CBS Evening News reported a few nights back that the UK is seriously considering getting rid of the rights to trial by jury and not being tried twice on the same accusation. Is this report true? Makes it kind of hard to see why we Americans saved you all from Hitler, if you don't end up preserving your freedom anyway. Of course, I may be soon enough wondering why we saved ourselves.
Newton spent more time working on alchemy than on what we'd consider science, including dosing himself with a variety of substances in search of knowledge and insights. Can Linus be serious that _this_ should be the exemplar? The guy didn't care about profits because he was a druggie with an inheritance.
Meanwhile daVinci was engaged in expensive defense boondogles involving diversion of rivers and fantastical weapons. Monies from this allowed him to do a few paintings on the side. Now _there_ is a model for the modern technologist!
Edison spent years trying to build a machine to talk to the dead, while Tesla, who has a lot more to do with modern electrical use than Edison, was suckered by the profit motive into getting totally screwed and impoverished by the corporations who commercialized his inventions.
A few days back Gordon Moore was on Charlie Rose talking about how the only way to get the chip fab equipment Intel needs two generations down the road (that would be 4 years, right?) is through massive capital investment that its current supplier can't afford. Luckily, a Dutch firm has the capital and and the two firms are trying to merge. However, there is significant opposition in the Bush administration to having a Dutch firm in such a 'strategic' position, even though the companies have agreed to produce all the equipment in the US and buy parts entirely from US suppliers.
Now you can be sure if the Dutch are that dangerous, we certainly can't trust the Finns and the Germans for the likes of Linux and KDE!
Moore, by the way, predicts that if Bush blocks the merger (which by law he has to decide on in the next week) the Japanese will make the necessary investments and end up owning the CPU market in a few short years. We should be more scared of the Japanese than the Dutch? It's not like they're an historic military enemy.
This morning mp3.com artists who haven't specifically signed off on the current version of their user agreement got a notice (the first notice about this) sent at midnight on the 1st saying their CDs will be removed from mp3.com if they don't sign on and accept the new agreement by the 4th. 48 hours! And this in a notice to musicians who are often on the road and away from e-mail.
But the real kicker is when you go to log in mp3.com insists you've forgotten your password. And when you go to have your password mp3.com says "There was a problem verifying your account. Please try again in a few minutes." So, either sign the new agreement or get your music yanked, but you can't sign the new agreement because their login mechanism is broken, so it's your own fault when your music placed there for free (but mp3.com's been making money off of both advertising and CD sales) disappears in 48 hours.
I imagine artists who've signed up to pay mp3.com $20 a month aren't facing this. But at least mp3.com could be honest about its tactics. Or have their ept staff left, and the systems are really failing?
"I haven't seen any visible performance difference though."
Recently switched a few servers and a workstation to Reiser from ext2 (using 2.2.19 kernels), and the performance difference is significant - surprisingly so. Output from Apache (AMD 450 and Pentium 700) off of SCSI-2 disks over the local net begins instantly rather than after a brief pause. Boot-up on the workstation (ATA-66 disks, P-Pro 180) runs faster (even disregarding the ext2 checks), as does loading KDE2 from tty. (Yeah, these are subjective reports, don't believe me. But I wasn't expecting speedup, just the journaling advantages.)
So is that the difference? Reading here, it looks like XFS might be more solid in some ways (particularly if you need NFS), but it may lack Reiser's performance boost?
You just can't. The courts have long recognized that many different songs reuse the same melodies and melodic fragments without infringing on each other. There might be a problem if you're representing a melody as being a particular copyrighted song that uses it (you can't copyright titles either, but the combination of a title with a melody may be legitimate IP). INAL, but these idiots should be more familiar with their area of law before making these absurd claims.
Ya know, it wouldn't be a huge project to write a program you plug your sound recording into and it writes the tabulature to the screen or file in real time. There's only a finite number of ways to finger to get notes out of a fretted instrument, so run a frequency analysis and then apply some simple algorithms for fingurability. Add basic harmonic analysis and it's easy to separate the bass from the guitar from whatever.
If this is copyright violation, then so is just listening if you have perfect pitch and the background to imagine the finguring as you hear it - which a whole lot of better guitarists can do, actually. If a computer augments your intelligence to match another guys or gals, this should be as free as thought.
Yeah, this would be precisely the place for the 00 fanatics hereabouts to design a few key modules that everything else could hang off of. As for the original post's recognition that the rarest skills are those of the human interface designer - design a solid modular back-end and the interface aces will show up to show off by putting their own pretty face on all your hard work. As an until-no-uncredited father of the H Bomb ws told early in his career, "You can get the project done, or you can get the credit, but you can't get both." The real work is on the back end, but do that so it's easy enough for some design queen to come in and do the front, the showiest-off stuff, and that'll happen.
What if you named the files randomly but recombined them in the order they'd been placed in the directory? Checking the date on the file would probably look like cheating to you, but it's quite possible to build a directory mechanism in which files are simply listed in order of creation with no explicit time stored. By your logic he only failed if he's not instantiated on such a system - but there's nothing intrinsic to his method that rules out doing just that.
