (ahem) informal means. That oftem meant "trashing" (raiding dumpters for manuals & stuff), "preaking" (exploiting stolen phone time so you were harder to trace), and "hacking" around in systems that did not belong to you.
Hackers are responsible for a lot of the success of the computer revolution of today. For example, a Jobs & Woz once perloined a 3-ring binder from Bell that got them started as phone phreaks. They went on to do quite well.
If you go back far enough, the term "hack" was once generally applied as a negative term pointing out sloppy work. This could well be the origin on the programming cuture's use of the word; appropriated for situations when one would hack a quick-fix to an application with a few lines of code. Like "geek", a derisive term was adopted and turned into a cheerful self-reference. Personally, I think both uses are fine.
I'm sure that people will continue to call people like Bernie S. and Kevin Mitnick "hackers", as painful as that may be for some/. regulars to swallow.
They are making money off of distributing these things. That is what is illegal.
IDKIYAAL (I Don't Know If You Are A Lawyer), but does that mean if we put together an ad-free "free beer" version of my.mp3.com (and relied on memberships or donations to pay the hardware and line costs), that this ruling would not apply to us?
It seems to me like it would be a great idea to have this judge interviewed on/.
From the comments, it is obvious that the press reports explained his ruling to the satisfaction of nobody. Judge Rakoff's responses to our questions might even shed some light on whether there is room for an appeal... or perhaps what could be done differently in order to set up something like my.mp3.com that is less open to litigation.
Well, like most people who shoot off their mouth here, IANAL... but I was under the impression that common law applied this same principal to all IP. If you let people rip off your idea long enough, you no longer can really claim exclusive rights to it. Perhaps I am mistaken.
Any lawyers out there want to chirp in with a clarification of this issue?
I'm not going to launch a personal attack, but I had a few specific problems with this article, which are as follows:
1. The C.S. Lewis quote refers to state socialism, not corporate power. Corporations are not interested in "leveling" people the way socialists are. In fact, corporations are more likely to encourage unequal human excellence, rather than discredit and eliminate it... Michael Jordan sells a lot more Nike's than would a typical city-league ballplayer.
2. I see no evidence that criticism is "thriving on the Net, but declining elsewhere". Quite the opposite, in fact. We have become a nation of people that bitch and moan perpetually about milk cows getting hormone injections, SUV's blocking our sight-lines on the highway, meetings in Seattle about international trade agreements, and so on, and so on.
3. Your entire premise of corporations vs. individualism is flawed. Corporations do not care whether you are an individual or a drone. They only care about how much product you are willing to buy from them. Individualists are just as likely as anybody else to buy cars, computers, and Pez.
4. Far from holding individuals "under the gun and on the run", any given corporation survives only if it convinces enough consumers that their product or service is worth paying for.
5. The majority of Americans hold at least a little stock (a 401k, if nothing else), which means we own them, not the other way around.
6. Governments are far more dangerous to freedom than any company could ever hope to be. AT&T did not gun down a black man in New York when he pulled out his wallet. Cisco did not murder the wife of a separatist looney at Ruby Ridge. Ford Motors did not assault the residence of a minor religious cult in Waco, Texas. Microsoft did not beat the living crap out of Rodney King. Phillip Morris did not lock up Kevin Mitnick for nearly five years without a trial. ADM did not send in shock troops to deal with a family custody dispute... The bottom line is that you have a lot more reason to fear Janet Reno than Steve Jobs.
Unfortunately, for the motor-skills-impaired, voice recognition is usually not an option.
A drinking buddy of my dad's had a stroke a few years ago that left him with the use of almost nothing but his mind (and a loyal family, thank God). He can move is neck and torso a little bit, and manage a soft growl... that's about it.
His only means of communication is his computer. It uses a laser pointer which he wears on his forehead (it was pretty uncomfortable at first, but some local kids built a mount for his glasses frames that helped out a lot).
"Typing" is done using a predictive selection program. Hold the cursor on "A", and you get a list of the 20 words that you used most often starting with A. Choose the word, or select the second letter to narrow it down a little more until you either spell it out or get the word you want from the list. Once you choose a word, you get a list of word clusters, and so on. (People who watched the "Brief History of Time" documentary saw how Stephen Hawking uses a program a lot like this.)
