Okay, it was a surprise when I heard the kind of Mellencamp-esque twang... but you know, I think it wouldn't have worked nearly as well without the images during the opening credits and the words to it. This is probably gonna be flamed, but I think the theme music/opening titles was really well done and added a nice falvor to the show. Sure, it wasn't a monster orchestral piece, but it worked. It really did make me think of things like The Right Stuff, and From The Earth To The Moon, and Apollo 13. And that seems to be what this whole new series is all about.
Spock and Data are pikers compared to Kim Kinnison, and the ones who've gained "godlike power" all leave the series.
Ahhh... the Golden Age. Where the brave and bold Tellurians stood firm against a starkly monstrous and supremely, incontrovertably vicious foe, flinging actinic bolts from the refractory maws of their unbelievably powerful weapons, hurling the irresistable, ponderous mass of entire PLANETS at their enemies, amidst an astounding stream of adverbage! =)
I've very fond memories of the Lensman series. I know, I know, "Muddied thinking, youth!"
These human supremacists don't want the soft liberal peace and love Federation of Kirk and the Next Generation's universe coming into fruition,[...]
Peace and love? Kirk? I mean, besides the fact that he didn't always limit himself to homo sapiens, Kirk kicked butt and took names, he wasn't representative of any 'peace and love Federation.' Yeah, he met some hippies, but It's hard to see the 'Space Hippies' taking over the Feds. =)
I would like nothing better than to be a full-time network administrator. However, until recently, this was a solo shop with an insane number of computers and system, with vendors who refused to play nice with one another, and a management who had (has) unrealistic expectations of one human MIS person. So I was netad, sysad, helpdesk, tech liason... in other words, 'the comuter guy.' I would almost scream when someone called me 'the computer expert.'
Fortunately, I now have someone here to help me, but I keep hearing that management here is trying to cut corners again, and may want to get rid of him.
It was this job which is the nail in my IT coffin, after only eight months of greymatta flambe, and it will be my last job doing IT work professionally and full-time.
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Chief Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
I admit, I'm one of the ones who likes some of what Jon Katz writes. I'll also admit that a good deal of it may not be "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters." Actually, I think he could do well on Kuro5hin, and this isn't meant as a flame.
I am still looking forward to Final Fantasy, though. =)
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Chief Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
A movie that Jon Katz totally panned! I think that's a first for/. =)
I'm looking forward to seeing Final Fantasy, partly because of the excellent animation techniques (for anyone who's familiar with the difficulties of character modeling and animation: OMG! THE HAIR!) and partly because I rather like a side of mysticism with my order of sci-fi and Biggie hard-SF shake.
Of course, after reading Jon's review, I'll probably slate seeing Final Fantasy for a matinee than an evening showing.
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Chief Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
It is very important to point out that civil disobedience is more than just disobeying an unjust law. It carries with it the willingness to be arrested for the belief that it is an unjust law, and giving one's self to the courts for them to decide on the justness of a law.
Just breaking the law isn't going to do a whit of good. Know what will? Breaking an unjust law and getting arrested. Getting the people and the courts to realize how unjust that law is. Convincing a jury of your peers that this law has no business being in the books. Even, if it comes to it, getting slapped with a conviction and a ridiculous punishment. (What are the legistlated penalties for breaking the DMCA?)
But to do all that, you have to be arrested.
You have to accept the high probability that, if you break the law, you will be arrested. That is civil disobedience, like it or not.
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Chief Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
Cisco certification is indeed very hard. Cisco controls it completely, moreso than MS and Novell do. From what I understand, the highest level of Cisco cert -- Certified Cisco Network Engineer -- requires you to go out, physically, to Cisco's corp. headquarters, spend half a day taking an exam, and the second half of the day essentially rebuilding a router.
I may be wrong (IANACCNE?) and anyone who has actually taken this certification I gladly welcome to correct me!
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Chief Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
Microsoft Verdict Overturned
Posted by michael on Thursday June 28, @10:47AM
from the campaign-contributions-a-good-investment dept.
Everyone and their brother sent in this unsurprising news: the Appeals Court handling the Microsoft anti-trust case has overturned the break-up decision. A few story URLs: CNet, BBC, ABC, AP. The decision is available in.pdf format.
