I believe that programs should read like novels; there should be long paragraphs of text that describe what and how the code is working followed by short bursts of actual 'dialog' that is the actual source instruction to the computer.
The actual source code (i.e. the instructions to the processor) should be surrounded by quote marks or other delimiters, and the comments (i.e. the extended code description and documention) should be the part of the source surrounded by white space characters (space, tab, cr/lf).
I never cease to be amazed at how little programming has changed since the 1960's. It really seems that the only innovation in compilier user-interface design has been that (some) compiliers will actually allow you to put your keywords and comments in color! (duh!)
If we are ever going to increase the productivity of programmers to even remotely match the vast increases in price/performance of the the hardware then we must be willing to spend large amounts of time energy and money to develop new and better approaches to writing software code.
We must abandon our kilobyte mentality to gigabyte technology!
As an example of a different approach, has anyone considered using Chinese characters arranged in a three-dimensional grid as a method of doing syncronous parallel programming? Have each character represent a complete function and have their placement in the 3-D grid space represent the point in the algorymthic process that the function should be complete. The compilier would either create the machine language or suggest other arrangements of the parallel process by rearranging the Chinese characters in the 3-D user interface.
(The fact that it sounds weird is not important. What is important is that any new idea that can help improve the productivity of programmers should be considered, regardless of how strange it may sound at the present time)
A large and successful water desalination project such as this proposal produces a lot of salt, either as solid crystals or brackish water.
We are running short of wood, which has been our traditional building material. Areas with serious fresh water problems often have been deforested as well. The salt resulting from the conversion of sea water to fresh could and should be somehow employed as a building material. I have no idea as to how the salt could be used as a construction material. Perhaps to start as a concrete-like mixture, then perhaps as an epoxy-like semi-solid combination with organic material. Finally as a new form of plastic with the sodium and chlorine molecules reordered into long chains or even bucky ball configurations.
This should be an exciting and profitable area of exploration for chemists who are uninterested in working for the traditional industries.
Please don't forget that all Arabian countries are of the Moslem religion and tradition. Beer is almost always forbidden under the general prohibition of consuming alcohol. Therefore it would not be less expensive than water anywhere in the Islamic world, of which the Arabian countries are the leaders.
Since nearly every PC has the same wiring, why not actually build the wires and connectors directly into the case? Most of the components (CD-R, DVD, floppy) are the same form factor so that cases could be designed for standardized compartments for drives and boards.
I also think that it's unlikely that HDTV will be implemented by government decree at the end of 2006. It reminds me of those decrees that ordered all cars and trucks in Los Angeles to have no pollution by 1979...1989...1999...
Consider that:
1> There are millions of poor and (dumb and poor) people who rely on television as their primary source of entertainment and social connection.
2> The new digital TVs are absurdly expensive for people who don't make a lot of money.
3> There has been very little if any coverage of the 'end of television' on television. Hardly anyone who does not follow technical news is aware of this looming fiasco.
4> Most people don't really care what the politicians do as long as it doesn't affect their daily lives in an obvious and intrusive manner. Turning off television for everyone who doesn't flip over hundreds of dollars to replace their perfectly good TV for a new for some technical reason that few understand is about as invasive and obtrusive as you're ever going to get in the USA.
I suspect that this subject will be completely ignored until summer or fall of 2006 and then there will be stories creeping up in the media about the 'end of television as we know it'.
Let me ask you: Would you want to be the president on the day that Jerry Springer, Oprah, and the rest of television went off the air and tens of millions of poor people with serious firearms decided that "it was 'bout time they were finally going to put things right with the screwy gov'm'nt?"
Anyone who messes with things that keep the poor people fat and happy in America is an idiot. The guy who decided that it would be a good idea to sell off the television frequencies was a true moron!
Here's what this really means:
1> People who work in Fortune 1000 are usually bored stiffless by institutional dreariness of the large company. Or they have become completely transformed by Dilbert syndrome into robots on the outside and boiling-with-rage just-destroy-it-see-if-I-care attitudes on the inside. Having a 1000-to-1 pay ratio between the top executives and the average Fortune 1000 worker ensures that there is a lot of this kind of feeling. Thousands of employees turn to P2P in the workplace just to get through the meaninglessness of the day. As long as the work continues to get done, it's not really a big deal.