<p>Of course even such a system would have to have some marker of the beginning (or end) of each file, you'll say. But consider when I compress fruit into jam. It's the same degree of compression if I end up with five one-gallon jars or on five-gallon. Sure, it uses more jars and labels the first way, but no one's going to claim I've made more jam. And if there's a cubbord I need to put the jam in that the five-gallon jar won't fit into, the one-gallon jars may even be the more effective compression scheme - less rather than more costly storage because I don't need a new cubbord.
"For instance, in Muslim countries women aren't leered at and treated as sex objects, because society conditions them not to."
This must be why all the American women I know want to move to Afghanistan.
Wake up, guy, women generally are sexual beings. They like to display that side of themselves. And men are violent beings, in part. In a world where the men display their violence in video games, and the women display their sexuality on the street... well, aren't those just about the ideal places to focus the expression of these two traits? Or do you prefer violence in the street and sex on video tape?
You don't say where you currently host your site. There may be no good revenue model based on advertising, and sending people to buy CDs and books doesn't make you much either. But if you're putting up a site that's well done in terms of either design or content, and it's drawing some traffic through, and you've got time left over from it to put into some consulting business, it can be very effective advertising for that.
The cost of an SDSL line - even at T1 capacity - is pretty cheap, all told, compared to standard hourly tech consulting fees. It should take you less than a day's work a month to pay for it, or only a few hours' if you're at, say 384 - which is enough for a mostly text, moderately trafficed site. And you can get rid of any current dial-in or cable or ADSL line, save a little there. Of course, the whole thing is a business expense, too, for taxes.
I live in a forth-floor walk-up. All that postal junk mail gets walked up, and then walked back down for mandatory recycling. Even the post office is taking a loss on much of it, the bulkier part that travels at subsidized magazine rate that costs me more to send letters. The city loses money in recycling.
The core problem is that commercial interests are allowed to maintain address lists and profiles of people who never opted in to them. This is a vast intrusion on privacy, and also allows the government to tap into privately-compiled (and often error-strewn) databases that go beyond what the government itself can legally keep.
There should be both opt-in and opt-out, with opt-out required on all correspondence generated to compiled lists of citizens, whether physical or electronic, and means provide where the citizen can respond in whatever way is easiest - mail, e-mail, a Website, a phone call - and be able to opt out not just of receiving more communications, but of being included in the database from which the addressing of the communication was generated.
The only exception would be for credit agencies, which would be prevented from sharing citizen information for any marketing purpose except if the citizen has specifically opted in (say, for the purpose of receiving credit card offers).
Well put together basic review of the issues, but it leaves out the level at which action, if it could be well-defined, might do the most good right now. I'm one of those folks who take care of their morning need to indulge in a bit of aggression by complaining to the providers of each bit of spam received. More often than not, they assure me accounts are closed. But for a few months most spam was coming from Phoenix or Tucson on the same provider. Now there's a lot coming from the Miami area. If they're shutting accounts, they're happily selling new ones the next day to replace 'em.
If there were a law requiring providers to maintain a central database of credit cards used to purchase spam accounts, and then use that as a basis to run cross checks with the credit agencies so that no one person who ever bought an account to spam could ever buy access to the Net again... well, you can see the problem, this will encourage the spammers to more often use stolen credit cards. Still, it should be illegal at least for the same firm to keep selling new accounts to the same spammer whose old account it just shut down. Or are we talking kids in the barrio who get their whole gang to sign up one at a time to keep their little business going?
Hmm, how about a clause in the sign-up process for any Net access account wereby the buyer agrees to have their card charged $100 for each instance of spam (per recipient) - a simple service contract: you can send spam from your account, this is what we'll charge you for it. Let the ISP keep the money to offset their anti-spam efforts. Of course, you'll get some cheating ISP faking the evidence to collect the charges, but public review of their practices through boards like dslreports.com can steer us away from that kind of theft.
So define spam as acceptable use that will be charged to your card, and at rates where we can hire serious collection agents to go after you if you try to stiff us. And we won't even notify you when the complaints start to come in, we'll just run up your charges. Any sane ISP would start paying small fees for spam reports from recipients. Setting a minimal threshold, say 50 reports before the clause kicks in, would protect folks from spurious reports. And we have a thoroughly capitalist solution without need for new laws.
Nicely written little begging-for-capital- through-the-press article. Makes Eazel sound like it might actually compete for the same market that buys a Mac these days - folks who really have no leaning towards understanding the underpinnings of their machines, and just want intuitive obviousness. What it needs to be to sell to them, though, is part of an appliance. Put something together where the underpinnings are Debian (for easy upgrading at that level), the CPU is Transmeta (advertise the ecological soundness of power saving - "We're in an energy crisis, no doubt about it," says Ms. Whitman), and the box itself is built by someone like Sonic Blue (because I was stupid enough to buy their stock when they went by the less silly name of S3, plus they know something about consumer devices, and were an early Transmeta adaptor - and appear to have some cash to invest).