So,/. editors, when are we going to see the 'edited by' or 'update' line correcting the little gaffe above? =)
Not to bust chops, but let's not get into the habit of sneaky-quick-behind-back-fixing-errors. Nobody's gonna blame anyone for thinking that, at first glance, this was what the article was saying.
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Chief Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
The Defense Information Systems Agency isn't going to be ripping out Wintel machines and replacing them with Linux boxen. Yes, 25k penguins in the US DoD would be nice, but that's not happening here.
From the article:
StarOffice, Sun's open source productivity application suite that includes word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, and database applications for the Solaris, Windows and Linux platforms, would replace Applix on more than 10,000 of DISA's Unix workstations at 600 client organizations worldwide, said Susan Grabau, the product line manager for StarOffice.
Basically, they're ripping out an older, proprietary, closd-source system which hardly anyone ever uses anymore, and replacing it with StarOffice. The machines are already *NIXie-boxes (probably a flavor of SunOS/Solaris.) I wish we could claim this as a victory against Microsoft's monolithia, but this is a setup which never had MS in it's shop at all.
What is is a victory against is Microsoft's FUD about open source being 'cancerous' and the like. This could be construed as a slap in the face of Microsoft by the DoD, arguably the second-most number-crunching group of peopl ein the US Government. (The first being, of course, the Internal Revenue Service, the tax collectors. Come on, the US Government has SOME sense of priorities!;)
I use StarOffice for myself, and I'm very pleased with it overall. It has a relatively small footprint, the features I need, and it's nice and flexible. I find it's a little buggy, but with a situation like this Sun will likely very much want to work out all the bugs.
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Chief Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
This is a configuration tool, not a command shell.
Good point. Does it show how long ago I last played with this sort of thing? =)
I just hope it isn't more like 'computer, range is 360, theta is 150, phi is 30.'
Coming soon, from InfoGuin, the only Linux distro to come with a star chart and a First Contact manual!
Hmm... is an IT-Goth like an Ur-Grue?:-)
Only if Ur-Grues wear a lot of black and glower at their computers while running troubleshooting ActiveDirectory, muttering about the cosmic futility life at 100baseT ethernet. =)
WEAR BOOTS
They are nice. You are likely to be hit on by a Goth...
Woohoo! Good advice. =) It certainly beats getting hit on by a Dellboxen server... over the head, that is, when it falls out of the rack.... =)
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Chief Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
I'm not a kernel hacker, but hasn't this already been done with the Adventure shell, and a few others which are based off of MUDs?
Then again, I guess that it's based off the the Infocom games, so that makes it slightly different. After all, it'll bring back memories to 'get babelfish' and 'put towel over head.'
But, darn, you gotta watch for them Grues....
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Chief Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
Now, if I were more of a conspiracy theorist than I already am, I'd say that this was a bio-engineered fungus. But who would develop it, I hear you asking? (Well, one of you asked it, at least.) The US Government in their top secret Plum Island research center (which has a biohazard rating two higher than the National Center for Disease Control!)? The NSA at Fort Meade? The Army biological weapons branch?
Worse! The RIAA!
Think about it. CD-Rs and CD-RWs are the demesne of music pir8s, and are a tool used for the theft of the property of the RIAA! Wouldn't it be great if the pirates had their tools eaten out from under them?
So, what happens? RIAA immunizes their CD's against this fungus. RIAA agents release it into the environment in colleges and in major metropolitan centers (i.e. anywhere there's a Tower Records.) Before you know it, CD-Rs are being eaten all over the place, CD burners become useless overnight, and millions of gigabytes of data are irrevocably lost faster than you can say "US Government Approved Methods for Destroying Media Containing Classified Data!"
It's a conspiracy, I tell you, a conspiracy!!
Ahem... uhm, that is, if I was any more of a conspiracy theorist than I already am. =)
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Chief Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
I have found that this has already actually happened.
SoundAmerica used to (and I believe still does) encode.wav files as.mp3, but the file extension is still.wav. What this means, is that Windows Media Player, for which you need this special codec, can play these.wav files, but WinAmp has a hard time, because it thinks these are.wav files when in reality, they're.mp3 files with.wav extensions. (I once renamed one of them from.wav to.mp3, and while the quality was sub-par WinAmp played it fine.)