2> Management gets a blanket threatening letter from the RIAA-MPAA. They immediately enact a policy saying that there will 'zero-tolerance' of any P2P or non-work-related computer or internet use by employees. The people who use P2P KNOW that their work is not affected by their listening and downloading and simply ignore this edict. Since everything is illegal in America now it doesn't seem to make any difference anyway, just as much work continues to get done as before.
3> The system administrator reviews the download records of all the employees and finds the people who continue to use P2P.
4> * The system administrator goes to each of these people (possible hundreds) and says that unless they give him $100-$200 a month, their names will be turned over to management for termination.
5> The system administrator gets tens of thousands of dollars a month from shaking down the employees due to management's stupid 'zero-tolerance' policy of something that hundreds of people are doing in the company.
6> The system administrator has an unfortunate accident. Someone deliberately drove their car over him in the company parking lot. Nobody saw anything. Word starts to circulate in and out of the company that there was a very profitable organized shakedown going on. Management refuses to tell the police anything to avoid scandal.
7> The word going around reachs the local Mafia crew. They 'persuade' management to install one of their people as the new system administrator. The shakedown continues... the Mafia gets the money...the employees get to download P2P...and nobody cares about what happens to the company.
Let me see if I understand this:
1> At the beginning of 2003, there are thousands of ISPs which offer internet service to about 100 million people in North America. Of all these people, about maybe ten to twenty million use P2P occasionally.
The RIAA monitors the P2P networks and assumes that they own everything that is flowing across any P2P network.
The RIAA selects one million or so intercepted P2P streams a month at random and orders the smaller ISPs to identify and turn over the identification of the 'criminals' to them. All legal threats to AOL are ignored by AOL as 'under review for possible questionable activity'
The smaller ISPs immediately cancel the service of their clients randomly selected by RIAA. Their names go to the RIAA and RIAA sends these names to the other small ISPs and threatens 'legal action' if anyone on this black list is allowed to sign up on a different ISP. AOL allows allows these little lost lambs the opportunity to sign on for $24 a month plus a small surcharge for being a 'criminal'.
2> The RIAA threatens AOL. AOL tells the RIAA to back off or Warners will leave the RIAA. Faced with the possible loss of 25% of its membership and its subsequent breakup, the RIAA allows AOL Warner to 'continue to study the situation for any possible wrongdoing'. It backs off. AOL gives a small percentage of 'criminal surcharge' (which is growing by millions of new customers per month) to the RIAA for 'operations research'.
3> Early 2004, all the small ISPs are gone. There are one or two medium sized ISPs that handle nothing but people who hate everything offered by the P2P networks and never have or would download anything from them, and AOL. AOL has tens of millions of new customers all paying $35 a month at least and about half of them also paying a 'criminal surcharge' (which will never be removed).
4> AOL Time Warner's stock price goes back to the mid-50s. Levin, Turner, and Case are brought back from exile at the pig farm to run the company in its new glory era.
I think that the next time that I'm interested in finding out what my competetors are doing, I'll fire up the old color inkjet and print out a few phony ID cards that say BSA on them in big black letters.
Then I'll march right into their offices, flash my new BSA badge, plug my laptop into their server, download all of their R&D work and accounting files, and walk out with a check for thousands of dollars and let them know that they got off easy, This TIME!
When this 10 digit telephone digit madness was imposed on Oregon, there was an article in the newspaper that explained that the reason why it was necessary. It seems that in the 1980's and 90's, the morons in the telephone company allocated a standardized block of ten thousand telephone numbers to anyone who asked for an allocation of more than ten. For example whenever a developer in the suburbs finished a block of fifteen houses and wanted to pre-install telephones, a block of ten thousand numbers was removed from the total available for use.
This is why seven digits is enough for ten million individual phone connections but we must use ten digits, which is ten billion connections (even though there are only about 300,000 phone connections in Oregon).
I also just can't listen to radio anymore, except NPR (and even I hate the German lessons that aired 3am Sunday mornings!).
I go now to the local library and just grab a handfull or two of CD's off the shelf and rip them. Anything that I haven't heard of before, I will play first. Info on the musician is usually available on the web at their website or AllMusic.com.
