I run OrCAD schematic capture and PCB layout DOS version 2.01 on a 1GigaHertz AMD Duron. This is the same program that I learned electronic design CAD on in 1990.
It is a dream combination. I have all the macro keys set-up right. The screen and program can finally keep up with my input. The PCB design compiles as fast as I can move from the mouse to the keyboard (I used to take a coffee break at this point when running OrCAD on a 286).
The screen image is a very cool, beautiful, and efficient black backgrounded and colored foreground of traces and symbols.
I have used the later OrCAD versions of these programs in various jobs. But they suck. They're ugly and have a terrible user-interface. DOS electronic CAD has finally gotten hardware worthy of the program.
Did I mention that I can also listen to WinAmp music, download files, and convert DVDs to DivX in the background while still doing OrCAD development work at full speed?
"Microsoft is encouraging people to throw away computers, huh? [stroking chin] Interesting... but how does this relate to their involvement in the JFK assassination? More research is needed..."
The Warren Commission had to get rid of many megabytes of data related to the investigation of the assassination for fear that future researchers using advanced artificial intelligence algorythms (cool, two root Arabic words in the same English sentence) would uncover the grand conspiracy.
They turned to a 'boy genius' 9-year-old computer whiz living in a middle-class suburb in Seattle. No one would believe that a boy would be able to accomplish this task, and so the deed went completely unnoticed. Twenty years later, huge government contracts went secretly to the now-grown-up whiz's little company (along with the services of the government's most advanvanced programmer's who were able to the boy's hopeless operating system into near working condition).
If many little community television stations go on-air at the same time that the majors go off the air, the FCC is going to be mighty busy.
Visiting a campus dorm with federal officers and future-career-destroying injuctions will quickly shut down all the middle-class DIY techno-nerd microstations. Shutting down the militant black-power gang-protected stations broadcasting from the ghetto housing projects to all the people in 'da community' with no television anymore is quite another matter.
This may require calling out the National Guard. But there is no National Guard anymore. It's been transformed into the President's private little army and sent off to an endless war on the other side of the world.
The primary issue that I am trying to raise is whether anyone in the NTSC decision loop is actually considering this possiblity.
Although I hate spam as much as the next guy, is participating in a DDOS attack the way to bring spammers to their knees?
Yes. If it works. We need something that works NOW against spammers more than we need ethical debates about how to prevent people from stealing large amounts of a de-facto public resource for their own personal gain.
The ability to send near instant character-based messages to anyone, anywhere for nearly no cost using ultra-high speed digital data links is a public good. Filling these channels with hundreds of millions of unwanted and unrequested commercial messages by taking advantage of a technical feature permitting the same message to be sent to millions of people at no cost is a theft of a new public community (abet a global community) resource.
We no longer permit private individuals or corporations to take unlimited amounts of other public resources like air, water, and frequency spectrum for private benefit. Why should we question the necessary means that are employed to prevent the theft of the newest public resource?
Spammers must be deterred. So at this time, whatever works to prevent this destruction of a new and fragile global public resource should be accepted.
In the same way pirate radio simply doesn't exist in the US, pirate TV will not do so either.
Pirate FM radio does exist in the USA but only a few channels in hyper-dense markets like Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York. Individual channels come and go depending upon how necessary that the FCC feels that the station needs to be shut down.
I suspect that pirate TV will happen when NTSC broadcasting goes off the air, which is scheduled for Dec 31, 2006. Suddenly there will be millions of TVs that will be receiving nothing but static and millions of people ready to watch anything. If you want to get a message out but couldn't afford expensive television advertizing rates before, that time will be your chance. Just have your own transmitter (a small neighborhood one to start) ready to go as soon as the major commercial stations switches off.
Since this big shut-down is tentatively scheduled to occur in 17 months, now would be the time to get the equipment ready for broadcasting whatever you want when the majors go off the air. Uncensored footage of the endless war, antiwar documentaries, conspiracy research, 'truth about UFOs', corporate coverups, home porn, whatever. When the television airwaves go off, there is going to be once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to fill the vacuum with your stuff. Pirate and Guerrilla television will be actually exciting for the first time.
Nuclear weapons have made an enormous change in the way that the world works. A change that is very slowly infusing public awareness.
Nuclear weapons have made the military obsolete. The primary reason for having an Army, Navy, and Air Force is to prevent people outside your country or homeland from coming to your homeland and killing your males, raping your females, enslaving your children, and stealing all your resources and property. To do this, the militaries have traditionally called upon young men kill the other young men in the invading army and to be killed themselves. When one army is skillful enough at employing violence at another army, they have succeeded in protecting the homeland. In reality, conventional wars with conventional armies go back and forth until both sides run out of money and solders. Then everyone goes home, fucks, farms, and rebuilds for a generation and the process begins again. It's an endless cycle of murder and revenge.
But with nuclear weapons, the military is powerless to prevent another military from destroying the cities of the homeland. Regardless of how many tanks, guns, money, and solders that they have, they simply can not prevent the other side's military from destroying the country. The only way to win a nuclear war is to not have one. The defense of the country shifts from the military to the diplomats and those that control the nuclear weapons. Because it has now become impossible for the military to actually do what they have traditionally done, the military has become obsolete and redundant. Since it can't protect the country, it is no longer needed to protect the country. This realignment of the importance of the military became apparent during the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. The entire Vietnam war was simply an attempt for the US military to justify its continued existence as a conventional organization of bodies, ships, and guns.
Today, thirty years after the defeat of the conventional military in Vietnam, the US military plays a different role in the USA. It is no longer concerned with defending the homeland from external enemies. This function is done by the people who control the nuclear weapons. I doubt that those people consider themselves as part of the traditional guns and troops military. It's certainly possible that they will at sometime in the next 50 years decide to separate from the control of the US government and become a sovereign state unto themselves supported by global corporations. Nothing on earth could stop them from doing this.
The function of the traditional military in the USA today is:
1) To provide a framework for the continuous transfer of billions of dollars in 'Defense contracts' from taxpayers to corporations.
2) To provide systematic application of violence in developing countries in order to force their leaders to adhere to the policies that primarily enrich global corporations.
3) To provide a way to kill off surplus working- class young people who have no function in the new gentrified Disney-Baby Gap yuppie American middle-class economy.
By breaking the endless cycle of institionalized murder and destruction caused by the war cycle of the traditional military structure, nuclear weapons have done more than any other development to bring about an era of permanent peace and prosperity in the developed world since the end of World War Two. The internet and the continuing communications revolution of the 1990s will prevent the nuclear weapons from being used in 'Dr. Strangelove' omnicidal war.