There are currently two Mac markets: graphics designers and folks who just use them as fancy typewriters and communications devices - Eazel as an appliance could own the second group, and they'd pay extra just as they pay extra to run Macs now.
For everyone else - probably 90% of the coming Linux desktop market - there's KDE, which is well on the way to being a better Windows than Windows - and we already know from the relative triumph of Windows over the Mac that that's enough for the majority of productivity users, especially when coupled with lower cost.
Keep in mind that the reason Mao won in China was that the Nationalists were closely allied with the criminal tongs - something of a public relations problem at the time, compared to the Marxist pose of purity - and when the Nationalists retreated to Taiwan they took their allies with them (in many cases, their allies were them). So when the present Taiwanese government cracks down on file sharing, they have a direct interest in encouraging the sale of physical product, even (especially) if bootlegged, because the bootleggers are close allies with the government.
Nor is this necessarily a bad thing for Taiwan. In fact, it seems that mainland China has enthusiasticly embraced this model, which in fact is the ancient Chinese Imperial way of doing business. As some wags suggest, when we say "capitalism" we often really mean "current business customs among English speakers." It may be somewhat against our custom for government to be so close to criminal gangs (although remember J. Edgar Hoover was fond enough of the Mafia to insist publicly for years that there was no such thing in America!), but as Taiwan shows, when handled right, this can produce a vibrant capitalist economy.
On the other hand, when viewed from the culture of 50-years hence, if we make it that far, I suspect the RIAA will appear to have been a criminal gang.
Okay, radio has sucked since about 1972. Before that there were still free-form independent FM stations in many cities. After that, everything went to formula, with even independent stations buying playlists from national services. It simply made more money, which allowed the price of stations to be bid up, which means there's now no economic choice besides these formula mills except... noncommerical radio. The best DJs work for free. And what does a college radio station pay when it plays stuff? (I really don't know, but I know their budgets are zilch.)
The whole Seattle music scene a decade ago happened because there were two good college stations, KAOS in Olympia and KCMU in Seattle, along with OP magazine out of Olympia and Bruce Pavitt's Sub Pop tape compilations - it was a very small circle of people, which also included Stephen Rabow who went from KAOS to being the only (and probably the last) free form DJ on a couple of commercial Seattle stations. Kim Thayil moved to the NW because he read in OP about what a cool station KAOS was - there was nothing like that in Chicago then. Soundgarden, Nirvana et al. happened only because this was enough to make a scene - that and that rent used to be cheap out that way.
So there's really only one Classic Rock, one Urban Contemporary, one Country, one Hip Hop station in the country anyhow - all the same centralized playlists, the DJs don't do shit, they aren't allowed to. Internet broadcast for them is redundant, and the DJs might as well be paid more for it. But for the free form college and community stations, well, those really can matter. So if this means that the commercial shit declines in this sector of the Net, good! And if this leaves the door open for noncommercial Net broadcasts, this could be very good indeed.
"What if an islamic member nation makes it a crime, a legal crime, for women to not wear their veils etc, and then tried to enforce their weirdo ideas in *other countries*?"
The nation that does that could find its population in a very curious undertow. Suddenly it will find that not just is its own population seething against the local governing authority, but much of the rest of the world - the most educated, wealthy and computer-literate rest of the world at that - is really bothered by them, and doing what it can to help bring the offending government down.
Perhaps what it comes down to is the old notion of culture hacking: we've got to get busy and truly undermine and subvert all large entities which stand against human (not to be confused with corporate and government) freedom. The currently fashionable notion that it's okay for people to be Muslim fundamentalists in their 'own' land - or Christian fundamentalists in the swamps of the American South - or Marxists in China - because gee whiz we've got to respect other cultures and beliefs....
Well, if we respect cultures and beliefs in this way we're going to get stifled at home; conversely, if we don't get stifled at home we're going to spread notions of freedom to Iran and China and the American South that will seriously shake up business as usual. So this is what's in play: either we get real busy figuring out how to help those on the ground in Iran and China and Texas pull their governments down, or we're gonna find ourselves sat on.
We're not talking digital entertainment here, we're talking one of the bigger puzzles going: how do you create societies which promote radical freedom in the psychology of their citizens? Can this even be hacked? Well, don't imagine for a minute that decades of research at the CIA and elsewhere have shown no progress in methods to hack cultures to move the other way. They hacked the Iranians to want to stupidly follow authority, for instance, and look what they got! Okay, this gives them pause, the technology isn't perfect yet.
But freedom should be easier, right? Isn't it simpler to break things down than to build them up, assinine authoritarian systems included? Probably not, but it's the only game we've got, and losing sucks.
Libertarians generally build theories where property rights are supreme; anarchists generally build theories where individual freedom is supreme - which is why libertarians are more often allied with Republicans, and anarchists, while disgusted with both major parties, sometimes find individual Democrats to be natural allies.