Using this program on a 486 runing Windows 3.x, he was able interact with people and write professionally, but the technology is far from perfect... He recently upgraded to a spiffy new PC, only to find that the cursor moved too fast for him to control. The system had no mouse, only the laser pointer, so people had a tough time working out how to adjust it for him. (My dad called me for help, and I walked him through the Win95 GUI using only keyboard shortcuts and arrow keys... not fun.)
A free beer solution would totally rock, because people who sell this kind of stuff charge massive ammounts of money for their products, and not being able to walk & speak can make it tough to land a high-paying job.
I don't want to be redundant with the details of how Metallica is not really targetting kids, as you claim. Others have already stated that better than I can. Instead I would like to push you to clarify your objection to Metallica's lawsuit.
Are you trying to say that making ripped MP3's available for anonymous download on this Internet is not a violation of copyright? Or are you saying that it should not be a violation of copyright?
If you are saying it is not a violation, you are wrong. Radio station can let you hear songs for free because they were given permission by the copyright holders. Smart bands and labels are starting to grant the same permission to MP3 broadcasters and even to Napster users in some cases. The fact is that Metallica is not one of those smart bands, and since they own the copyrights they have the exclusive rights to be dicks about this.
If you are saying that MP3 distribution should not be copyright violation, and that the law should be changed, I am willing to accept that, but it does not justify getting all pissy about what Metallica is doing.
The sad reality about copyright law is that if you do not defend your IP against violators, it slips into the public domain, and you lose all rights. This is why Coke, Kleenex, and Band-Aid worked so hard to prevent their trademark names from becoming generic terms. Metallica's lawers know very well that if they take no action against the unauthorized duplication of MP3's now, they will have no ability to stop it when their music shows up on an unauthorized "Napster's Greatest Hits" CD a few years down the road.
If I were Metallica's business manager, my advice would be to extend their copyrights to permit free trading of ripped MP3's to anybody who wants them. It would serve the dual purpose of protecting their IP at minimal expense, and it would also promote their music at a time when they are building a new fan base to replace all the metal-heads that think their new stuff is crap. That might be my advise, but it is not what they are doing... and there are no laws against being stubborn and unwise.
It is also worth mentioning that Metallica is not the only "corporate" interest in this fight. Napster is not distributing all this "free" music out of the goodness of their hearts. They are doing it to create traffic so they can sell ads. There is nothing wrong with this business model, except that they are not paying for, nor authorized to use, the content that captures the eyeballs.
It all comes down to the issue of copyright and authorization. Let me try to crystalize my point with an example:
If I ran a commercial radio station, and taped Garrison Keilor's "Prairie Home Companion" from an MPR broadcast (Minnesota Public Radio, who produced the show), then turned around and re-broadcast the tapes on my station (with my own station's commercials in place of the spoof ads for "Powdermilk Buscuits" and "Ah-hoo-ah Hot Sauce"), you'd better believe that MPR would sue my ass off.
It seems to me that what we really need is for all of the major software vendors (sans M$) to assemble at Camp David or somewhere with the aid of IEEE and hash out an agreed-upon document standard.
Start by trademarking a catchy name for it, like "eWord". Choose a single set of rules for formatting documents. Each software vendor can create their own fancy tools and macros for creating this content, but only those that can be read on all competing systems will be allowed to call their product "eWord Compliant".
Agree to meet every six months to update the standard. All updates to the standard should include a beta period so everybody can write patches for their prior software versions. Companies that do not keep their older versions compliant for at least three years lose the right to brand their current products as "eWord Compliant".
Promote the hell out of the standard, like the way Intel ads used to be appended at the end of all PC commercials. For example, Corel's WP ads would include the blurb, "...of course Word Perfect is 100% eWord Compatable. Don't buy any text editor that is not eWord Compatable, or your customers might not be able to read your documents!" Star Office ads would say, "...not only does StarOffice read Microsoft formats, but it is also eWord Compatable, assuring your of seamless interoperability with your business partners." For one, people could spread FUD against M$ instead of for it: "Yea, Word2004 is pretty neat, but it's not eWord compliant, so I can't really reccomend it if you expect to interact with other companies."
Heavy marketing, along with GPL'd translators between the new standard and M$ formats, would quickly change people's perceptions.
Perhaps the same should be done for spreadsheets, day planners, etc.
If I had the power and influence to get something like this of the ground, then that's pretty much how I would handle it.