Hello,
I used to work for a small German company that made lasers for PCB stencils and PCB milling machines. They kept putting more and more money into getting the precision of the milling machines finer until they began to cost over $50,000.
One day I pointed out to the branch manager that tiny companies like Olimet and SparkFun were offering PCB board manufacturing services at $2.50 per square inch. I showed some numbers that with the cost of the machines, the salary of the operator, and the expense of the consumables that there were no circumstances that anyone who bought out machine could ever come out ahead financially. I said that we needed to start making inexpensive machines that sold for less than $1000 and accept a precision that would be acceptable to 95% of our present customers and all of our future customers.
Within one week, they shut off my e-mail, hired someone else to do exactly my job, and then fired me in a way that made it impossible for me to get unemployment.
I learned two valuable lessons. Never work for stupid people. And never work for Germans. Maybe that was one lesson.
Shipping a DVD-ROM from the USA to Italy costs 2 euros. A DVD-ROM will hold 1000 songs. In this case, I believe that a disk would be better than a broadband connection.
The big problem with legal downloads is that the downloader doesn't know what the music will sound like until it is actually downloaded and played. Which takes a long time and consumes a lot of bandwidth. Internet downloading is very inefficient way to become introduced to new music.
What the music download sites should do is get the 'artists' to agree to put one of their (hopefully best) recordings (3-5 minutes max) in MP3 or OGG format on a DVD-ROM. These DVD-ROMs can hold about 1000 songs in high-quality MP3 format. Blank DVD-ROMs are selling for about $0.40US each now.
People interested in new music would contact the New Music Artists Association NMAA and order one of this month's DVDs sent to them in the mail for a few dollars. With a thousand songs on each DVD, hundreds of new artists can get their music exposed to hundreds of thousands of people without signing away their future earnings to the currupt music recording distribution companies, the RIAA.
All the heat generated over downloading really masks the real fact that downloading is the worst way to become exposed to new music. The limits of bandwidth are really a gift for RIAA. People get quite discouraged with the whole concept of new music through downloading after getting five or six tunes over a dial-up connection and finding none of them are of any interest.
But then again, the RIAA (and by this I mean the companies funding this group, of course) is not interested in promoting new music. They want to continue to get the endless free money that comes from selling the same old recordings over and over again. It's like being a lumber company in a magic forest where the trees regrow a hundred feet overnight after being cut down.
Over harsh punishment for computer crimes is a bad idea.
1) It's too easy to make someone else look guilty. If you like the girlfriend of the guy in the next cubicle, buy a virus from your local friendly illegal substances dealer and make it appear that it was originated by the guy in the next cubicle. Then offer your most 'deepest' condolences to his newly-available girlfriend.
2) The hackers/virus specialists aren't the cause of the problem. The problem is poorly designed and written operating systems. Killing people who develop applications for the OS isn't going to help fix the OS.
3) The courts can't differenciate those who develop rogue code for 'national security' regardless of the nation from those who write it for amusement or corporate interests.
The best way to deal with virus writers is to make them liable to civil lawsuits for the damage that they cause. Straightforward tort law. Any 17-year-old hacker who realizes that he is going to have to write database front-ends in Visual Basic for the next thirty years to pay off the damage his cool virus has done will reconsider releasing it.
Also remind business leaders that using proprietary operating systems exposes them to underground attack because there isn't an open feedback loop where thousands of qualified people are constantly examining the OS source for flaws.
For RSI the split-and-curved keyboard helps quite a bit. Avoid the old Microsoft one because its keys don't move up and down well.
It also helps to occasionally put 3 or 4 inch books under your elbows.
After typing sessions a few minutes with the thinking putty helps. Kneading bread dough also helps strengthing hands and avoiding nerve damage. It's also good for making cheap pizza.
Also consider experimenting with a speech-to-text program. They have to be trained to an individual's voice but they respond well when used with a fast 3 GigaHertz CPU. They can be a real pain for use in a programming format until you assign certain words and phrases to the formatting operations common to writing code.
This guy sounds like a totally clueless corporate jerk.
A major reason that programmers created open source was to be able to have control of the tools that they use to create profit for their employers.
Computer systems are arbitrary and very complicated. Yet companies use programmers and information system professionals for ad-hoc tasks only to discard them like used tissues when the project is working. On the next project, the programmer is expected to master a completely different set of symbols (an operating system interface) before starting to do productive work.
Open source software is a means by which the productive members (i.e. the people who actually do the real work) of the IT community are forcing a standardization of corporate systems in order to greatly increase their productivity. Mastering one operating system means that the programmer/analyst/specialist doesn't have to waste time learning a new system with every project. Making the complicated software free forces the corporations to adopt the new standard OS on 'bottom-line' grounds. Having the source available and adaptable creates huge feedback loops which is the best way to find and remove deep bugs that always arise in a project of this magnitude.
This guy and all others like him in the managerial suites prove once again that engineers, programmers, and system specialists are simply smarter than they are. He should really 'just shut the fuck up' (a cute American expression meaning to restrain yourself from public displays of stupidity) and give quiet thanks that the people more intelligent than him continue to permit this illusion of managerial superiority.
Hello,
The 60's spy-secret agent films that had the self-destructing messages were actually not James Bond movies. This plot device was from the original Mission: Impossible television show (1966-1970).
Each hour-long episode would always start with Peter Graves retreiving an envelope of photos and a small hand-held tape recorder that had been previously stashed discretely in a public place. The tape recording would say "Good afternoon, Mr. Phelps. The man you are looking at is -some Slavic name-. He has either developed a major scientific discovery vital to the free world, or is the leader of a critical resistance movement in -some Eastern European country-. He is being held by this man,-some other vaguely Slavic name-.
"Your mission, Jim, should you decide to accept it, is to rescue -the first guy- and bring the documents of the new discovery to the free world.
As usual, should you or any of your IM force be caught or killed, the secretary will disavow any knowledge of your actions.
Good luck, Jim. This tape will self-destruct in five seconds". Then there was a close-up of smoke coming out of the little tape recorder.
The rest of the show was straightforward. Greg Morris would design and build some advanced custom electronics. Barbara Bain would vamp someone. Martin Landau would create a latex face mask that made him look just like someone else. Peter Lupus would carry away someone hidden in a box.
The elaborate plan would go wrong about 2/3rds of the way through every episode. But teamwork and intelligence and lots of good luck would always save the day. The last scene was the original guy in the first photo from the beginning of the show shaking hands with the Impossible Mission force while riding on the airplane or in the back of the truck to freedom.