In all this time, I have wondered who came up with this codec and this idea of making "MP3-encoded.WAV files." I was wondering if Frauhoffer would be interested in finding this out, but chances are, with Patent Madness striking business models these days, they probably already know.
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Chief Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
by my comment, I was referring to the old SCOTUS ruling about (to paraphrase) "the right to free speech ends at shouting 'fire!' in a crowded movie theater."
Now, shouting 'FIRE!' when there IS a fire sounds to me like a Pretty Good Idea. =) Shouting 'FIRE!' just to panic people is... well, just what is it? Fraud comes to mind, but it doesn't seem like a 'right' of any sort.
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Chief Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
Calling people fools for not believing in your cause is protected speech.
True. Better than burning them at the stake. *rimshot* =)
Asking the creators to compromise their ideals to gain users is entirely your right; just don't expect them to listen. Fool.:P
Ouch.;) Seriously, a good point. (Glad I worded it the way I had.) No, I can't seriously expect them to jump up and do what I say; Lordy, I would HOPE they wouldn't do that! =)
If it's their ideals that anyone who uses Winders is a fool, well, I'm not going to change anyone's mind on the Internet. =) I was just thinking that, maybe, they would want to get the word out, to get as many Freenet nodes out there, irrelevant of OS, and that if that was the case, then they might not want to alienate some not-as-humor-inclined. =)
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Chief Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
Having said that, the usage guide you point to isn't actually the usage guide at all, the actual usage guide you are thinking of is at http://freenetproject.org/quickguide/ and has been for months, and AFAIK there are no references to "fools" anywhere - so I really don't understand what you are talking about.
The link to the/freenet4fools directory was off of their downloads page, and it was being listed as the manual for the Windows version. It may very well be a link they missed to the "real" Windows manual.
As for the name of the book being a takeoff on the "for Dummies" books, I'll buy that; it just seems that 'Fool' is harsher than 'Dummy.' At this point, it's semantics and my personal opinion, so I'll conceed the point. =)
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Chief Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
So, "Freenet for Fools" was written by a Windows user. I think it was originally "Freenet for D*mmies," but because of trademark issues the name was changed.
If that's the case, I'll mitigate my comments, and note that the person who wrote that should consider that a large majority of users out there who might use Freenet are Windows users, and might not get the subtlity of the humor. =)
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Chief Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
Freenet is a darn good thing, and something we should all support in whatever ways we can. We MUST preserve free speech (not neccessarilly free-as-in-'FIRE!' speech, of course) on the net, if nothing else, and Freenet garauntees it.
I would like to entreat the guiding hands behind Freenet, however, to consider the greater audience out there. Yes, the project is working with Open Source tools, and that's a good thing! However, it must be accessable to everyone. They can't afford to alienate any potential users of Freenet. For that reason, calling the directory that the Windows usage guide in, 'Freenet for Fools,' could be considered insulting to Windows users.
I know, this is/., where anyone who relies entirely on a Windows machine is a chump, and just SO needs flaming change to get on the clue bus, hurled at him at supercavitating speeds. Come on, let's think about this maturely. I hate Microsoft as much as any other person who's had to clean up after BSODs (sometimes I can see a blue residue on the screen after rebooting...) but MS machines are Out There, and people will be using them.
Freenet essentially calling a fair amount of their user base 'fools' to their face will just turn those users away. "Oh, more elitist Linux users," they'll sigh. "If I join Freenet I'll just be exposed to more of that elitist crap. Screw it, I'm not putting up with that." And one more potential Freenet node disappears.
Good riddance to bad rubbish? You miss the point of Freenet. Freenet is Free Speech without harrassment. Free Speech without fear of being taken down by a government. Free Speech without fear of being dragged into a court. (And believe me, there are some courts in this world where you won't even have the courtesy of being ordered to bend over a barrel; a bullet in the back of the head is far more likely.)
Freenet should not involved in the OS warz. Maybe I'm blowing it out of proportion, but remember, this is coming from a grey-matta-flambe helpdesk drudge. That's all I have to say. =)
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Chief Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
A good reason NOT to visit Mr. Chiu's site is the obnoxious amount of pop-up windows that will fill your screen when you try to leave.
Caveat emptor. I personally believe that the spirit and soul can't be fettered by anything simplistic as mere magnets. But that's my crazed view. What's yours? =)
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Chief Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
Was the web developed in the course of establishing a patent? Hell no!