When Arthur was stranded in prehistoric Earth, he boldy declared "I think I shall go insane", and Ford popped up right away and told him it was a good idea... or so we are lead to believe.
In fact, Ford never showed up at all, and everything that happened from that point on (learning to fly, returning home to find the Earth OK, getting laid while listening to Dire Straits, etc.) was just the fantasy of a broken mind. The events of the next three and a half books never happened.
While every project you have ever put your hands to has been very entertaining, geeks everywhere will always venerate the way the Guide series skewered everything from Isaac Asimov to arguments about splitting the tab at lunch.
However, it looks like you decided that you've had your fill of Arthur Dent (as evidenced by the fact that you made sure he was dead, dead, dead at the end of Mostly Harmless).
Given that you are the most successful sci-fi humor writer ever, and probably do not need to work another day in your life if you don't want to, what is currently lighting your fire? What I mean is, what kind of stories do you hope to create over the next few years? More Holistic Detective stories? Another sci-fi epic? Perhaps something completely different?
For years, ZD has observed that the only way they can get large groups of people to be active on their site is to post flame-bait. Every two months or so, Jesse Berst or one of the other trolls will post a "story" about how the Apple iBook looks "girlie" or that the Macintosh is doomed to disappear. Within hours, hundreds of Mac zealots swoop in to speak up for their beloved platform.
Lately, the Macintosh community has woken up to this tactic, posting stories at places like LowEndMac warning about ZD's trolling. The next step was obvious: Find another loyal, tight-knit community on the net and flame them. Open source is a ripe target. In a couple months, I'm sure it will be a story about Red Hat being "beleagured", complete with FUD about all LINUX distro's in general.
I don't know if i'd call free "earth shattering".. it's only free if you have the time and bandwidth to download it,
This months issue of Maximum LINUX enclosed a 2 CD set of LINUX & Mandrake. The magazine was about five bucks, making the CD's a give-away. We are not likely to see PCWeek enclose a copy of DOS2000 anytime soon, are we?
.. and open source isn't really earth shattering either, since the only difference it makes to Average Joe User is that it's harder to get some programs running since he (Joe) has to figure out how to compile it first.
The advantage to Joe User is that the code has been subjected to peer review. I have not read a single line of code (yet) from BASH, KDE, StarOffice, or even the LINUX kernel, but I have the comfort of knowing that hundreds of geeks have. Bugs get found and squished very promptly once you get enough monkeys in front of typewriters. With Windows, Joe must place his faith in the QA team and Beta testers... and wait for the next Service Pack.
Those who object to the term "theft" are correct. Copyright violation is unauthorized copying; theft is taking somebody's stuff away.
On the other hand, Mr. Katz's colorful language is at least as inaccurate, if not more so.
It's not "FREE" music that you are talking about, Jon. It is UNPAID music. Free means it was given away willingly (like GNU and free beer). If that was the case, there would be no lawsuits, would there?
There is no "REVOLUTION" going on here. Most of the kids copying MP3's don't know or care about where the music comes from. They just want their Dr. Dre songs, and hey look - I can get them for free on Napster! Neat!
This is not a recent development or change of any sort, other than one of medium. When I was a student, we traded tapes of each other's records, and later burned copies of each other's CD's. Now kids swap MP3's. Same thing, different method.
Jon, I know that your brand of "journalism" depends on always being on the edge of some startling new paradigm (usually catalized by the Internet, which I'm sure was a hot new story when you started writing professionally), but you need to take a breath once in a while and recognize it when what you are seeing is really just the same old crap.
Slashdot Mirror
We sent some guys up there in 1969, and discovered that it is just a big, lifeless, rocky wasteland with no Amazon Women anywhere to be found.
Hey, you're right! With just a few hundred billion dollars of VC money, we could build the biggest volcanic-ash mine in history! Think of all the Lava-brand soap we could make!
Okay, okay... Seriously, whenever anybody talks about terraforming Mars, building moon colonies, or mining asteroids, I think we should step back and apply this simple proof-of-concept test:
Would it be feasable to do this right now at the South Pole?
Keeping people alive in Antarctica is much, much cheaper than out in deep space or on our neighboring planets. Transportation and communication costs are also an order of magnitute lower. Don't even get me started on the costs of replacing equipment, or letting people visit their extended families over Christmas.