The 1960's Mission:Impossible television show had nothing in common with the 1990s movies of the same name starring what's-his-name.
The James Bond character was a borderline psychopath who happened to be a super-handsome 'babe magnet'. He enjoyed killing and never avoided an opportunity to do so. He rarely planned his moves and usually worked alone. Sex and alchool were just 'fuel' to him. This was much more so with the original Bond (played by Sean Connery) than the other Bond actors.
The Mission:Impossible team never deliberately killed anyone as part of their elaborately detailed planning and were too disciplined to compromise the mission with sex and alchool diversions.
The Austin Powers character attempts to mix the secret agent with the swinging 60's youth and music culture. But these two cultures were like oil and water. They never mixed or crossed over. Austin Powers only works on young people who can see both the secret agent char and the Mod-pop star as equally ridiculous period characters. Middle-aged people can't understand the concept behind Austin Powers at all. It just falls flat. The only successful attempt to mold together secret-agent and pop-Mod genres was the original '60s "Avengers" television series with Diana Rigg and Patrick MacNee. And that show only worked because it had no politics, no real violence, no real plots, and no pop music. All it had was two great lead characters.
A new Harry Potter book is a big event for young people. Young being 9-15 years old. In my city the huge local bookstore stays open on a Harry Potter release night until about 2am. Children and young people show up by the hundreds; dressed up as their favorite Potter character. They actually convince their parents to bring them downtown and let them stay up until 1am when they fall asleep in car on the way home with their new Harry Potter book in their hands.
A new Windows release midnight sale is just a dud fest for insomniac nerds. But a new Harry Potter release is a big event for young people, bigger than Christmas. For most suburban 12 year olds, it's the first time being at public gathering late at night outside their home. They probably won't be downtown again after midnight until they're old enough to sneak into clubs with fake ID.
I don't really understand why us I don't really understand why us geeks like to hoard intellectual property so much..
Geeks hoard 'intellectual property' because they have a deep respect for it and reasonable distrust of corporate interests to the protect it.
Entertainment corps are only interested in money. When the individual product stops selling above a certain number, it will be simply removed from the market by the corps because the cost of supporting it will be greater than the profit resulting from its sale. In reasonable times, the product would have passed into public domain by this point.
But since the entertainment corps stole the public domain, and since they plan to add unbreakable DRM to the product, the work of art will disappear from the earth should the corps decide to stop selling it.
By 'pirating' it, geeks are protecting current works of film and music not only for their own amusement but also for generations hundreds of years from now.
I read Start Up and really enjoyed it. Dr. Kaplan sounds smart and a nice person to work with.
At the time, I was working at PI Systems in Portland Oregon. This company made a 'pen computer' nearly identical to the one produced at GO. IIRC, they never sold a single unit.
They, and all the other pen computer companies, were wiped out by the Apple Newton and by the inability of 1992 technology to actually deliver a handheld computer that actually did what the marketers were claiming that it would do.
Microsoft was operating on institutional paranoia at that time. If they had actually examined any of the pen computers availible, they would have quickly realized that none of them were ever any threat to Windows. Most of them didn't really work at all.
Palm bought all the technology from the 1993 era pen computer companies and fashioned it into a real machine about five years later when Moore's law actually made it possible to make and market a hand-held.
Hello,
I get DVDs at the local library. They circulate for free. The best picks are usually in the metro branch libraries on the border of the city and the suburbs or the branch of the suburban county library system located in the neighborhood with the most college graduates. Check also on-line listings for the local library. You can often have the titles sent to your closest neighborhood branch. Rural patrons can often have titles mailed to them at reduced postal rates.
The library has a fair amount of last years hits and older. They are always in circulation. Some titles, like the fifty or so unknown Mexican titles, never circulate off the shelves of the wealthy suburban libraries.
Some older and foreign gems are simply not well known. If you can stand to watch black/white and subtitles, I recommend:
Beauty and the Beast - the original French live version from 1946.
Jules and Jim - 1962 Beautiful Jeanne Moreau as the original psycho-bitch from hell that no normal man can avoid falling in love with.
Anything Hollywood with Cary Grant, Paul Newman, Kirk Douglas, William Powell, Humphrey Bogart.
Any Samurai movie from Japan, especially those with Toshiro Mifune.
Ah, hell, check out the library, the stuff is free. Just be sure to get it back on time.
It's great that people are looking in the bargain bin for quality entertainment. Steven Segal is considered pretty low-brow by film critics, but his films are well photographed, well-paced, well-edited, and fun to watch. The characters are stereotypes and the plots follow well-worn paths, but that doesn't change the basic quality of the movie.
His films end up selling four for ten because so many copies of the title get made. When all the sales are made of an individual film at list price, the disk owners have to choose whether to lower the price to move the product or hold the price high and sell small amounts to people who will expected to become fans of the film in the future. People who are holding an extra hundred thousand Segal DVDs lower the price, while those holding a few thousand copies of the latest film of an European director who wins many festival awards but doesn't get seen outside NY and LA will accept lower sales at full list price. In "da biz" one never knows if the unknown director will get hot next year.
Hopefully the decreasing cost of actually pressing the DVDs will make it possible for obscure foreign titles that win prestigous film festivals overseas to be released in speciality rental shops and mail-order services. This is the long tail of quality that will keep film/movies profitable when people aren't going out to see movies like they do now.
It would be really great (real neat, insanely great) if someone could persuade Netflix to partner with the major European studios to get some great films circulating in North America that wouldn't otherwise because of the print costs, subtitle costs, and distribution costs. It costs a ton of money to bring European, Asian, Indian, and developing world films to the US and present them in a way that will cover the costs. Distributing them on DVD through the mail would open a vast new market. Unfortunately the movie industry "da biz" is dominated by shell-shocked cement heads, both here and even more so overseas. I doubt anyone at NetFlix has the finesse and savoir-faire to pull this off. Especially since they chose to have their headquarters in Los Gatos. They're probably spending more time checking out the babes at Great Bear than plotting the overthrow,..er, transformation of the global film industry.
It could make law enforcement officers hesitant to actually inflict the punishment.