Neither was it developed as a commercial venture. It was a throught experiment which took off six ways to Sunday.
We need to face the fact that a lot of computer technology out there took some innovative ('real' innovative as opposed to 'Microsoft' innovative) thinking, some hardcore inventing, and some rather 1337 5k|1z. And while the core technologies of the net are open standards, i.e. anyone with the skills can read up on NFS and implement an app that makes use of NFS over TCP/IP, the applications of those technologies (hence the term 'apps') are what we most directly deal with, and which are currently patentable.
(Unless you happen to know someone who by whistling into a phone can log in to their ISP and send TCP/IP packets down the wire at 56Kbps.)
Now, I am all for free (as in freedom) software. Heck, I'm even all for free-as-in-bheer software. Open source is great for making apps that truly WORK for your company. However, I have known a few professional programmers, ones who live or die (figuratively) by the quality of their code, who put in a lot of time on their code, and most are rather apprehensive about their hard work being grabbed by someone too lazy to write their own code.
It's pretty sobering, if you think about it. How does a joe (or a jane, or a caitlin, if you speak Gaelic) earn a living writing code if someone can waltz up and use that same code, and make a bundle off of it? Take a small startup with a pretty nifty idea for an application. Have a team of programmers working day and night for six months. They come up with a beautiful piece of code... which is then gobbled up by some megalithic corporation that has A Name(tm) and rakes in the bucks while the startup falters.
There are protections against this. They're called patents.
Like it or not, there are some valid reasons for Intellectual Property. Personally, if someone can come up with a way of doing something better than a "closed-source" or IP-protected way, there shouldn't be a problem with that... as long as they conducted their work independantly and did not use even a part of the other methodology (outside of coincidentally, and not including reverse-engineering.)
This is already a viable and valid means of competition. However, this gets complicated when you get things like 'ruthless companies' and *ahem* 'embrace and extend.' Thus the new technology and methodology has to be protected as well, and we're back to IP again.
I guess what I'm trying to say is, I have some serious concerns about how a programmer (or musician, or author, or what-have-you) will actually receive fair and just compensation for their efforts. I haven't yet seen a system proposed here on Slashdot which adequately compensates any of the above for appreciated work.
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Chief Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
Echelon is an infomration-gathering system. The theory behind its operation is that it picks up key words in open communications. It cannot pick out encrypted words. By "encrypted" in this sense, I mean messages within messages, such as one phrase meaning something completely different than what it sounds. (For example: "Climb Mount Niitaki," I think, was the phrase used to initiate the Imperial Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. This phrase would ot have been picked up, if Echelon was operating during WWII, which it was not, since there are no "key" words for Echelon to latch onto, such as "bomb," "attack," "aircraft carrier," and the like.) Some people have claimed that Echelon has been expanded to enable it to monitor Internet traffic.
Furthermore, military traffic of a sensitive nature is sent encrypted over non-civilian channels. Echelon's entire purpose is the monitoring of civilian channels. This is of importance when combatting an insurrection or rebellion, when the participants will most likely need to rely on the existing civilian information infrastructure. However, when facing a full-fledged military force (or an insurrection force equipped by a foreign power with military-grade equipment) Echelon will fail because the targets of surveillance will no longer be using civilian channels.
This lends credence to the assertations of a report to the European Parliament in 1988 that Echelon "ECHELON is designed for primarily non-military targets: governments, organisations and businesses in virtually every country." (Reference) (In fact, go here to learn about the ACLU's take on Echelon.)
Echelon is intended for domestic monitoring. The only possible use such a thing could have is to monitor a nation's citizens for insurrection and seditious activities. The legal and moral grounds for a government to monitor it's citizens and persecute them for these crimes depends upon whom you ask.
Just as a point of fact:
It provided much defense against the nazi threat in WWII.
It did not. Echelon's groundwork was laid in 1947 as part of the UKUSA agreement, in which the United States and the United Kingdom (and by extension the British Commonwealth) would coordinate intelligence activities and share information. The actuall Echelon system itself was allegedly set up in 1971.
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Chief Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
As others pointed out, yeah, it's not MS code, it's code that MS ported. =) It's good that the engineers are respecting the GPL (I believe the original code was GPL'd, at least.)