Jefferson originally wrote "life, liberty and property," but changed the last to "the pursuit of happiness" because his favorite philosopher was Francis Hutcheson, whose An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue contains an extensive argument that accumulation of property is only virtuous to the degree that it truly serves happiness. Hutcheson is also where Jefferson got the notion of "inalienable rights." (If you're going to read Hutcheson, get a copy with the original capitalization - a lot is lost in ironing it out into modern lower case and loss of italics &c. Oh, and Hutcheson was also Adam Smith's teacher.)
If you think the accumulation of wealth and property by the richest among us truly serves their happiness, you haven't read any of the psychological studies showing it largely doesn't - or grown up with rich kids and seen how miserably neurotic most of them are (although if school killings have ever made it above middle class, that has been kept out of the news).
If you really like the libertarian property-is-the-essential-right argument, you need to explain what you're going to do when someone buys so much property that everyone else becomes tenants on it - they don't have rights there anymore, right? That's feudalism, not capitalism.
On the other hand, if you, like Jefferson, think life, liberty and happiness come first, and property is only of secondary concern to the degree that we need to own our tooth brush and perhaps enough land to grow our own crops - hmm, I suppose he'd favor land distribution in the banana republics? - this is not unAmerican.
Communism has failed. But individual liberty is always at the mercy of large organizations, be they governments or corporations or the local slave-holders club. Individual liberty requires the right to form your own business; but that's not the same thing as the right to bully others through governments or corporations or the club. Bullies in capitalist societies will always accuse their victims, should they complain, of being against capitalism.
The economy did well under Clinton because somehow his style of government was compatible with an openness to invention and experiment (of course, he invented and experimented a bit himself). Cheney-Bush sent the ecomony reeling when it saw them coming because they really would just as soon that we follow older roads, the ones the preserve the power of their friends, even if that means we're not, as a whole, as prosperous as in times when businesses really do take great risks on invention and innovation.
'Community' by itself is an empty value. Consider the modern campus, where the community actively stifles incorrect speech. What's needed is more, IMHO, the action of individuals encouraging other individuals to invent futures and dreams that go outside the bounds and terms presently favored by governments, corporations, and yes communities. Only by doing that can we require those larger organisms to, as a necessity of their own prosperity, accommodate the sort of creative individual who is the well from which good government, good business and good community might arise.
This is risky as hell. Not doing it is even riskier.
Where the Debian installer is especially rough is if your install skids off the straight-and-narrow path it hopes to find. For instance, if it doesn't see your network card (maybe it wasn't supported in the included kernel modules) it halts setting stuff up in the middle, with no option to override this and no option to restart at that point (say, after you compile a module for the card). The maintainer replies to suggestions for improving this with "Whatever it doesn't do is purposely unsupported."
I've nothing against non-GUI installs, but I'm all against routines that are inflexible and brittle - that fail in the (not so) exceptional cases. That, and developers who think the exceptional cases are the user's fault. Difficult to walk into a client's shop to do a new install using Debian, when you know you might end up looking dumb and swearing at the machine if it happens to be hardware for which the Debian install derails; at least with Red Hat you know, despite the trade-off in long-term maintainability, you're going to look efficient as you install it. So I'd say putting a solid installation routine on the front of Debian could just be brilliant.
As a historical reference point which may or may not correlate with the trajectory in Gibson's historical conjecture, see the diary of a visit in 1923 by the NY-based American junior partner to an expatriot Japanese nobleman. The account includes dinner with song and geisha, climbing Fuji, and getting caught in the Tokyo earthquake. (Their import-export business later failed in the depression. The Japanese partner was running a Japan-America Friendship outfit in LA at the time of Pearl Harbor.)
What's the security-maintenance potential of Debian-based systems? I generally set up Red Hat-based servers at client sites, run a tight ipchains firewall and custom compile whatever daemons will be publicly available from the latest source; and then watch for security news, compiling updated daemons as necessary. So, far, no problems, fingers crossed. But I've recently been playing with Debian, am coming to like.deb far better than.rpm, and wonder what the odds would be of a daily "apt-get dist-upgrade" in cron on server's keeping security relatively tight (and not sometimes mucking things up)? Some of y'all must be doing this?
Shirkey says "The invention of the image tag, as part of the Mosaic browser (ancestor of Netscape), brought a GUI to the previously text-only Internet in exactly the same way that, a decade earlier, Apple brought a GUI to the previously text-only operating system." History simplified to the point of almost being wrong does us no service. The image tag was neither a GUI nor invented for Mosaic. It came out of CERN where the physicists wanted to put illustrations in their documents. Mosaic was just an early implementation of a browser that could run in existing GUI OS's and that implemented the CERN standards.
A few paragraphs later his theme is "big, sloppy ideas." Yeah, fine, he gets big and sloppy about his ideas of the past, and then parallels that distortion to a present he doesn't begin to define, and this passes for analysis? In a really vague way he may be waving his arms in the right direction, but why are we even trying to listen to someone whose prattling skirts close to the edge of intellectual dishonesty? It's like those old "make millions from the Internet" spams. Sure, you could make millions back in the day, by not by following the advice in those missives. It's because the likes of Shirky have been listened to by too many VCs and editors that the tech economy is so shakey now - false intelligence is more dangerous than ignorance.