In my experience and reading, this is rarely the case. Having insane punishments for common activities that are defined as crimes in order to harass a certain political or minority group often results in the increased willingness for the 'criminals' to kill the police when an arrest appears to be imminent. When the penality for killing the arrestor is the same as the penality for the minor offence, people have nothing to lose by just blasting away whenever it begins to appear like an arrest for some minor crime might happen. This sometimes happened in the early 1970's when returning Vietnam veterans found themselves facing long prison terms in the USA for being caught smoking marijuana. Marijuana use was common in Vietnam and was discovered to be harmless. Murder was common also in Vietnam, both of the enemy, the local civilians, and by the end of the war, of the butt-head officers as well. When the police in America found that returning veterans would actually shoot the arresting officer instead of face 10 years in prison for smoking a joint, the laws were changed to decrimialize marijuana posession in most states.
This is relevant to copyright 'crimes' because it is basically the same kind of legal situation. It is the use of extraordinarily harsh penalities to systematically imprison a specific and focused minority. In five years, no rich Republican (or local EU equalivent) will ever be prosecuted for copyright, but young people protesting the Iraq/Iran war draft will be sent to prison by the thousands. In the EU, the illegal listeners of music who are in unpopular minorities will be either deported or exiled to the poorest regions of the EU.
This is the way that the world works.
There are two reasons for all the grammar and spelling errors. One is that computers and the internet have removed any difference between typing and publishing on the web, even posting a message to a popular website. With paper publishing, several people view the text before it is inked to paper. They are trained to catch spelling and grammar errors.
Secondly, there are no tools built in to text entry that catch spelling and grammar errors. I make mistakes in every post I put on Slashdot and see them after they've been sent. I have to write a message in the Slashdot text buffer, open MS Word, cut-and-paste the message from Slashdot to Word, use Word's spelling tools, fix the obvious, then copy-and-paste it back. Even something a simple as a piece of code that capitalizes the letter 'i' between white space and other characters would be welcome.
I've always found it intriguing that a programmer who could master several arcane computer languages (especially since computers are notably intolerant of errors), could fail so utterly to master his own native human language.
Computers are absurdly tolerant of errors. It's the compiliers and assemblers that catch everything first in computer languages. Anyone learning C programming without a knowledgable tutor around would best be advised to take some 'soothing potion' before attempting to compile their first simple program. You're guaranteed to get many, many incomprehensible error messages that will leave you flopping on the floor in despair. There still is no compiler that explains all the errors that you get in simple, easy-to-understand language. Thirty years, a billion lines of code, and we're still left with the same deranged error handling messages inserted on the fly back in the 1970s.
And there is no way to tell if the text writer is a native speaker of English or has had years of study. English is a notoriously difficult language to master. My postings in non-English languages makes me appear retarded. I now funnel everything non-English into www.systransoft.com because it seems to be an accurate translation.
The real problem of bad English in web postings is that it chokes the machine language translators. And by the way, it's the 21st century, where's our speech-to-text?
Hello,
I remember reading about this procedure in BYTE when the Mac came out. I was in tech school then and couldn't afford anything more than a Commodore 64. If I recall correctly, the article recommended cleaning out the circuit board holes with a toothpick. A Mac user could save several hundred dollars by buying the memory chips mail-order and doing the upgrade themselves.
Then, there were several bugs found in the original ROM and they issued a recall. Mac buyers would bring the machines to the local Apple computer store and get the ROM swapped. Steven Jobs decided that any Mac mobo with a non-Apple memory upgrade would not be allowed to have the debugged ROM installed.
I was stunned (easy to do to a student new to the personal computer industry). I realized then that Apple was a company that hid a fundamental sleazy and predatory nature under a blizard of 'New Age' advertizements. It's corporate image of being a working partner with the information age pioneers was a purchased sham.
To this day, I've never trusted them or believed their image. I have marvelled at the design of some of their products. But at its heart, the personal computer industry is about ever-increasing performance vs. price issues, not design.
It's amazing how some nasty little business decision can turn off potential customers for very long periods of time. When a former employer was doing the same thing, I expressed my reservations about the practice, citing the above example. I was then promptly fired. I've learned to just shut up, now at work, and express opinions on the web.
These sleazy pop-up ad makers are a public nuisance. They are a major source of pollution in the internet experience. Microsoft should have just bullied them out of the way.
The previous poster was right about making have these shitheads in the kernel. Microsoft would never pay $500 million to buy a company in order to get them to stop harassing people. It's most likely that Microsoft is buying this technology to constantly check if the individual copy of Windows on a PC is registered with them. If not (or if the registration number doesn't match the microprocessor ID number secretly included in the registration process), then the pop-up message routines embedded in the Windows kernel will incessantly blast the user to transfer the full list price from their checking account to Microsoft.
But, like all Microsoft stuff, it won't work completely right and even after paying, the poor schmucks will continue to be blasted with annoying messages. Microsoft will charge them a service fee for problem solving, an activation fee, a supplemental fee for having used an unregistered copy of windows, a fee for having been born, etc...
This could be good for Linux if Microsoft if Gates finally makes good on his famous 1977 letter of intent to stop people from using software without paying him. People use Windows because it is easy, more-or-less, and because Linux is such a pain in the ass to work with due to the inability of its designers to transcend their 'computer priesthood' mentality. I realize that comment will get the message marked as a troll, but, beautiful slashdaughters, it's so true.
But if Microsoft decides to use this new technology to harass the hell out of people, then they will come to Linux, kicking and cursing the whole way, and they will provide the major boost and surge in popularity that will break the Microsoft monopoly.
In this corner, one mega-corporation owning the monopoly on an essesential technology found in every business in the world and most middle-class homes globally. A company known for only employing the best and the brightest throughout the world, and having billions of dollars in cash to fight with...
and...
In the other corner... a sovereign state. A national government. Abet a rocky, mostly desolate, small country with 1/5 of its land located north of the Arctic Circle. But, blessed with a million or so intelligent, civilized, and organized people (with their own king). A proud and powerful Viking heritage...and billions of dollars in cash from offshore oil to fight with... Well, I like Norway. Expensive as hell, women to die for, a language that will kill you, and fertile, livable countryside around Oslo. I even get mistaken for being from Norway by people who think that all white people look alike.
But my money's on Microsoft in this fight. The people in Norway are just too nice and law-abiding to just simply ignore Microsoft, refuse to give them any more money, and keep using Windows anyway like all normal intelligent people do in the developing world. No, the Norwegians will just give in, pay up, and shut up.
Remember, these are the people who tried to put one of their most brilliant 15-year-olds in prison for basically just watching DVDs. One of their own people, just because some greasy California record company VP asked them to.
Slashdot Mirror
I run OrCAD schematic capture and PCB layout DOS version 2.01 on a 1GigaHertz AMD Duron. This is the same program that I learned electronic design CAD on in 1990.