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Chief Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
Sorry; didn't think it would press a button quite that hard. =6
You make a good point, though; ironically, there was a discussion some friends were having a while ago about how slang helps a subculture to make itself elitist. Thank you; your point about the smugness of the term 'sheeple' is well received.
(Betcha were expecting a flame, huh?;)
Seriously, though, I just found it interesting that they called the thing 'Fnord,' which is, in Robert Shea's Illuminatus! Trilogy, everywhere but seen by almost nobody. That'll probably map pretty well here; almost everyone won't see this server, one of the few (if there are even any others?) GPL'd packages to come out of Microsoft.
Then again, this IS less than a beta; it's some codeworkers cobbling together an IPv6 web server.
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Chief Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, it was a surprise when I heard the kind of Mellencamp-esque twang... but you know, I think it wouldn't have worked nearly as well without the images during the opening credits and the words to it. This is probably gonna be flamed, but I think the theme music/opening titles was really well done and added a nice falvor to the show. Sure, it wasn't a monster orchestral piece, but it worked. It really did make me think of things like The Right Stuff, and From The Earth To The Moon, and Apollo 13. And that seems to be what this whole new series is all about.
Ahhh... the Golden Age. Where the brave and bold Tellurians stood firm against a starkly monstrous and supremely, incontrovertably vicious foe, flinging actinic bolts from the refractory maws of their unbelievably powerful weapons, hurling the irresistable, ponderous mass of entire PLANETS at their enemies, amidst an astounding stream of adverbage! =)
I've very fond memories of the Lensman series. I know, I know, "Muddied thinking, youth!"
From the original article:
Peace and love? Kirk? I mean, besides the fact that he didn't always limit himself to homo sapiens, Kirk kicked butt and took names, he wasn't representative of any 'peace and love Federation.' Yeah, he met some hippies, but It's hard to see the 'Space Hippies' taking over the Feds. =)
This is, unfortunately, true.
I would like nothing better than to be a full-time network administrator. However, until recently, this was a solo shop with an insane number of computers and system, with vendors who refused to play nice with one another, and a management who had (has) unrealistic expectations of one human MIS person. So I was netad, sysad, helpdesk, tech liason... in other words, 'the comuter guy.' I would almost scream when someone called me 'the computer expert.'
Fortunately, I now have someone here to help me, but I keep hearing that management here is trying to cut corners again, and may want to get rid of him.
It was this job which is the nail in my IT coffin, after only eight months of greymatta flambe, and it will be my last job doing IT work professionally and full-time.
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Chief Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
I admit, I'm one of the ones who likes some of what Jon Katz writes. I'll also admit that a good deal of it may not be "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters." Actually, I think he could do well on Kuro5hin, and this isn't meant as a flame.
I am still looking forward to Final Fantasy, though. =)
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Chief Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
A movie that Jon Katz totally panned! I think that's a first for /. =)
I'm looking forward to seeing Final Fantasy, partly because of the excellent animation techniques (for anyone who's familiar with the difficulties of character modeling and animation: OMG! THE HAIR!) and partly because I rather like a side of mysticism with my order of sci-fi and Biggie hard-SF shake.
Of course, after reading Jon's review, I'll probably slate seeing Final Fantasy for a matinee than an evening showing.
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Chief Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
It is very important to point out that civil disobedience is more than just disobeying an unjust law. It carries with it the willingness to be arrested for the belief that it is an unjust law, and giving one's self to the courts for them to decide on the justness of a law.
Just breaking the law isn't going to do a whit of good. Know what will? Breaking an unjust law and getting arrested. Getting the people and the courts to realize how unjust that law is. Convincing a jury of your peers that this law has no business being in the books. Even, if it comes to it, getting slapped with a conviction and a ridiculous punishment. (What are the legistlated penalties for breaking the DMCA?)
But to do all that, you have to be arrested.
You have to accept the high probability that, if you break the law, you will be arrested. That is civil disobedience, like it or not.
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Chief Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
Ah, thanks for the information! =)
And, yes, Novell CNE is very hard. The 5.1 upgrade exam is particularly rough. I understand the MCSE upgrade to Win2K is also extraordinarilly brutal.