As someone with a long-term dislike of Microsoft products (I preferred ZCPR-CP/M on a Z80 to DOS, I always ran DR-DOS under Win 3.1, and I still vastly prefer the Lotus SmartSuite to Office, but I've been using Linux for most things since '93), I have to say this guy is totally wrong about the market for Office on Linux. I have good-sized clients who could be moved very rapidly to Linux + Office, were Office only available on Linux. And I would strongly urge them to make the move. As it is, I have to wait until there is the equivalent of Office on Linux (which is probably still 1-2 years away - my bet's on the KDE efforts - StarOffice sucks in all the ways Office does, and worse, IMHO). And then I, and a lot of sysadmins who feel like me, will move everyone to Linux + whatever.
So the Microsoft marketing choice is this: Don't issue Office for Linux and hold on to your OS market share in the short run, because business users demand Office-level functionality; or issue Office for Linux and gain a longer-term advantage for Office, but lose the OS advantage in the short term.
Again, I would have major clients buying Office for Linux tomorrow - because they could throw out Windows. There's a great advantage in OS standardization on the best, and all these clients already run Linux and perhaps Solaris for their critical servers - only the Office hold on the workstations prevents Windows going out the window in total. But there's all sorts of money Microsoft can only make in the long term if it quickly takes advantage of the openning for a good Linux desktop suite for folks who really do want to run Office - or the better equivalent that will come along in 1-2 years if Microsoft doesn't seize that ground fast.
Would have moderated you up, but wanted to comment instead that you can get two DSL lines for less than the price of one T1 - so if you go with one Covad reseller (I also use Speakeasy, and have had near-perfect service for 18 months of business SDSL), and one Rhythms reseller, odds are small they both go under at the same time - so you'll have time to switch your business to that T1 or something newer by the time both DSL options go under, and meanwhile have nice redundancy and more total bandwidth.
A client of mine did this with Northpoint and Covad - so Northpoint's demise was a minor glitch at most for him.
It's also very true that SDSL is far more important than ADSL, because it supports the true use of the Net. If your kid's not running her own server at home, she's growing up Net illiterate.
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CBS Evening News reported a few nights back that the UK is seriously considering getting rid of the rights to trial by jury and not being tried twice on the same accusation. Is this report true? Makes it kind of hard to see why we Americans saved you all from Hitler, if you don't end up preserving your freedom anyway. Of course, I may be soon enough wondering why we saved ourselves.
Newton spent more time working on alchemy than on what we'd consider science, including dosing himself with a variety of substances in search of knowledge and insights. Can Linus be serious that _this_ should be the exemplar? The guy didn't care about profits because he was a druggie with an inheritance.
Meanwhile daVinci was engaged in expensive defense boondogles involving diversion of rivers and fantastical weapons. Monies from this allowed him to do a few paintings on the side. Now _there_ is a model for the modern technologist!
Edison spent years trying to build a machine to talk to the dead, while Tesla, who has a lot more to do with modern electrical use than Edison, was suckered by the profit motive into getting totally screwed and impoverished by the corporations who commercialized his inventions.
And then we have Linus. 'nough said.
Online sales only grew
Television and radio, and much of print media failed because they followed the advertising model.
The United States will never work as a country because it gave away much of its land free to early settlers.
The Soviet Union triumphed because it applied a unified, coherent model of process and organization across its broad domain.
The automobile never caught on as a technology because multiple vendors expanded on its open engineering platform in incompatible ways, while the horse, built on a standard plan, was flexibly sized from pony to draft horse for every scale of use.
A few days back Gordon Moore was on Charlie Rose talking about how the only way to get the chip fab equipment Intel needs two generations down the road (that would be 4 years, right?) is through massive capital investment that its current supplier can't afford. Luckily, a Dutch firm has the capital and and the two firms are trying to merge. However, there is significant opposition in the Bush administration to having a Dutch firm in such a 'strategic' position, even though the companies have agreed to produce all the equipment in the US and buy parts entirely from US suppliers.
Now you can be sure if the Dutch are that dangerous, we certainly can't trust the Finns and the Germans for the likes of Linux and KDE!
Moore, by the way, predicts that if Bush blocks the merger (which by law he has to decide on in the next week) the Japanese will make the necessary investments and end up owning the CPU market in a few short years. We should be more scared of the Japanese than the Dutch? It's not like they're an historic military enemy.
Oh, wait....
But the real kicker is when you go to log in mp3.com insists you've forgotten your password. And when you go to have your password mp3.com says "There was a problem verifying your account. Please try again in a few minutes." So, either sign the new agreement or get your music yanked, but you can't sign the new agreement because their login mechanism is broken, so it's your own fault when your music placed there for free (but mp3.com's been making money off of both advertising and CD sales) disappears in 48 hours.
I imagine artists who've signed up to pay mp3.com $20 a month aren't facing this. But at least mp3.com could be honest about its tactics. Or have their ept staff left, and the systems are really failing?