It is a dream combination. I have all the macro keys set-up right. The screen and program can finally keep up with my input. The PCB design compiles as fast as I can move from the mouse to the keyboard (I used to take a coffee break at this point when running OrCAD on a 286).
The screen image is a very cool, beautiful, and efficient black backgrounded and colored foreground of traces and symbols.
I have used the later OrCAD versions of these programs in various jobs. But they suck. They're ugly and have a terrible user-interface.
DOS electronic CAD has finally gotten hardware worthy of the program.
Did I mention that I can also listen to WinAmp music, download files, and convert DVDs to DivX in the background while still doing OrCAD development work at full speed?
"Microsoft is encouraging people to throw away computers, huh? [stroking chin] Interesting... but how does this relate to their involvement in the JFK assassination? More research is needed..."
The Warren Commission had to get rid of many megabytes of data related to the investigation of the assassination for fear that future researchers using advanced artificial intelligence algorythms (cool, two root Arabic words in the same English sentence) would uncover the grand conspiracy.
They turned to a 'boy genius' 9-year-old computer whiz living in a middle-class suburb in Seattle. No one would believe that a boy would be able to accomplish this task, and so the deed went completely unnoticed. Twenty years later, huge government contracts went secretly to the now-grown-up whiz's little company (along with the services of the government's most advanvanced programmer's who were able to the boy's hopeless operating system into near working condition).
So there!
If many little community television stations go on-air at the same time that the majors go off the air, the FCC is going to be mighty busy.
Visiting a campus dorm with federal officers and future-career-destroying injuctions will quickly shut down all the middle-class DIY techno-nerd microstations. Shutting down the militant black-power gang-protected stations broadcasting from the ghetto housing projects to all the people in 'da community' with no television anymore is quite another matter.
This may require calling out the National Guard. But there is no National Guard anymore. It's been transformed into the President's private little army and sent off to an endless war on the other side of the world.
The primary issue that I am trying to raise is whether anyone in the NTSC decision loop is actually considering this possiblity.
Although I hate spam as much as the next guy, is participating in a DDOS attack the way to bring spammers to their knees?
Yes. If it works. We need something that works NOW against spammers more than we need ethical debates about how to prevent people from stealing large amounts of a de-facto public resource for their own personal gain.
The ability to send near instant character-based messages to anyone, anywhere for nearly no cost using ultra-high speed digital data links is a public good. Filling these channels with hundreds of millions of unwanted and unrequested commercial messages by taking advantage of a technical feature permitting the same message to be sent to millions of people at no cost is a theft of a new public community (abet a global community) resource.
We no longer permit private individuals or corporations to take unlimited amounts of other public resources like air, water, and frequency spectrum for private benefit. Why should we question the necessary means that are employed to prevent the theft of the newest public resource?
Spammers must be deterred. So at this time, whatever works to prevent this destruction of a new and fragile global public resource should be accepted.
In the same way pirate radio simply doesn't exist in the US, pirate TV will not do so either.
Pirate FM radio does exist in the USA but only a few channels in hyper-dense markets like Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York. Individual channels come and go depending upon how necessary that the FCC feels that the station needs to be shut down.
I suspect that pirate TV will happen when NTSC broadcasting goes off the air, which is scheduled for Dec 31, 2006. Suddenly there will be millions of TVs that will be receiving nothing but static and millions of people ready to watch anything. If you want to get a message out but couldn't afford expensive television advertizing rates before, that time will be your chance. Just have your own transmitter (a small neighborhood one to start) ready to go as soon as the major commercial stations switches off.
Since this big shut-down is tentatively scheduled to occur in 17 months, now would be the time to get the equipment ready for broadcasting whatever you want when the majors go off the air.
Uncensored footage of the endless war, antiwar documentaries, conspiracy research, 'truth about UFOs', corporate coverups, home porn, whatever. When the television airwaves go off, there is going to be once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to fill the vacuum with your stuff. Pirate and Guerrilla television will be actually exciting for the first time.
Absolutely true. Nolo contendre. Mea Culpa
Nuclear weapons have made an enormous change in the way that the world works. A change that is very slowly infusing public awareness.
Nuclear weapons have made the military obsolete. The primary reason for having an Army, Navy, and Air Force is to prevent people outside your country or homeland from coming to your homeland and killing your males, raping your females, enslaving your children, and stealing all your resources and property. To do this, the militaries have traditionally called upon young men kill the other young men in the invading army and to be killed themselves. When one army is skillful enough at employing violence at another army, they have succeeded in protecting the homeland. In reality, conventional wars with conventional armies go back and forth until both sides run out of money and solders. Then everyone goes home, fucks, farms, and rebuilds for a generation and the process begins again. It's an endless cycle of murder and revenge.
But with nuclear weapons, the military is powerless to prevent another military from destroying the cities of the homeland. Regardless of how many tanks, guns, money, and solders that they have, they simply can not prevent the other side's military from destroying the country. The only way to win a nuclear war is to not have one. The defense of the country shifts from the military to the diplomats and those that control the nuclear weapons. Because it has now become impossible for the military to actually do what they have traditionally done, the military has become obsolete and redundant. Since it can't protect the country, it is no longer needed to protect the country. This realignment of the importance of the military became apparent during the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. The entire Vietnam war was simply an attempt for the US military to justify its continued existence as a conventional organization of bodies, ships, and guns.
Today, thirty years after the defeat of the conventional military in Vietnam, the US military plays a different role in the USA. It is no longer concerned with defending the homeland from external enemies. This function is done by the people who control the nuclear weapons. I doubt that those people consider themselves as part of the traditional guns and troops military. It's certainly possible that they will at sometime in the next 50 years decide to separate from the control of the US government and become a sovereign state unto themselves supported by global corporations. Nothing on earth could stop them from doing this.
The function of the traditional military in the USA today is:
1) To provide a framework for the continuous transfer of billions of dollars in 'Defense contracts' from taxpayers to corporations.
2) To provide systematic application of violence in developing countries in order to force their leaders to adhere to the policies that primarily enrich global corporations.
3) To provide a way to kill off surplus working- class young people who have no function in the new gentrified Disney-Baby Gap yuppie American middle-class economy.
By breaking the endless cycle of institionalized murder and destruction caused by the war cycle of the traditional military structure, nuclear weapons have done more than any other development to bring about an era of permanent peace and prosperity in the developed world since the end of World War Two. The internet and the continuing communications revolution of the 1990s will prevent the nuclear weapons from being used in 'Dr. Strangelove' omnicidal war.