I'm glad I decided to get out of this gig. =)
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Chief Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
Cisco certification is indeed very hard. Cisco controls it completely, moreso than MS and Novell do. From what I understand, the highest level of Cisco cert -- Certified Cisco Network Engineer -- requires you to go out, physically, to Cisco's corp. headquarters, spend half a day taking an exam, and the second half of the day essentially rebuilding a router.
I may be wrong (IANACCNE?) and anyone who has actually taken this certification I gladly welcome to correct me!
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Chief Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
So, /. editors, when are we going to see the 'edited by' or 'update' line correcting the little gaffe above? =)
Not to bust chops, but let's not get into the habit of sneaky-quick-behind-back-fixing-errors. Nobody's gonna blame anyone for thinking that, at first glance, this was what the article was saying.
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Chief Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
The Defense Information Systems Agency isn't going to be ripping out Wintel machines and replacing them with Linux boxen. Yes, 25k penguins in the US DoD would be nice, but that's not happening here.
From the article:
Basically, they're ripping out an older, proprietary, closd-source system which hardly anyone ever uses anymore, and replacing it with StarOffice. The machines are already *NIXie-boxes (probably a flavor of SunOS/Solaris.) I wish we could claim this as a victory against Microsoft's monolithia, but this is a setup which never had MS in it's shop at all.
What is is a victory against is Microsoft's FUD about open source being 'cancerous' and the like. This could be construed as a slap in the face of Microsoft by the DoD, arguably the second-most number-crunching group of peopl ein the US Government. (The first being, of course, the Internal Revenue Service, the tax collectors. Come on, the US Government has SOME sense of priorities! ;)
I use StarOffice for myself, and I'm very pleased with it overall. It has a relatively small footprint, the features I need, and it's nice and flexible. I find it's a little buggy, but with a situation like this Sun will likely very much want to work out all the bugs.
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Chief Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
Good point. Does it show how long ago I last played with this sort of thing? =)
Coming soon, from InfoGuin, the only Linux distro to come with a star chart and a First Contact manual! Only if Ur-Grues wear a lot of black and glower at their computers while running troubleshooting ActiveDirectory, muttering about the cosmic futility life at 100baseT ethernet. =) Woohoo! Good advice. =) It certainly beats getting hit on by a Dellboxen server... over the head, that is, when it falls out of the rack.... =)---
Chief Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
I'm not a kernel hacker, but hasn't this already been done with the Adventure shell, and a few others which are based off of MUDs?
Then again, I guess that it's based off the the Infocom games, so that makes it slightly different. After all, it'll bring back memories to 'get babelfish' and 'put towel over head.'
But, darn, you gotta watch for them Grues....
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Chief Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
Now, if I were more of a conspiracy theorist than I already am, I'd say that this was a bio-engineered fungus. But who would develop it, I hear you asking? (Well, one of you asked it, at least.) The US Government in their top secret Plum Island research center (which has a biohazard rating two higher than the National Center for Disease Control!)? The NSA at Fort Meade? The Army biological weapons branch?
Worse! The RIAA!
Think about it. CD-Rs and CD-RWs are the demesne of music pir8s, and are a tool used for the theft of the property of the RIAA! Wouldn't it be great if the pirates had their tools eaten out from under them?
So, what happens? RIAA immunizes their CD's against this fungus. RIAA agents release it into the environment in colleges and in major metropolitan centers (i.e. anywhere there's a Tower Records.) Before you know it, CD-Rs are being eaten all over the place, CD burners become useless overnight, and millions of gigabytes of data are irrevocably lost faster than you can say "US Government Approved Methods for Destroying Media Containing Classified Data!"
It's a conspiracy, I tell you, a conspiracy!!
Ahem... uhm, that is, if I was any more of a conspiracy theorist than I already am. =)
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Chief Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
I have found that this has already actually happened.
SoundAmerica used to (and I believe still does) encode .wav files as .mp3, but the file extension is still .wav. What this means, is that Windows Media Player, for which you need this special codec, can play these .wav files, but WinAmp has a hard time, because it thinks these are .wav files when in reality, they're .mp3 files with .wav extensions. (I once renamed one of them from .wav to .mp3, and while the quality was sub-par WinAmp played it fine.)
In all this time, I have wondered who came up with this codec and this idea of making "MP3-encoded .WAV files." I was wondering if Frauhoffer would be interested in finding this out, but chances are, with Patent Madness striking business models these days, they probably already know.