Even if a major catastrophe happened (big rock hits us, large-scale nuclear war, "Patch Adams II" is made, etc.), it would still be far easier to restore Earth's biosphere to a state that lets us survive than it would be to build a colony on one of Jupiter's moons.
Nobody is seriously suggesting that we should build permanent hydroponic farms in Antarctica, or housing projects on the ocean floors, or shopping malls in the Saharah desert... so why are so many people convinced that we will have entire cities on the Moon within a generation or two?
No implication was intended. Handhelds rock. That said, the usefulness of handheld system to hardcore geeks depends on the ability to write programs for them. Until Palm or WinCE includes a really good on-board C compiler, I think that palmtops will continue to be used in addition to another computer, not as a replacement. They do make successful replacement for Franklin Day Planner notebooks, though. :)
My point was that the NIC is no less a functional computer than any Wintel, Mac, or Unix-based desktop computer. You can browse, run office apps, write code, etc. on these boxes just as you could with any other desktop platform.
1. You are a common carrier of information that does not own, nor does it edit, the content of user posts. (This might be a good time to suggest that you kill the Katz book you were plugging a couple weeks ago.)
2. User posts really amounts to on-line chat, and saved articles contain a log of what was said. This is not really publishing, but is archival.
3. If you accept liability for the Micros~1 comments, you expose yourself to litigation for every naked Natalie Portman post and every mean thing said about RMS (Including my post from last week, where I jokingly called him Richard M. Stalin).
4. Check with your lawyers and make damn sure that the posts in question constitute fair use in the context of criticism of a product. If they do, you have a final line of argument of the others fail.
The most effective thing you can do, as I see it, is send out a press release... not just to folks like Wired and C|Net, but to all the major dead-tree news services. Include the e-mail. Include links to the offending sites. State your case to the press. Include an explanation of the DMCA, and how it is being used by some companies against free speech and fair use.
This might have the dual effect of getting Micros~1 to back off (they really don't want to look like bullies again right now), while calling the attention of the mainstream press to DMCA issues.
I did some radio work in college, and indie labels were always pushing us to play their stuff as often as possible.
Radio (and MTV) are critical to reaching a mass audience, and so stations are actually sent free copies of the albums. (When you shop for CD's you will occationally see one that says "Promotional Copy. Not for resale" stamped on it. Chances are good that it came from a DJ that perloined it from the station they work at.)
Church music is different. With the exception of a few "big-name" recording artists like Steve Camp, most church music was written specifically to be sold to churches for worship services. They depend on sheet music sales to put food on the table, and go broke if the youth pastors and choir leaders don't pay up.
This is a really good question that speaks to a certain cognitive disconnect on the part of the band. I really hope that one version or another of this question gets asked.
To avoid "weasel" answers, we should make sure to include this fact with the question:
The sound quality of MP3 compression is good, but not perfect, and certainly no better than a good cassette tape copy. In layman's terms, some of the sound quality is sacrificed in order to make songs easier to send over typical Internet connections.
There's this neat invention you could know about. It's called a file server. Look into it.
Probably, yeah.
Shouldn't we be focusing on teaching our kids how to use actual computers?
This is an actual computer. Read the faq at http://www.thinknic.com/faq.html and you will see that what we are talking about here is a fully-functional LINUX box, being sold with no strings attatched, at a price that even a struggling single parent could probably scrounge up. It ships with Ethernet for LAN's & Broadband connections, and a 56K modem for dial-up. It's a Cyrix 266, and the video can run x-windows at 1024x768, so it is a step up from the old P133 that is currently my main LINUX workhorse.
If this catches on, I could see a whole generation of C programmers, LINUX hackers, and network admins coming out of schools that never had CS programs before because they thought they could not afford it. You can insist that it is not a "real" computer if you like, but it is a heck of a lot more computer than the old Vic20 that I learned BASIC on two decades ago.
Without a paid-for monthly recurring expense you will have an essentially useless device.
The web page is very specific about this. The NIC cost $199, and you can get your net connection from anywhere you want... if you are dirt poor, you can even use one of those ad-driven "free" ISP's like NetZero.
The alternative is to hack these to run linux
They ship with LINUX on a pre-installed, bootable CD. The corporate world is too pig-headed to use linux/Macintosh where appropriate
Most corporations have Macs in their marketing and publishing divisions, and LINUX is gaining ground fast on NT when it comes to servers.