P.S. If you're ripping a large number of CD's, get a DVD-ROM. I found to my surprise and delight that a DVD-ROM will rip CD's three to five times faster than a CD-ROM with far fewer errors.
Slightly outside the classical science fiction genre but definitely in the magical realism - fantasy - social commentary league is Gore Vidal's brilliant book Myron. Written in 1974, it is about the adventures of a man who falls asleep in front of the television only to awaken and find himself inside the Hollywood set of the 1940's B-movie that he was watching, in a sort of parallel universe along with other people to whom this has happened whenever the movie gets shown.
The book is really hard to find. Try your local library and inter-library loan. The original publication substituted the names of US Supreme Court justices for the 'dirty' words, but later and offshore editions skip this sparkling touch of Vidal's nastiness.
I've scanned the book and keep it available on Kazaa whenever I'm logged on there.
I recommend Whitley Strieber and James Kunetka's masterpiece Nature's End. Written fifteen years about a distopian world future in 2025, it has many exciting ideas and predictions. Well written and a great story.
You know, I have to agree with this. If DRM makes it impossible to consume media products then there will eventually arise a new form of entertainment that will be somewhat more active than the totally passive media that characterized the 20th century. No one really has a clue as to what kind of interactive media will be developing over the next fifty years.
I was 'into' creating electronic ambient sound atmospheres by programming synthesizers until the MP3 revolution hit about five years ago. Then I got involved with collecting all of the music on MP3 that I listened to as a young adult. I find that not having broadband prevents using the P2P networks as a means of exposure to new music. Why doesn't the RIAA try to make high speed internet access from the home illegal?
But I am not buying media product any more not so much as a boycott but rather because it is not very interesting. I am beginning to find books more interesting than music. It is difficult to find actual books on the P2P networks. People don't read and the people that do read don't scan books for upload/sharing. Almost all of the books available on Kazaa! are of the Fantasy-Science Fiction-Horror-Military genre. It is impossible to find anything from the New York Times bestseller list on P2P, even great stuff that has been published years ago.
I would like to suggest to the slashdot community that if you have a favorite book, by all means get a flatbed scanner and OCR program and scan/proofread/post it to your favorite P2P network.
I'm reminded of 1991 when Willie Brown was asked why he rammed a 20% increase in the California state sales (from 4 to 6 percent) without any public input. He replied 'What kind of person don't wanna pay two pennies to help the poor?"
There is a distopian possiblity that the majority of cultural product created in the years 1960 to 2030 could disappear from the long term historical record. This could result from having the creations of this period be considered corporate 'property' and having their availability subjected to restriction by powerfull encryption. Should the ability to decode this encryption be lost, then the cultural artifacts created in this period be unavailable hundreds of years in the future.
This the the real long term danger from corporate DRM. Think if all the paintings in the Louvre or Uffizi (Florence) Museum were to have been lost because their 'owners' at the time had chosen to destroy them (the same thing as applying an unbreakable DRM to an art work) hundreds of years ago in order to keep them from being seen by people who hadn't 'paid'.
Actually only two in seven people now in Oregon can read English.
As a long time Oregon resident, let me fill in the slashdotters with some background.
One: Oregonians are poor. We have the highest unemployment rate in the country. When you run out of unemployment benefits, you automatically get taken off the unemployment rolls and become 'employed'. Real unemployment is 15-20 percent. Our forest product, tourist, fishing, and electronic industries are decimated.
Two: Oregonians are dumb. We have the shortest school year in the country and are about to shorten it another twenty or so days. We have one of the highest dropout rates in the USA. Most of the jobs requiring advanced skills and education to people moving here from other places.
Three: Oregonians are cheap. We voted down all major tax increases in the past ten years. We defeated the sales tax proposals put forth by our betters five times in the past twenty years. Being cheap is a direct result of being poor and dumb.
Four: Oregon is big. Bigger than New England. A third of the people live in the Portland metro area; one third live in other 'cities'; and the rest live far out in the country and drive lots of miles.
Five: Our state legislators are either over-educated Jane Jacobs followers from Portland or Eugene (the Dems) or dumb-as-dirt bible-thumping morons from the woods (the Repubs). Each side hates each other and would gladly shut down the state rather than cooperate or give an inch on anything. Both sides pride themselves on coming up with truly dumb laws to show that they are meaner than the other side. For example, get caught with any amount of voter-approved medical mar1juana, lose your driver's license for a year. Or, drop out of high school at age sixteen? Can't get a driver's license until you're twenty-one.