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Chief Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
by my comment, I was referring to the old SCOTUS ruling about (to paraphrase) "the right to free speech ends at shouting 'fire!' in a crowded movie theater."
Now, shouting 'FIRE!' when there IS a fire sounds to me like a Pretty Good Idea. =) Shouting 'FIRE!' just to panic people is... well, just what is it? Fraud comes to mind, but it doesn't seem like a 'right' of any sort.
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Chief Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
Ouch. ;) Seriously, a good point. (Glad I worded it the way I had.) No, I can't seriously expect them to jump up and do what I say; Lordy, I would HOPE they wouldn't do that! =)
If it's their ideals that anyone who uses Winders is a fool, well, I'm not going to change anyone's mind on the Internet. =) I was just thinking that, maybe, they would want to get the word out, to get as many Freenet nodes out there, irrelevant of OS, and that if that was the case, then they might not want to alienate some not-as-humor-inclined. =)
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Chief Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
The link to the /freenet4fools directory was off of their downloads page, and it was being listed as the manual for the Windows version. It may very well be a link they missed to the "real" Windows manual.
As for the name of the book being a takeoff on the "for Dummies" books, I'll buy that; it just seems that 'Fool' is harsher than 'Dummy.' At this point, it's semantics and my personal opinion, so I'll conceed the point. =)
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Chief Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
If that's the case, I'll mitigate my comments, and note that the person who wrote that should consider that a large majority of users out there who might use Freenet are Windows users, and might not get the subtlity of the humor. =)
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Chief Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
Freenet is a darn good thing, and something we should all support in whatever ways we can. We MUST preserve free speech (not neccessarilly free-as-in-'FIRE!' speech, of course) on the net, if nothing else, and Freenet garauntees it.
I would like to entreat the guiding hands behind Freenet, however, to consider the greater audience out there. Yes, the project is working with Open Source tools, and that's a good thing! However, it must be accessable to everyone. They can't afford to alienate any potential users of Freenet. For that reason, calling the directory that the Windows usage guide in, 'Freenet for Fools,' could be considered insulting to Windows users.
I know, this is /., where anyone who relies entirely on a Windows machine is a chump, and just SO needs flaming change to get on the clue bus, hurled at him at supercavitating speeds. Come on, let's think about this maturely. I hate Microsoft as much as any other person who's had to clean up after BSODs (sometimes I can see a blue residue on the screen after rebooting...) but MS machines are Out There, and people will be using them.
Freenet essentially calling a fair amount of their user base 'fools' to their face will just turn those users away. "Oh, more elitist Linux users," they'll sigh. "If I join Freenet I'll just be exposed to more of that elitist crap. Screw it, I'm not putting up with that." And one more potential Freenet node disappears.
Good riddance to bad rubbish? You miss the point of Freenet. Freenet is Free Speech without harrassment. Free Speech without fear of being taken down by a government. Free Speech without fear of being dragged into a court. (And believe me, there are some courts in this world where you won't even have the courtesy of being ordered to bend over a barrel; a bullet in the back of the head is far more likely.)
Freenet should not involved in the OS warz. Maybe I'm blowing it out of proportion, but remember, this is coming from a grey-matta-flambe helpdesk drudge. That's all I have to say. =)
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Chief Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
A good reason NOT to visit Mr. Chiu's site is the obnoxious amount of pop-up windows that will fill your screen when you try to leave.
Caveat emptor. I personally believe that the spirit and soul can't be fettered by anything simplistic as mere magnets. But that's my crazed view. What's yours? =)
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Chief Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
Neither was it developed as a commercial venture. It was a throught experiment which took off six ways to Sunday.
We need to face the fact that a lot of computer technology out there took some innovative ('real' innovative as opposed to 'Microsoft' innovative) thinking, some hardcore inventing, and some rather 1337 5k|1z. And while the core technologies of the net are open standards, i.e. anyone with the skills can read up on NFS and implement an app that makes use of NFS over TCP/IP, the applications of those technologies (hence the term 'apps') are what we most directly deal with, and which are currently patentable.
(Unless you happen to know someone who by whistling into a phone can log in to their ISP and send TCP/IP packets down the wire at 56Kbps.)