The bottom line here is that this is a $200 LINUX box. Network speed and reliability has reached the point that local storage is really not as important as it once was. Most "Office" type apps run just fine over a LAN or broadband WAN.
One thing that has escaped some people's notice is the USB port... Granted, it is not as fast as SCSI or "Firewire", but it is still an easy way to connect an external HD, CDRW, Zip, DLT, etc., if you really insist on local storage.
The knocks against this being a "real" computer are not valid. Other than the fact that you can't write to the boot drive (although you can replace it by changing CD's), it should be capable of just about everything you would really want to do with a 266MHz LINUX box.
For schools and home LAN's, this will be very cool. I would not mind having one or two for other rooms of my house.
Were I a VP, I would fire that admin and hire one that understands how to set permissions.
UNIX was designed from the ground up to me a multiple-user OS. "Shell access" does not mean they get to log in as root. Anybody who does not understand this should get their MCSE and do tier-2 user support or something.
I'm pretty sure what the previous poster meant to say was that NT4 was a small and incremental step up from NT3.5 - which is very true.
I used 3.5 back in the day, and as much as I hated the klunky Windows interface, I had to admit that it was a rock-solid 32-bit platform. The NT4 client had a few improvements... most notable to the luser was that it looked like Win95 instead of Win3.x.
The older versions of Windows were a step up from DOS in some ways, but it was not until the release of Win95 that MS had a GUI that could even hold a candle to MacOS 7.0. Remember what a pain networking was on the old Win3.x boxes?
The old Mac vs. Windows debate is pretty much over as far as I'm concerned. I use NT when I need to at work (not for much longer... I'm shifting careers to UNIX Admin), LINUX for almost everything else, a G3 in my music studio, and a Win95 box for games. Once LINUX catches up in the game market, and OS X comes out for the Mac, then everything I do will be *NIX-based.
It all comes down to using the right tool for the job... and LINUX is slowly becoming the right tool for every job. :)
Hacker = someone who enters other peoples computers via a modem (not necessarily damaging the system, but doing it in an un-authorised manner...)
only occasionally is a hacker someone who `really likes coding`...
I'm actually from the US, and it was more or less the same for me back in the 80's. "Cracker" always meant somebody who disabled copy protection code. Even on the old Apple II's, bootleg games would proudly display "cracked by..." with the cracker's handle on the title screen.
"Hacker" typically meant a code guru who could program for the "big iron" mainframes, *NIX servers, etc. who got their knowledge through (ahem) informal means. That oftem meant "trashing" (raiding dumpters for manuals & stuff), "preaking" (exploiting stolen phone time so you were harder to trace), and "hacking" around in systems that did not belong to you.
Hackers are responsible for a lot of the success of the computer revolution of today. For example, a Jobs & Woz once perloined a 3-ring binder from Bell that got them started as phone phreaks. They went on to do quite well.
If you go back far enough, the term "hack" was once generally applied as a negative term pointing out sloppy work. This could well be the origin on the programming cuture's use of the word; appropriated for situations when one would hack a quick-fix to an application with a few lines of code. Like "geek", a derisive term was adopted and turned into a cheerful self-reference. Personally, I think both uses are fine.
I'm sure that people will continue to call people like Bernie S. and Kevin Mitnick "hackers", as painful as that may be for some /. regulars to swallow.
IDKIYAAL (I Don't Know If You Are A Lawyer), but does that mean if we put together an ad-free "free beer" version of my.mp3.com (and relied on memberships or donations to pay the hardware and line costs), that this ruling would not apply to us?
From the comments, it is obvious that the press reports explained his ruling to the satisfaction of nobody. Judge Rakoff's responses to our questions might even shed some light on whether there is room for an appeal... or perhaps what could be done differently in order to set up something like my.mp3.com that is less open to litigation.
Any lawyers out there want to chirp in with a clarification of this issue?
1. The C.S. Lewis quote refers to state socialism, not corporate power. Corporations are not interested in "leveling" people the way socialists are. In fact, corporations are more likely to encourage unequal human excellence, rather than discredit and eliminate it... Michael Jordan sells a lot more Nike's than would a typical city-league ballplayer.
2. I see no evidence that criticism is "thriving on the Net, but declining elsewhere". Quite the opposite, in fact. We have become a nation of people that bitch and moan perpetually about milk cows getting hormone injections, SUV's blocking our sight-lines on the highway, meetings in Seattle about international trade agreements, and so on, and so on.