To point of all this? Don't take anything that the Oregonians say or do seriously.
Hello,
I also make CDs of all high-resolution scans of important documents, records, and photos. The files that are sensitive are encrypted. I make copys and give them to my friends and relatives along with the decryption keys according to level of trust and need.
It is so easy to lose everything that I'm surprised that everybody doesn't do this. Certainly now that it is so cheap and easy to make backups of huge amounts of information.
I do this myself, I have put all old photographs from scans and documents like birth certificates, school diplomas, ect along with bank statements and financial data onto CD-R. Everything sensitive is encrypted on the file level.
I give these 'life CDs' as I call them to my close friends and relatives along with the decryption codes and keys according to the level of need and trust.
I've been in house fires, earthquakes (7.2 Richter in Silicon Valley in 1989), police SWAT raids (Campbell CAlifornia 1991 - had local cops hold load assault rifles at my head as they tore apart the house looking for 'condoms and condom wrappers'. Since my landlady was a recent Chinese immigrant and didn't trust US banks, she kept about $100,000 hidden in the wall of her home office. The Campbell CA police found the money, gave her a receipt for half of it, pocketted the rest for themselves, and deported her... plus ca change, plus ca meme chose).
Anyway, the point of putting your life on easily replacable media like CD-R and DVD-R is that it is easy to lose everything that is in paper form after a fire, earthquake, or home invasion. You of course backup your computer files so why would it be so unusual to accept that all of life's paper records and photos should be widely back-uped also?
In sort-of related news to the music industry's decision to allow listeners to copy music from the net and burn songs onto CDs, the Horseshoe industry has decided to allow illegal users of automobiles (declared illegal by the Transportation Alternatives Abatement Act of 1895) to use public roadways.
"It's an experiment to see if this is really what public wants." said Mortimer Snerd, spokesman for the powerfull Horseshoe Manufacturers Association. "However, we must still constantly remind the public of the dangers of allowing non-bio based transport to get out of hand. Otherwise they could start taking it for granted!"
I love scanning books. I have done about four so far. Recently I got a UMAX Astra 3400 USB(1.1) scanner and Abbyy FineReader 6.0 (from Kazaa and the working krak from www.cracks4u.com) and have been impressed at the speed at which I can scan books. I recommend that everyone scan their favorite books and share them.
The results from the OCR is OK but not good. I have been learning VBA in order to assemble a series of Word Macros that will analyse and correct many of the scanning spelling and formatting errors with minimum effort on the user's part.
It is important to digitize books regardless of the current absurd copyright laws. This is our cultural heritage. No one has the right to tell us that we can't do this.
Thank you for your consideration of my perspective.
I agree that the FUD factor for buying any new consumer device caused by the manufacturer's undisclosed DRM policies will significantly affect the price that consumers are willing to pay for any new consumer device.
The consumer electronic device manufacturers(sp?) will find to their dismay that people will start to buy new equipment only after its DRM parameters have been established by early adopters.
Smart consumer device makers will hire a third party trusted source (like Consumer Reports) to inspect their source code and report exactly what does and what doesn't work with any new device.
By promising for a year that DRM would be in every new device within a year the consumer electronic device makers have created this mess for themselves!
I think that the time has come that consumers take a 'Soviet' view of new entertainment products: what is unsaid about them is more important that what is said. We need to stop trying to balance the potential of the feature set with the asking price and start requesting that the manufacturers disclose all of the DRM ('Digital Rights Management' i.e. copy and viewing restrictions on the entertainment media) pollution imposed on the new device.
Without complete information on DRM restrictions in any new entertainment-media player, the public should consider the fair price of the new device to be no more than the 'Weird Stuff Warehouse' value on the components inside the box.
I suggest setting up a group of people who are interested in the same genre of music and film as you are and doing a single download of the artistic piece that you wish to purview. (or 'pirate the product' to use the entertainment industry term)
Then make the piece available for other students in a discreet but convenient manner. The sensitive nature of all these types of products such as herbal intoxicants, entertainment recordings, telephone circuitry, political alternative literature, unpopular religious perspectives, Amway, ect... makes their limited and discreet distribution a real challenge.