Hello,
I used to work for a small German company that made lasers for PCB stencils and PCB milling machines. They kept putting more and more money into getting the precision of the milling machines finer until they began to cost over $50,000.
One day I pointed out to the branch manager that tiny companies like Olimet and SparkFun were offering PCB board manufacturing services at $2.50 per square inch. I showed some numbers that with the cost of the machines, the salary of the operator, and the expense of the consumables that there were no circumstances that anyone who bought out machine could ever come out ahead financially. I said that we needed to start making inexpensive machines that sold for less than $1000 and accept a precision that would be acceptable to 95% of our present customers and all of our future customers.
Within one week, they shut off my e-mail, hired someone else to do exactly my job, and then fired me in a way that made it impossible for me to get unemployment.
I learned two valuable lessons. Never work for stupid people. And never work for Germans. Maybe that was one lesson.
Shipping a DVD-ROM from the USA to Italy costs 2 euros. A DVD-ROM will hold 1000 songs. In this case, I believe that a disk would be better than a broadband connection.
Stone Transformer Gargoyles guard the Governor Hotel in Portland, Oregon.
The big problem with legal downloads is that the downloader doesn't know what the music will sound like until it is actually downloaded and played. Which takes a long time and consumes a lot of bandwidth. Internet downloading is very inefficient way to become introduced to new music.
What the music download sites should do is get the 'artists' to agree to put one of their (hopefully best) recordings (3-5 minutes max) in MP3 or OGG format on a DVD-ROM. These DVD-ROMs can hold about 1000 songs in high-quality MP3 format. Blank DVD-ROMs are selling for about $0.40US each now.
People interested in new music would contact the New Music Artists Association NMAA and order one of this month's DVDs sent to them in the mail for a few dollars. With a thousand songs on each DVD, hundreds of new artists can get their music exposed to hundreds of thousands of people without signing away their future earnings to the currupt music recording distribution companies, the RIAA.
All the heat generated over downloading really masks the real fact that downloading is the worst way to become exposed to new music. The limits of bandwidth are really a gift for RIAA. People get quite discouraged with the whole concept of new music through downloading after getting five or six tunes over a dial-up connection and finding none of them are of any interest.
But then again, the RIAA (and by this I mean the companies funding this group, of course) is not interested in promoting new music. They want to continue to get the endless free money that comes from selling the same old recordings over and over again. It's like being a lumber company in a magic forest where the trees regrow a hundred feet overnight after being cut down.
Over harsh punishment for computer crimes is a bad idea.
1) It's too easy to make someone else look guilty. If you like the girlfriend of the guy in the next cubicle, buy a virus from your local friendly illegal substances dealer and make it appear that it was originated by the guy in the next cubicle. Then offer your most 'deepest' condolences to his newly-available girlfriend.
2) The hackers/virus specialists aren't the cause of the problem. The problem is poorly designed and written operating systems. Killing people who develop applications for the OS isn't going to help fix the OS.
3) The courts can't differenciate those who develop rogue code for 'national security' regardless of the nation from those who write it for amusement or corporate interests.
The best way to deal with virus writers is to make them liable to civil lawsuits for the damage that they cause. Straightforward tort law. Any 17-year-old hacker who realizes that he is going to have to write database front-ends in Visual Basic for the next thirty years to pay off the damage his cool virus has done will reconsider releasing it.
Also remind business leaders that using proprietary operating systems exposes them to underground attack because there isn't an open feedback loop where thousands of qualified people are constantly examining the OS source for flaws.
For RSI the split-and-curved keyboard helps quite a bit. Avoid the old Microsoft one because its keys don't move up and down well.
It also helps to occasionally put 3 or 4 inch books under your elbows.
After typing sessions a few minutes with the thinking putty helps. Kneading bread dough also helps strengthing hands and avoiding nerve damage. It's also good for making cheap pizza.
Also consider experimenting with a speech-to-text program. They have to be trained to an individual's voice but they respond well when used with a fast 3 GigaHertz CPU. They can be a real pain for use in a programming format until you assign certain words and phrases to the formatting operations common to writing code.
This guy sounds like a totally clueless corporate jerk.
A major reason that programmers created open source was to be able to have control of the tools that they use to create profit for their employers.
Computer systems are arbitrary and very complicated. Yet companies use programmers and information system professionals for ad-hoc tasks only to discard them like used tissues when the project is working. On the next project, the programmer is expected to master a completely different set of symbols (an operating system interface) before starting to do productive work.
Open source software is a means by which the productive members (i.e. the people who actually do the real work) of the IT community are forcing a standardization of corporate systems in order to greatly increase their productivity. Mastering one operating system means that the programmer/analyst/specialist doesn't have to waste time learning a new system with every project. Making the complicated software free forces the corporations to adopt the new standard OS on 'bottom-line' grounds. Having the source available and adaptable creates huge feedback loops which is the best way to find and remove deep bugs that always arise in a project of this magnitude.
This guy and all others like him in the managerial suites prove once again that engineers, programmers, and system specialists are simply smarter than they are. He should really 'just shut the fuck up' (a cute American expression meaning to restrain yourself from public displays of stupidity) and give quiet thanks that the people more intelligent than him continue to permit this illusion of managerial superiority.
Hello,
The 60's spy-secret agent films that had the self-destructing messages were actually not James Bond movies. This plot device was from the original Mission: Impossible television show (1966-1970).
Each hour-long episode would always start with Peter Graves retreiving an envelope of photos and a small hand-held tape recorder that had been previously stashed discretely in a public place.
The tape recording would say "Good afternoon, Mr. Phelps. The man you are looking at is -some Slavic name-. He has either developed a major scientific discovery vital to the free world, or is the leader of a critical resistance movement in -some Eastern European country-. He is being held by this man,-some other vaguely Slavic name-.
"Your mission, Jim, should you decide to accept it, is to rescue -the first guy- and bring the documents of the new discovery to the free world.
As usual, should you or any of your IM force be caught or killed, the secretary will disavow any knowledge of your actions.
Good luck, Jim. This tape will self-destruct in five seconds". Then there was a close-up of smoke coming out of the little tape recorder.
The rest of the show was straightforward. Greg Morris would design and build some advanced custom electronics. Barbara Bain would vamp someone. Martin Landau would create a latex face mask that made him look just like someone else. Peter Lupus would carry away someone hidden in a box.