Now, I am all for free (as in freedom) software. Heck, I'm even all for free-as-in-bheer software. Open source is great for making apps that truly WORK for your company. However, I have known a few professional programmers, ones who live or die (figuratively) by the quality of their code, who put in a lot of time on their code, and most are rather apprehensive about their hard work being grabbed by someone too lazy to write their own code.
It's pretty sobering, if you think about it. How does a joe (or a jane, or a caitlin, if you speak Gaelic) earn a living writing code if someone can waltz up and use that same code, and make a bundle off of it? Take a small startup with a pretty nifty idea for an application. Have a team of programmers working day and night for six months. They come up with a beautiful piece of code... which is then gobbled up by some megalithic corporation that has A Name(tm) and rakes in the bucks while the startup falters.
There are protections against this. They're called patents.
Like it or not, there are some valid reasons for Intellectual Property. Personally, if someone can come up with a way of doing something better than a "closed-source" or IP-protected way, there shouldn't be a problem with that... as long as they conducted their work independantly and did not use even a part of the other methodology (outside of coincidentally, and not including reverse-engineering.)
This is already a viable and valid means of competition. However, this gets complicated when you get things like 'ruthless companies' and *ahem* 'embrace and extend.' Thus the new technology and methodology has to be protected as well, and we're back to IP again.
I guess what I'm trying to say is, I have some serious concerns about how a programmer (or musician, or author, or what-have-you) will actually receive fair and just compensation for their efforts. I haven't yet seen a system proposed here on Slashdot which adequately compensates any of the above for appreciated work.
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Chief Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
I'm sorry, Lover's Arrival, but I must disagree.
Echelon is an infomration-gathering system. The theory behind its operation is that it picks up key words in open communications. It cannot pick out encrypted words. By "encrypted" in this sense, I mean messages within messages, such as one phrase meaning something completely different than what it sounds. (For example: "Climb Mount Niitaki," I think, was the phrase used to initiate the Imperial Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. This phrase would ot have been picked up, if Echelon was operating during WWII, which it was not, since there are no "key" words for Echelon to latch onto, such as "bomb," "attack," "aircraft carrier," and the like.) Some people have claimed that Echelon has been expanded to enable it to monitor Internet traffic.
Furthermore, military traffic of a sensitive nature is sent encrypted over non-civilian channels. Echelon's entire purpose is the monitoring of civilian channels. This is of importance when combatting an insurrection or rebellion, when the participants will most likely need to rely on the existing civilian information infrastructure. However, when facing a full-fledged military force (or an insurrection force equipped by a foreign power with military-grade equipment) Echelon will fail because the targets of surveillance will no longer be using civilian channels.
This lends credence to the assertations of a report to the European Parliament in 1988 that Echelon "ECHELON is designed for primarily non-military targets: governments, organisations and businesses in virtually every country." (Reference) (In fact, go here to learn about the ACLU's take on Echelon.)
Echelon is intended for domestic monitoring. The only possible use such a thing could have is to monitor a nation's citizens for insurrection and seditious activities. The legal and moral grounds for a government to monitor it's citizens and persecute them for these crimes depends upon whom you ask.
Just as a point of fact:
It did not. Echelon's groundwork was laid in 1947 as part of the UKUSA agreement, in which the United States and the United Kingdom (and by extension the British Commonwealth) would coordinate intelligence activities and share information. The actuall Echelon system itself was allegedly set up in 1971.
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Chief Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
As others pointed out, yeah, it's not MS code, it's code that MS ported. =) It's good that the engineers are respecting the GPL (I believe the original code was GPL'd, at least.)
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Chief Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
Sorry; didn't think it would press a button quite that hard. =6
You make a good point, though; ironically, there was a discussion some friends were having a while ago about how slang helps a subculture to make itself elitist. Thank you; your point about the smugness of the term 'sheeple' is well received.
(Betcha were expecting a flame, huh? ;)
Seriously, though, I just found it interesting that they called the thing 'Fnord,' which is, in Robert Shea's Illuminatus! Trilogy, everywhere but seen by almost nobody. That'll probably map pretty well here; almost everyone won't see this server, one of the few (if there are even any others?) GPL'd packages to come out of Microsoft.
Then again, this IS less than a beta; it's some codeworkers cobbling together an IPv6 web server.
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Chief Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World