At least you'll be learning a skill in college that you can use in the real world!
I have been giving a lot of thought lately to this exact topic and I can't escape the conclusion that software is so expensive primarily because the tools for developing it are so primitive.
The price-performance ratio (or productivity) of hardware has gone up by three orders of magnitude since the introduction of the microprocessor in the early 1970's but there has been little change in the productivity of programmers in the same period. Could this be due that that there has been no real change in the programming style of 1) banging out source code in cryptic non-intuitive symbolic format known as a programming 'language' 2) compiling it to binary 3) running it to see how long it runs before it stops 4) goto #1?
I believe that it is time to throw massive resources into a 'go to the moon' style project to enable natural language programming and to finally retire programming languages like C++ and BASIC. In other words, it's time to develop a compiler that converts the comments into binary and not the source code. Why shouldn't people be able to simply type (or better yet , speak) the command 'turn the text in the box red if the amount is less than zero' instead of the incomprensible code:
IF clong(oWorkbook.Cells.value) NULL then oWorkbook.Cells.text.color vbRED ENDIF
Having natural language compilers would seriously increase the productivity of programming. This increase in productivity would greatly reduce the necessity of charging high prices for software in order to recover its massive development costs.
It's the high costs of writing software that result from its backward, outdated, and inefficient development tools that are the main causes of inflated software prices, not labor costs or unauthorized copying losses. In the long run, moving the software centers to the third world such and India or China and spreading the programming process out over hundreds of programmers (such as the open source development model) will make no difference in bringing down the costs of effective and useful software.
Thank you, Simonetta
I have had a lot of problems with the CD recorders that I have bought in the past two years. Here's a brief history:
Mitsumi - 4x2x8x - May 2000 $165
failed after 7 months usage, about 20 disks.
gradually could not read or write data correctly - no error messages
couldn't contact tech support for RMA
BTC 8x4x24x Dec 2000 $120
-failed after 6 months usage, about 30 disks.
-gave the same stange error message with every attempt to access a CD.
-returned for RMA. Received replacement that is
beginning to fail after 9 months.
QPS Que (Ultima Technologies) 24x10x40x $90
-failed after 6 months usage, about 50 disks.
-no drive letter assigned by Windows. Tried several PC's with same results.
-could not contact Que tech support; sent five e-mails (none answered). Telephone call placed on hold for 45 minutes (my toll charge) with no reply.
Artec 32x12x48x (Ultima Technologies) $60
-still working after one month use, about 20 disks.
What is wrong with this industry???? I really like this technology but I dread having to throw more and more money into these defective products!
Slashdot Mirror
I believe that programs should read like novels; there should be long paragraphs of text that describe what and how the code is working followed by short bursts of actual 'dialog' that is the actual source instruction to the computer.
The actual source code (i.e. the instructions to the processor) should be surrounded by quote marks or other delimiters, and the comments (i.e. the extended code description and documention) should be the part of the source surrounded by white space characters (space, tab, cr/lf).
I never cease to be amazed at how little programming has changed since the 1960's. It really seems that the only innovation in compilier user-interface design has been that (some) compiliers will actually allow you to put your keywords and comments in color! (duh!)
If we are ever going to increase the productivity of programmers to even remotely match the vast increases in price/performance of the the hardware then we must be willing to spend large amounts of time energy and money to develop new and better approaches to writing software code.
We must abandon our kilobyte mentality to gigabyte technology!
As an example of a different approach, has anyone considered using Chinese characters arranged in a three-dimensional grid as a method of doing syncronous parallel programming? Have each character represent a complete function and have their placement in the 3-D grid space represent the point in the algorymthic process that the function should be complete. The compilier would either create the machine language or suggest other arrangements of the parallel process by rearranging the Chinese characters in the 3-D user interface.
(The fact that it sounds weird is not important. What is important is that any new idea that can help improve the productivity of programmers should be considered, regardless of how strange it may sound at the present time)
Thank you,
A large and successful water desalination project such as this proposal produces a lot of salt, either as solid crystals or brackish water.