3. Your entire premise of corporations vs. individualism is flawed. Corporations do not care whether you are an individual or a drone. They only care about how much product you are willing to buy from them. Individualists are just as likely as anybody else to buy cars, computers, and Pez.
4. Far from holding individuals "under the gun and on the run", any given corporation survives only if it convinces enough consumers that their product or service is worth paying for.
5. The majority of Americans hold at least a little stock (a 401k, if nothing else), which means we own them, not the other way around.
6. Governments are far more dangerous to freedom than any company could ever hope to be. AT&T did not gun down a black man in New York when he pulled out his wallet. Cisco did not murder the wife of a separatist looney at Ruby Ridge. Ford Motors did not assault the residence of a minor religious cult in Waco, Texas. Microsoft did not beat the living crap out of Rodney King. Phillip Morris did not lock up Kevin Mitnick for nearly five years without a trial. ADM did not send in shock troops to deal with a family custody dispute... The bottom line is that you have a lot more reason to fear Janet Reno than Steve Jobs.
A drinking buddy of my dad's had a stroke a few years ago that left him with the use of almost nothing but his mind (and a loyal family, thank God). He can move is neck and torso a little bit, and manage a soft growl... that's about it.
His only means of communication is his computer. It uses a laser pointer which he wears on his forehead (it was pretty uncomfortable at first, but some local kids built a mount for his glasses frames that helped out a lot).
"Typing" is done using a predictive selection program. Hold the cursor on "A", and you get a list of the 20 words that you used most often starting with A. Choose the word, or select the second letter to narrow it down a little more until you either spell it out or get the word you want from the list. Once you choose a word, you get a list of word clusters, and so on. (People who watched the "Brief History of Time" documentary saw how Stephen Hawking uses a program a lot like this.)
Using this program on a 486 runing Windows 3.x, he was able interact with people and write professionally, but the technology is far from perfect... He recently upgraded to a spiffy new PC, only to find that the cursor moved too fast for him to control. The system had no mouse, only the laser pointer, so people had a tough time working out how to adjust it for him. (My dad called me for help, and I walked him through the Win95 GUI using only keyboard shortcuts and arrow keys... not fun.)
A free beer solution would totally rock, because people who sell this kind of stuff charge massive ammounts of money for their products, and not being able to walk & speak can make it tough to land a high-paying job.
Are you trying to say that making ripped MP3's available for anonymous download on this Internet is not a violation of copyright? Or are you saying that it should not be a violation of copyright?
If you are saying it is not a violation, you are wrong. Radio station can let you hear songs for free because they were given permission by the copyright holders. Smart bands and labels are starting to grant the same permission to MP3 broadcasters and even to Napster users in some cases. The fact is that Metallica is not one of those smart bands, and since they own the copyrights they have the exclusive rights to be dicks about this.
If you are saying that MP3 distribution should not be copyright violation, and that the law should be changed, I am willing to accept that, but it does not justify getting all pissy about what Metallica is doing.
The sad reality about copyright law is that if you do not defend your IP against violators, it slips into the public domain, and you lose all rights. This is why Coke, Kleenex, and Band-Aid worked so hard to prevent their trademark names from becoming generic terms. Metallica's lawers know very well that if they take no action against the unauthorized duplication of MP3's now, they will have no ability to stop it when their music shows up on an unauthorized "Napster's Greatest Hits" CD a few years down the road.
If I were Metallica's business manager, my advice would be to extend their copyrights to permit free trading of ripped MP3's to anybody who wants them. It would serve the dual purpose of protecting their IP at minimal expense, and it would also promote their music at a time when they are building a new fan base to replace all the metal-heads that think their new stuff is crap. That might be my advise, but it is not what they are doing... and there are no laws against being stubborn and unwise.
It is also worth mentioning that Metallica is not the only "corporate" interest in this fight. Napster is not distributing all this "free" music out of the goodness of their hearts. They are doing it to create traffic so they can sell ads. There is nothing wrong with this business model, except that they are not paying for, nor authorized to use, the content that captures the eyeballs.