"I haven't seen any visible performance difference though."
Recently switched a few servers and a workstation to Reiser from ext2 (using 2.2.19 kernels), and the performance difference is significant - surprisingly so. Output from Apache (AMD 450 and Pentium 700) off of SCSI-2 disks over the local net begins instantly rather than after a brief pause. Boot-up on the workstation (ATA-66 disks, P-Pro 180) runs faster (even disregarding the ext2 checks), as does loading KDE2 from tty. (Yeah, these are subjective reports, don't believe me. But I wasn't expecting speedup, just the journaling advantages.)
So is that the difference? Reading here, it looks like XFS might be more solid in some ways (particularly if you need NFS), but it may lack Reiser's performance boost?
You just can't. The courts have long recognized that many different songs reuse the same melodies and melodic fragments without infringing on each other. There might be a problem if you're representing a melody as being a particular copyrighted song that uses it (you can't copyright titles either, but the combination of a title with a melody may be legitimate IP). INAL, but these idiots should be more familiar with their area of law before making these absurd claims.
Ya know, it wouldn't be a huge project to write a program you plug your sound recording into and it writes the tabulature to the screen or file in real time. There's only a finite number of ways to finger to get notes out of a fretted instrument, so run a frequency analysis and then apply some simple algorithms for fingurability. Add basic harmonic analysis and it's easy to separate the bass from the guitar from whatever.
If this is copyright violation, then so is just listening if you have perfect pitch and the background to imagine the finguring as you hear it - which a whole lot of better guitarists can do, actually. If a computer augments your intelligence to match another guys or gals, this should be as free as thought.
Yeah, this would be precisely the place for the 00 fanatics hereabouts to design a few key modules that everything else could hang off of. As for the original post's recognition that the rarest skills are those of the human interface designer - design a solid modular back-end and the interface aces will show up to show off by putting their own pretty face on all your hard work. As an until-no-uncredited father of the H Bomb ws told early in his career, "You can get the project done, or you can get the credit, but you can't get both." The real work is on the back end, but do that so it's easy enough for some design queen to come in and do the front, the showiest-off stuff, and that'll happen.
What if you named the files randomly but recombined them in the order they'd been placed in the directory? Checking the date on the file would probably look like cheating to you, but it's quite possible to build a directory mechanism in which files are simply listed in order of creation with no explicit time stored. By your logic he only failed if he's not instantiated on such a system - but there's nothing intrinsic to his method that rules out doing just that.
<p>Of course even such a system would have to have some marker of the beginning (or end) of each file, you'll say. But consider when I compress fruit into jam. It's the same degree of compression if I end up with five one-gallon jars or on five-gallon. Sure, it uses more jars and labels the first way, but no one's going to claim I've made more jam. And if there's a cubbord I need to put the jam in that the five-gallon jar won't fit into, the one-gallon jars may even be the more effective compression scheme - less rather than more costly storage because I don't need a new cubbord.
This must be why all the American women I know want to move to Afghanistan.
Wake up, guy, women generally are sexual beings. They like to display that side of themselves. And men are violent beings, in part. In a world where the men display their violence in video games, and the women display their sexuality on the street ... well, aren't those just about the ideal places to focus the expression of these two traits? Or do you prefer violence in the street and sex on video tape?
The cost of an SDSL line - even at T1 capacity - is pretty cheap, all told, compared to standard hourly tech consulting fees. It should take you less than a day's work a month to pay for it, or only a few hours' if you're at, say 384 - which is enough for a mostly text, moderately trafficed site. And you can get rid of any current dial-in or cable or ADSL line, save a little there. Of course, the whole thing is a business expense, too, for taxes.
The core problem is that commercial interests are allowed to maintain address lists and profiles of people who never opted in to them. This is a vast intrusion on privacy, and also allows the government to tap into privately-compiled (and often error-strewn) databases that go beyond what the government itself can legally keep.
There should be both opt-in and opt-out, with opt-out required on all correspondence generated to compiled lists of citizens, whether physical or electronic, and means provide where the citizen can respond in whatever way is easiest - mail, e-mail, a Website, a phone call - and be able to opt out not just of receiving more communications, but of being included in the database from which the addressing of the communication was generated.
The only exception would be for credit agencies, which would be prevented from sharing citizen information for any marketing purpose except if the citizen has specifically opted in (say, for the purpose of receiving credit card offers).
Well put together basic review of the issues, but it leaves out the level at which action, if it could be well-defined, might do the most good right now. I'm one of those folks who take care of their morning need to indulge in a bit of aggression by complaining to the providers of each bit of spam received. More often than not, they assure me accounts are closed. But for a few months most spam was coming from Phoenix or Tucson on the same provider. Now there's a lot coming from the Miami area. If they're shutting accounts, they're happily selling new ones the next day to replace 'em.
... well, you can see the problem, this will encourage the spammers to more often use stolen credit cards. Still, it should be illegal at least for the same firm to keep selling new accounts to the same spammer whose old account it just shut down. Or are we talking kids in the barrio who get their whole gang to sign up one at a time to keep their little business going?