The elaborate plan would go wrong about 2/3rds of the way through every episode. But teamwork and intelligence and lots of good luck would always save the day. The last scene was the original guy in the first photo from the beginning of the show shaking hands with the Impossible Mission force while riding on the airplane or in the back of the truck to freedom.
The 1960's Mission:Impossible television show had nothing in common with the 1990s movies of the same name starring what's-his-name.
The James Bond character was a borderline psychopath who happened to be a super-handsome 'babe magnet'. He enjoyed killing and never avoided an opportunity to do so. He rarely planned his moves and usually worked alone. Sex and alchool were just 'fuel' to him. This was much more so with the original Bond (played by Sean Connery) than the other Bond actors.
The Mission:Impossible team never deliberately killed anyone as part of their elaborately detailed planning and were too disciplined to compromise the mission with sex and alchool diversions.
The Austin Powers character attempts to mix the secret agent with the swinging 60's youth and music culture. But these two cultures were like oil and water. They never mixed or crossed over.
Austin Powers only works on young people who can see both the secret agent char and the Mod-pop star as equally ridiculous period characters. Middle-aged people can't understand the concept behind Austin Powers at all. It just falls flat.
The only successful attempt to mold together secret-agent and pop-Mod genres was the original '60s "Avengers" television series with Diana Rigg and Patrick MacNee. And that show only worked because it had no politics, no real violence, no real plots, and no pop music. All it had was two great lead characters.
A new Harry Potter book is a big event for young people. Young being 9-15 years old. In my city the huge local bookstore stays open on a Harry Potter release night until about 2am. Children and young people show up by the hundreds; dressed up as their favorite Potter character. They actually convince their parents to bring them downtown and let them stay up until 1am when they fall asleep in car on the way home with their new Harry Potter book in their hands.
A new Windows release midnight sale is just a dud fest for insomniac nerds. But a new Harry Potter release is a big event for young people, bigger than Christmas. For most suburban 12 year olds, it's the first time being at public gathering late at night outside their home. They probably won't be downtown again after midnight until they're old enough to sneak into clubs with fake ID.
I don't really understand why us I don't really understand why us geeks like to hoard intellectual property so much..
Geeks hoard 'intellectual property' because they have a deep respect for it and reasonable distrust of corporate interests to the protect it.
Entertainment corps are only interested in money. When the individual product stops selling above a certain number, it will be simply removed from the market by the corps because the cost of supporting it will be greater than the profit resulting from its sale. In reasonable times, the product would have passed into public domain by this point.
But since the entertainment corps stole the public domain, and since they plan to add unbreakable DRM to the product, the work of art will disappear from the earth should the corps decide to stop selling it.
By 'pirating' it, geeks are protecting current works of film and music not only for their own amusement but also for generations hundreds of years from now.
I read Start Up and really enjoyed it. Dr. Kaplan sounds smart and a nice person to work with.
At the time, I was working at PI Systems in Portland Oregon. This company made a 'pen computer' nearly identical to the one produced at GO. IIRC, they never sold a single unit.
They, and all the other pen computer companies, were wiped out by the Apple Newton and by the inability of 1992 technology to actually deliver a handheld computer that actually did what the marketers were claiming that it would do.
Microsoft was operating on institutional paranoia at that time. If they had actually examined any of the pen computers availible, they would have quickly realized that none of them were ever any threat to Windows. Most of them didn't really work at all.
Palm bought all the technology from the 1993 era pen computer companies and fashioned it into a real machine about five years later when Moore's law actually made it possible to make and market a hand-held.
Hello,
I get DVDs at the local library. They circulate for free. The best picks are usually in the metro branch libraries on the border of the city and the suburbs or the branch of the suburban county library system located in the neighborhood with the most college graduates. Check also on-line listings for the local library. You can often have the titles sent to your closest neighborhood branch. Rural patrons can often have titles mailed to them at reduced postal rates.
The library has a fair amount of last years hits and older. They are always in circulation. Some titles, like the fifty or so unknown Mexican titles, never circulate off the shelves of the wealthy suburban libraries.
Some older and foreign gems are simply not well known. If you can stand to watch black/white and subtitles, I recommend:
Beauty and the Beast - the original French live version from 1946.
Jules and Jim - 1962 Beautiful Jeanne Moreau as the original psycho-bitch from hell that no normal man can avoid falling in love with.
Anything Hollywood with Cary Grant, Paul Newman, Kirk Douglas, William Powell, Humphrey Bogart.
Any Samurai movie from Japan, especially those with Toshiro Mifune.
Ah, hell, check out the library, the stuff is free. Just be sure to get it back on time.
It's great that people are looking in the bargain bin for quality entertainment. Steven Segal is considered pretty low-brow by film critics, but his films are well photographed, well-paced, well-edited, and fun to watch. The characters are stereotypes and the plots follow well-worn paths, but that doesn't change the basic quality of the movie. ..er, transformation of the global film industry.
His films end up selling four for ten because so many copies of the title get made. When all the sales are made of an individual film at list price, the disk owners have to choose whether to lower the price to move the product or hold the price high and sell small amounts to people who will expected to become fans of the film in the future. People who are holding an extra hundred thousand Segal DVDs lower the price, while those holding a few thousand copies of the latest film of an European director who wins many festival awards but doesn't get seen outside NY and LA will accept lower sales at full list price. In "da biz" one never knows if the unknown director will get hot next year.
Hopefully the decreasing cost of actually pressing the DVDs will make it possible for obscure foreign titles that win prestigous film festivals overseas to be released in speciality rental shops and mail-order services. This is the long tail of quality that will keep film/movies profitable when people aren't going out to see movies like they do now.
It would be really great (real neat, insanely great) if someone could persuade Netflix to partner with the major European studios to get some great films circulating in North America that wouldn't otherwise because of the print costs, subtitle costs, and distribution costs. It costs a ton of money to bring European, Asian, Indian, and developing world films to the US and present them in a way that will cover the costs.
Distributing them on DVD through the mail would open a vast new market. Unfortunately the movie industry "da biz" is dominated by shell-shocked cement heads, both here and even more so overseas.
I doubt anyone at NetFlix has the finesse and savoir-faire to pull this off. Especially since they chose to have their headquarters in Los Gatos. They're probably spending more time checking out the babes at Great Bear than plotting the overthrow,
It could make law enforcement officers hesitant to actually inflict the punishment.