It all comes down to the issue of copyright and authorization. Let me try to crystalize my point with an example:
If I ran a commercial radio station, and taped Garrison Keilor's "Prairie Home Companion" from an MPR broadcast (Minnesota Public Radio, who produced the show), then turned around and re-broadcast the tapes on my station (with my own station's commercials in place of the spoof ads for "Powdermilk Buscuits" and "Ah-hoo-ah Hot Sauce"), you'd better believe that MPR would sue my ass off.
Start by trademarking a catchy name for it, like "eWord". Choose a single set of rules for formatting documents. Each software vendor can create their own fancy tools and macros for creating this content, but only those that can be read on all competing systems will be allowed to call their product "eWord Compliant".
Agree to meet every six months to update the standard. All updates to the standard should include a beta period so everybody can write patches for their prior software versions. Companies that do not keep their older versions compliant for at least three years lose the right to brand their current products as "eWord Compliant".
Promote the hell out of the standard, like the way Intel ads used to be appended at the end of all PC commercials. For example, Corel's WP ads would include the blurb, "...of course Word Perfect is 100% eWord Compatable. Don't buy any text editor that is not eWord Compatable, or your customers might not be able to read your documents!" Star Office ads would say, "...not only does StarOffice read Microsoft formats, but it is also eWord Compatable, assuring your of seamless interoperability with your business partners." For one, people could spread FUD against M$ instead of for it: "Yea, Word2004 is pretty neat, but it's not eWord compliant, so I can't really reccomend it if you expect to interact with other companies."
Heavy marketing, along with GPL'd translators between the new standard and M$ formats, would quickly change people's perceptions.
Perhaps the same should be done for spreadsheets, day planners, etc.
If I had the power and influence to get something like this of the ground, then that's pretty much how I would handle it.
My theory is this:
When Arthur was stranded in prehistoric Earth, he boldy declared "I think I shall go insane", and Ford popped up right away and told him it was a good idea... or so we are lead to believe.
In fact, Ford never showed up at all, and everything that happened from that point on (learning to fly, returning home to find the Earth OK, getting laid while listening to Dire Straits, etc.) was just the fantasy of a broken mind. The events of the next three and a half books never happened.
Hope that clears that up. :)
However, it looks like you decided that you've had your fill of Arthur Dent (as evidenced by the fact that you made sure he was dead, dead, dead at the end of Mostly Harmless).
Given that you are the most successful sci-fi humor writer ever, and probably do not need to work another day in your life if you don't want to, what is currently lighting your fire? What I mean is, what kind of stories do you hope to create over the next few years? More Holistic Detective stories? Another sci-fi epic? Perhaps something completely different?
Thank you for all your great work so far.
Lately, the Macintosh community has woken up to this tactic, posting stories at places like LowEndMac warning about ZD's trolling. The next step was obvious: Find another loyal, tight-knit community on the net and flame them. Open source is a ripe target. In a couple months, I'm sure it will be a story about Red Hat being "beleagured", complete with FUD about all LINUX distro's in general.
This months issue of Maximum LINUX enclosed a 2 CD set of LINUX & Mandrake. The magazine was about five bucks, making the CD's a give-away. We are not likely to see PCWeek enclose a copy of DOS2000 anytime soon, are we?
The advantage to Joe User is that the code has been subjected to peer review. I have not read a single line of code (yet) from BASH, KDE, StarOffice, or even the LINUX kernel, but I have the comfort of knowing that hundreds of geeks have. Bugs get found and squished very promptly once you get enough monkeys in front of typewriters. With Windows, Joe must place his faith in the QA team and Beta testers... and wait for the next Service Pack.
On the other hand, Mr. Katz's colorful language is at least as inaccurate, if not more so.
It's not "FREE" music that you are talking about, Jon. It is UNPAID music. Free means it was given away willingly (like GNU and free beer). If that was the case, there would be no lawsuits, would there?
There is no "REVOLUTION" going on here. Most of the kids copying MP3's don't know or care about where the music comes from. They just want their Dr. Dre songs, and hey look - I can get them for free on Napster! Neat!
This is not a recent development or change of any sort, other than one of medium. When I was a student, we traded tapes of each other's records, and later burned copies of each other's CD's. Now kids swap MP3's. Same thing, different method.
Jon, I know that your brand of "journalism" depends on always being on the edge of some startling new paradigm (usually catalized by the Internet, which I'm sure was a hot new story when you started writing professionally), but you need to take a breath once in a while and recognize it when what you are seeing is really just the same old crap.
Today, I learn the importance of using the preview button.
Oops.