If there were a law requiring providers to maintain a central database of credit cards used to purchase spam accounts, and then use that as a basis to run cross checks with the credit agencies so that no one person who ever bought an account to spam could ever buy access to the Net again
Hmm, how about a clause in the sign-up process for any Net access account wereby the buyer agrees to have their card charged $100 for each instance of spam (per recipient) - a simple service contract: you can send spam from your account, this is what we'll charge you for it. Let the ISP keep the money to offset their anti-spam efforts. Of course, you'll get some cheating ISP faking the evidence to collect the charges, but public review of their practices through boards like dslreports.com can steer us away from that kind of theft.
So define spam as acceptable use that will be charged to your card, and at rates where we can hire serious collection agents to go after you if you try to stiff us. And we won't even notify you when the complaints start to come in, we'll just run up your charges. Any sane ISP would start paying small fees for spam reports from recipients. Setting a minimal threshold, say 50 reports before the clause kicks in, would protect folks from spurious reports. And we have a thoroughly capitalist solution without need for new laws.
Nicely written little begging-for-capital- through-the-press article. Makes Eazel sound like it might actually compete for the same market that buys a Mac these days - folks who really have no leaning towards understanding the underpinnings of their machines, and just want intuitive obviousness. What it needs to be to sell to them, though, is part of an appliance. Put something together where the underpinnings are Debian (for easy upgrading at that level), the CPU is Transmeta (advertise the ecological soundness of power saving - "We're in an energy crisis, no doubt about it," says Ms. Whitman), and the box itself is built by someone like Sonic Blue (because I was stupid enough to buy their stock when they went by the less silly name of S3, plus they know something about consumer devices, and were an early Transmeta adaptor - and appear to have some cash to invest).
There are currently two Mac markets: graphics designers and folks who just use them as fancy typewriters and communications devices - Eazel as an appliance could own the second group, and they'd pay extra just as they pay extra to run Macs now.
For everyone else - probably 90% of the coming Linux desktop market - there's KDE, which is well on the way to being a better Windows than Windows - and we already know from the relative triumph of Windows over the Mac that that's enough for the majority of productivity users, especially when coupled with lower cost.
Nor is this necessarily a bad thing for Taiwan. In fact, it seems that mainland China has enthusiasticly embraced this model, which in fact is the ancient Chinese Imperial way of doing business. As some wags suggest, when we say "capitalism" we often really mean "current business customs among English speakers." It may be somewhat against our custom for government to be so close to criminal gangs (although remember J. Edgar Hoover was fond enough of the Mafia to insist publicly for years that there was no such thing in America!), but as Taiwan shows, when handled right, this can produce a vibrant capitalist economy.
On the other hand, when viewed from the culture of 50-years hence, if we make it that far, I suspect the RIAA will appear to have been a criminal gang.
The whole Seattle music scene a decade ago happened because there were two good college stations, KAOS in Olympia and KCMU in Seattle, along with OP magazine out of Olympia and Bruce Pavitt's Sub Pop tape compilations - it was a very small circle of people, which also included Stephen Rabow who went from KAOS to being the only (and probably the last) free form DJ on a couple of commercial Seattle stations. Kim Thayil moved to the NW because he read in OP about what a cool station KAOS was - there was nothing like that in Chicago then. Soundgarden, Nirvana et al. happened only because this was enough to make a scene - that and that rent used to be cheap out that way.
So there's really only one Classic Rock, one Urban Contemporary, one Country, one Hip Hop station in the country anyhow - all the same centralized playlists, the DJs don't do shit, they aren't allowed to. Internet broadcast for them is redundant, and the DJs might as well be paid more for it. But for the free form college and community stations, well, those really can matter. So if this means that the commercial shit declines in this sector of the Net, good! And if this leaves the door open for noncommercial Net broadcasts, this could be very good indeed.
The nation that does that could find its population in a very curious undertow. Suddenly it will find that not just is its own population seething against the local governing authority, but much of the rest of the world - the most educated, wealthy and computer-literate rest of the world at that - is really bothered by them, and doing what it can to help bring the offending government down.
Perhaps what it comes down to is the old notion of culture hacking: we've got to get busy and truly undermine and subvert all large entities which stand against human (not to be confused with corporate and government) freedom. The currently fashionable notion that it's okay for people to be Muslim fundamentalists in their 'own' land - or Christian fundamentalists in the swamps of the American South - or Marxists in China - because gee whiz we've got to respect other cultures and beliefs....
Well, if we respect cultures and beliefs in this way we're going to get stifled at home; conversely, if we don't get stifled at home we're going to spread notions of freedom to Iran and China and the American South that will seriously shake up business as usual. So this is what's in play: either we get real busy figuring out how to help those on the ground in Iran and China and Texas pull their governments down, or we're gonna find ourselves sat on.