We are running short of wood, which has been our traditional building material. Areas with serious fresh water problems often have been deforested as well. The salt resulting from the conversion of sea water to fresh could and should be somehow employed as a building material. I have no idea as to how the salt could be used as a construction material. Perhaps to start as a concrete-like mixture, then perhaps as an epoxy-like semi-solid combination with organic material. Finally as a new form of plastic with the sodium and chlorine molecules reordered into long chains or even bucky ball configurations.
This should be an exciting and profitable area of exploration for chemists who are uninterested in working for the traditional industries.
Please don't forget that all Arabian countries are of the Moslem religion and tradition. Beer is almost always forbidden under the general prohibition of consuming alcohol. Therefore it would not be less expensive than water anywhere in the Islamic world, of which the Arabian countries are the leaders.
Thank you,
Simonetta
Since nearly every PC has the same wiring, why not actually build the wires and connectors directly into the case? Most of the components (CD-R, DVD, floppy) are the same form factor so that cases could be designed for standardized compartments for drives and boards.
I also think that it's unlikely that HDTV will be implemented by government decree at the end of 2006. It reminds me of those decrees that ordered all cars and trucks in Los Angeles to have no pollution by 1979...1989...1999...
Consider that:
1> There are millions of poor and (dumb and poor) people who rely on television as their primary source of entertainment and social connection.
2> The new digital TVs are absurdly expensive for people who don't make a lot of money.
3> There has been very little if any coverage of the 'end of television' on television. Hardly anyone who does not follow technical news is aware of this looming fiasco.
4> Most people don't really care what the politicians do as long as it doesn't affect their daily lives in an obvious and intrusive manner. Turning off television for everyone who doesn't flip over hundreds of dollars to replace their perfectly good TV for a new for some technical reason that few understand is about as invasive and obtrusive as you're ever going to get in the USA.
I suspect that this subject will be completely ignored until summer or fall of 2006 and then there will be stories creeping up in the media about the 'end of television as we know it'.
Let me ask you: Would you want to be the president on the day that Jerry Springer, Oprah, and the rest of television went off the air and tens of millions of poor people with serious firearms decided that "it was 'bout time they were finally going to put things right with the screwy gov'm'nt?"
Anyone who messes with things that keep the poor people fat and happy in America is an idiot. The guy who decided that it would be a good idea to sell off the television frequencies was a true moron!
Here's what this really means:
1> People who work in Fortune 1000 are usually bored stiffless by institutional dreariness of the large company. Or they have become completely transformed by Dilbert syndrome into robots on the outside and boiling-with-rage just-destroy-it-see-if-I-care attitudes on the inside. Having a 1000-to-1 pay ratio between the top executives and the average Fortune 1000 worker ensures that there is a lot of this kind of feeling. Thousands of employees turn to P2P in the workplace just to get through the meaninglessness of the day. As long as the work continues to get done, it's not really a big deal.
2> Management gets a blanket threatening letter from the RIAA-MPAA. They immediately enact a policy saying that there will 'zero-tolerance' of any P2P or non-work-related computer or internet use by employees. The people who use P2P KNOW that their work is not affected by their listening and downloading and simply ignore this edict. Since everything is illegal in America now it doesn't seem to make any difference anyway, just as much work continues to get done as before.
3> The system administrator reviews the download records of all the employees and finds the people who continue to use P2P.
4> * The system administrator goes to each of these people (possible hundreds) and says that unless they give him $100-$200 a month, their names will be turned over to management for termination.
5> The system administrator gets tens of thousands of dollars a month from shaking down the employees due to management's stupid 'zero-tolerance' policy of something that hundreds of people are doing in the company.
6> The system administrator has an unfortunate accident. Someone deliberately drove their car over him in the company parking lot. Nobody saw anything. Word starts to circulate in and out of the company that there was a very profitable organized shakedown going on. Management refuses to tell the police anything to avoid scandal.
7> The word going around reachs the local Mafia crew. They 'persuade' management to install one of their people as the new system administrator. The shakedown continues... the Mafia gets the money...the employees get to download P2P...and nobody cares about what happens to the company.
Let me see if I understand this:
1> At the beginning of 2003, there are thousands of ISPs which offer internet service to about 100 million people in North America. Of all these people, about maybe ten to twenty million use P2P occasionally.