In my experience and reading, this is rarely the case. Having insane punishments for common activities that are defined as crimes in order to harass a certain political or minority group often results in the increased willingness for the 'criminals' to kill the police when an arrest appears to be imminent. When the penality for killing the arrestor is the same as the penality for the minor offence, people have nothing to lose by just blasting away whenever it begins to appear like an arrest for some minor crime might happen. This sometimes happened in the early 1970's when returning Vietnam veterans found themselves facing long prison terms in the USA for being caught smoking marijuana. Marijuana use was common in Vietnam and was discovered to be harmless. Murder was common also in Vietnam, both of the enemy, the local civilians, and by the end of the war, of the butt-head officers as well. When the police in America found that returning veterans would actually shoot the arresting officer instead of face 10 years in prison for smoking a joint, the laws were changed to decrimialize marijuana posession in most states.
This is relevant to copyright 'crimes' because it is basically the same kind of legal situation. It is the use of extraordinarily harsh penalities to systematically imprison a specific and focused minority. In five years, no rich Republican (or local EU equalivent) will ever be prosecuted for copyright, but young people protesting the Iraq/Iran war draft will be sent to prison by the thousands. In the EU, the illegal listeners of music who are in unpopular minorities will be either deported or exiled to the poorest regions of the EU.
This is the way that the world works.
There are two reasons for all the grammar and spelling errors. One is that computers and the internet have removed any difference between typing and publishing on the web, even posting a message to a popular website. With paper publishing, several people view the text before it is inked to paper. They are trained to catch spelling and grammar errors.
Secondly, there are no tools built in to text entry that catch spelling and grammar errors.
I make mistakes in every post I put on Slashdot and see them after they've been sent. I have to write a message in the Slashdot text buffer, open MS Word, cut-and-paste the message from Slashdot to Word, use Word's spelling tools, fix the obvious, then copy-and-paste it back. Even something a simple as a piece of code that capitalizes the letter 'i' between white space and other characters would be welcome.
I've always found it intriguing that a programmer who could master several arcane computer languages (especially since computers are notably intolerant of errors), could fail so utterly to master his own native human language.
Computers are absurdly tolerant of errors. It's the compiliers and assemblers that catch everything first in computer languages. Anyone learning C programming without a knowledgable tutor around would best be advised to take some 'soothing potion' before attempting to compile their first simple program. You're guaranteed to get many, many incomprehensible error messages that will leave you flopping on the floor in despair. There still is no compiler that explains all the errors that you get in simple, easy-to-understand language. Thirty years, a billion lines of code, and we're still left with the same deranged error handling messages inserted on the fly back in the 1970s.
And there is no way to tell if the text writer is a native speaker of English or has had years of study. English is a notoriously difficult language to master. My postings in non-English languages makes me appear retarded. I now funnel everything non-English into www.systransoft.com because it seems to be an accurate translation.
The real problem of bad English in web postings is that it chokes the machine language translators. And by the way, it's the 21st century, where's our speech-to-text?
Hello,
I remember reading about this procedure in BYTE when the Mac came out. I was in tech school then and couldn't afford anything more than a Commodore 64. If I recall correctly, the article recommended cleaning out the circuit board holes with a toothpick. A Mac user could save several hundred dollars by buying the memory chips mail-order and doing the upgrade themselves.
Then, there were several bugs found in the original ROM and they issued a recall. Mac buyers would bring the machines to the local Apple computer store and get the ROM swapped. Steven Jobs decided that any Mac mobo with a non-Apple memory upgrade would not be allowed to have the debugged ROM installed.
I was stunned (easy to do to a student new to the personal computer industry). I realized then that Apple was a company that hid a fundamental sleazy and predatory nature under a blizard of 'New Age' advertizements. It's corporate image of being a working partner with the information age pioneers was a purchased sham.
To this day, I've never trusted them or believed their image. I have marvelled at the design of some of their products. But at its heart, the personal computer industry is about ever-increasing performance vs. price issues, not design.
It's amazing how some nasty little business decision can turn off potential customers for very long periods of time. When a former employer was doing the same thing, I expressed my reservations about the practice, citing the above example. I was then promptly fired. I've learned to just shut up, now at work, and express opinions on the web.
These sleazy pop-up ad makers are a public nuisance. They are a major source of pollution in the internet experience. Microsoft should have just bullied them out of the way.
The previous poster was right about making have these shitheads in the kernel. Microsoft would never pay $500 million to buy a company in order to get them to stop harassing people. It's most likely that Microsoft is buying this technology to constantly check if the individual copy of Windows on a PC is registered with them. If not (or if the registration number doesn't match the microprocessor ID number secretly included in the registration process), then the pop-up message routines embedded in the Windows kernel will incessantly blast the user to transfer the full list price from their checking account to Microsoft.
But, like all Microsoft stuff, it won't work completely right and even after paying, the poor schmucks will continue to be blasted with annoying messages. Microsoft will charge them a service fee for problem solving, an activation fee, a supplemental fee for having used an unregistered copy of windows, a fee for having been born, etc...
This could be good for Linux if Microsoft if Gates finally makes good on his famous 1977 letter of intent to stop people from using software without paying him. People use Windows because it is easy, more-or-less, and because Linux is such a pain in the ass to work with due to the inability of its designers to transcend their 'computer priesthood' mentality. I realize that comment will get the message marked as a troll, but, beautiful slashdaughters, it's so true.
But if Microsoft decides to use this new technology to harass the hell out of people, then they will come to Linux, kicking and cursing the whole way, and they will provide the major boost and surge in popularity that will break the Microsoft monopoly.
Ladies and Gentlemen:
In this corner, one mega-corporation owning the monopoly on an essesential technology found in every business in the world and most middle-class homes globally. A company known for only employing the best and the brightest throughout the world, and having billions of dollars in cash to fight with...
and...
In the other corner... a sovereign state. A national government. Abet a rocky, mostly desolate, small country with 1/5 of its land located north of the Arctic Circle. But, blessed with a million or so intelligent, civilized, and organized people (with their own king). A proud and powerful Viking heritage...and billions of dollars in cash from offshore oil to fight with...
Well, I like Norway. Expensive as hell, women to die for, a language that will kill you, and fertile, livable countryside around Oslo. I even get mistaken for being from Norway by people who think that all white people look alike.
But my money's on Microsoft in this fight. The people in Norway are just too nice and law-abiding to just simply ignore Microsoft, refuse to give them any more money, and keep using Windows anyway like all normal intelligent people do in the developing world. No, the Norwegians will just give in, pay up, and shut up.
Remember, these are the people who tried to put one of their most brilliant 15-year-olds in prison for basically just watching DVDs. One of their own people, just because some greasy California record company VP asked them to.