We're not talking digital entertainment here, we're talking one of the bigger puzzles going: how do you create societies which promote radical freedom in the psychology of their citizens? Can this even be hacked? Well, don't imagine for a minute that decades of research at the CIA and elsewhere have shown no progress in methods to hack cultures to move the other way. They hacked the Iranians to want to stupidly follow authority, for instance, and look what they got! Okay, this gives them pause, the technology isn't perfect yet.
But freedom should be easier, right? Isn't it simpler to break things down than to build them up, assinine authoritarian systems included? Probably not, but it's the only game we've got, and losing sucks.
I've nothing against non-GUI installs, but I'm all against routines that are inflexible and brittle - that fail in the (not so) exceptional cases. That, and developers who think the exceptional cases are the user's fault. Difficult to walk into a client's shop to do a new install using Debian, when you know you might end up looking dumb and swearing at the machine if it happens to be hardware for which the Debian install derails; at least with Red Hat you know, despite the trade-off in long-term maintainability, you're going to look efficient as you install it. So I'd say putting a solid installation routine on the front of Debian could just be brilliant.
As a historical reference point which may or may not correlate with the trajectory in Gibson's historical conjecture, see the diary of a visit in 1923 by the NY-based American junior partner to an expatriot Japanese nobleman. The account includes dinner with song and geisha, climbing Fuji, and getting caught in the Tokyo earthquake. (Their import-export business later failed in the depression. The Japanese partner was running a Japan-America Friendship outfit in LA at the time of Pearl Harbor.)
What's the security-maintenance potential of Debian-based systems? I generally set up Red Hat-based servers at client sites, run a tight ipchains firewall and custom compile whatever daemons will be publicly available from the latest source; and then watch for security news, compiling updated daemons as necessary. So, far, no problems, fingers crossed. But I've recently been playing with Debian, am coming to like .deb far better than .rpm, and wonder what the odds would be of a daily "apt-get dist-upgrade" in cron on server's keeping security relatively tight (and not sometimes mucking things up)? Some of y'all must be doing this?
Shirkey says "The invention of the image tag, as part of the Mosaic browser (ancestor of Netscape), brought a GUI to the previously text-only Internet in exactly the same way that, a decade earlier, Apple brought a GUI to the previously text-only operating system." History simplified to the point of almost being wrong does us no service. The image tag was neither a GUI nor invented for Mosaic. It came out of CERN where the physicists wanted to put illustrations in their documents. Mosaic was just an early implementation of a browser that could run in existing GUI OS's and that implemented the CERN standards.
A few paragraphs later his theme is "big, sloppy ideas." Yeah, fine, he gets big and sloppy about his ideas of the past, and then parallels that distortion to a present he doesn't begin to define, and this passes for analysis? In a really vague way he may be waving his arms in the right direction, but why are we even trying to listen to someone whose prattling skirts close to the edge of intellectual dishonesty? It's like those old "make millions from the Internet" spams. Sure, you could make millions back in the day, by not by following the advice in those missives. It's because the likes of Shirky have been listened to by too many VCs and editors that the tech economy is so shakey now - false intelligence is more dangerous than ignorance.
As someone with a long-term dislike of Microsoft products (I preferred ZCPR-CP/M on a Z80 to DOS, I always ran DR-DOS under Win 3.1, and I still vastly prefer the Lotus SmartSuite to Office, but I've been using Linux for most things since '93), I have to say this guy is totally wrong about the market for Office on Linux. I have good-sized clients who could be moved very rapidly to Linux + Office, were Office only available on Linux. And I would strongly urge them to make the move. As it is, I have to wait until there is the equivalent of Office on Linux (which is probably still 1-2 years away - my bet's on the KDE efforts - StarOffice sucks in all the ways Office does, and worse, IMHO). And then I, and a lot of sysadmins who feel like me, will move everyone to Linux + whatever.
So the Microsoft marketing choice is this: Don't issue Office for Linux and hold on to your OS market share in the short run, because business users demand Office-level functionality; or issue Office for Linux and gain a longer-term advantage for Office, but lose the OS advantage in the short term.
Again, I would have major clients buying Office for Linux tomorrow - because they could throw out Windows. There's a great advantage in OS standardization on the best, and all these clients already run Linux and perhaps Solaris for their critical servers - only the Office hold on the workstations prevents Windows going out the window in total. But there's all sorts of money Microsoft can only make in the long term if it quickly takes advantage of the openning for a good Linux desktop suite for folks who really do want to run Office - or the better equivalent that will come along in 1-2 years if Microsoft doesn't seize that ground fast.
Would have moderated you up, but wanted to comment instead that you can get two DSL lines for less than the price of one T1 - so if you go with one Covad reseller (I also use Speakeasy, and have had near-perfect service for 18 months of business SDSL), and one Rhythms reseller, odds are small they both go under at the same time - so you'll have time to switch your business to that T1 or something newer by the time both DSL options go under, and meanwhile have nice redundancy and more total bandwidth.
A client of mine did this with Northpoint and Covad - so Northpoint's demise was a minor glitch at most for him.
It's also very true that SDSL is far more important than ADSL, because it supports the true use of the Net. If your kid's not running her own server at home, she's growing up Net illiterate.