The RIAA monitors the P2P networks and assumes that they own everything that is flowing across any P2P network.
The RIAA selects one million or so intercepted P2P streams a month at random and orders the smaller ISPs to identify and turn over the identification of the 'criminals' to them. All legal threats to AOL are ignored by AOL as 'under review for possible questionable activity'
The smaller ISPs immediately cancel the service of their clients randomly selected by RIAA. Their names go to the RIAA and RIAA sends these names to the other small ISPs and threatens 'legal action' if anyone on this black list is allowed to sign up on a different ISP. AOL allows allows these little lost lambs the opportunity to sign on for $24 a month plus a small surcharge for being a 'criminal'.
2> The RIAA threatens AOL. AOL tells the RIAA to back off or Warners will leave the RIAA. Faced with the possible loss of 25% of its membership and its subsequent breakup, the RIAA allows AOL Warner to 'continue to study the situation for any possible wrongdoing'. It backs off. AOL gives a small percentage of 'criminal surcharge' (which is growing by millions of new customers per month) to the RIAA for 'operations research'.
3> Early 2004, all the small ISPs are gone. There are one or two medium sized ISPs that handle nothing but people who hate everything offered by the P2P networks and never have or would download anything from them, and AOL. AOL has tens of millions of new customers all paying $35 a month at least and about half of them also paying a 'criminal surcharge' (which will never be removed).
4> AOL Time Warner's stock price goes back to the mid-50s. Levin, Turner, and Case are brought back from exile at the pig farm to run the company in its new glory era.
I think that the next time that I'm interested in finding out what my competetors are doing, I'll fire up the old color inkjet and print out a few phony ID cards that say BSA on them in big black letters.
Then I'll march right into their offices, flash my new BSA badge, plug my laptop into their server, download all of their R&D work and accounting files, and walk out with a check for thousands of dollars and let them know that they got off easy, This TIME!
When this 10 digit telephone digit madness was imposed on Oregon, there was an article in the newspaper that explained that the reason why it was necessary. It seems that in the 1980's and 90's, the morons in the telephone company allocated a standardized block of ten thousand telephone numbers to anyone who asked for an allocation of more than ten. For example whenever a developer in the suburbs finished a block of fifteen houses and wanted to pre-install telephones, a block of ten thousand numbers was removed from the total available for use.
This is why seven digits is enough for ten million individual phone connections but we must use ten digits, which is ten billion connections (even though there are only about 300,000 phone connections in Oregon).
I go now to the local library and just grab a handfull or two of CD's off the shelf and rip them. Anything that I haven't heard of before, I will play first. Info on the musician is usually available on the web at their website or AllMusic.com.
P.S. If you're ripping a large number of CD's, get a DVD-ROM. I found to my surprise and delight that a DVD-ROM will rip CD's three to five times faster than a CD-ROM with far fewer errors.
Slightly outside the classical science fiction genre but definitely in the magical realism - fantasy - social commentary league is Gore Vidal's brilliant book Myron. Written in 1974, it is about the adventures of a man who falls asleep in front of the television only to awaken and find himself inside the Hollywood set of the 1940's B-movie that he was watching, in a sort of parallel universe along with other people to whom this has happened whenever the movie gets shown. The book is really hard to find. Try your local library and inter-library loan. The original publication substituted the names of US Supreme Court justices for the 'dirty' words, but later and offshore editions skip this sparkling touch of Vidal's nastiness. I've scanned the book and keep it available on Kazaa whenever I'm logged on there.
I recommend Whitley Strieber and James Kunetka's masterpiece Nature's End. Written fifteen years about a distopian world future in 2025, it has many exciting ideas and predictions. Well written and a great story.
You know, I have to agree with this. If DRM makes it impossible to consume media products then there will eventually arise a new form of entertainment that will be somewhat more active than the totally passive media that characterized the 20th century. No one really has a clue as to what kind of interactive media will be developing over the next fifty years.
I was 'into' creating electronic ambient sound atmospheres by programming synthesizers until the MP3 revolution hit about five years ago. Then I got involved with collecting all of the music on MP3 that I listened to as a young adult. I find that not having broadband prevents using the P2P networks as a means of exposure to new music. Why doesn't the RIAA try to make high speed internet access from the home illegal?
But I am not buying media product any more not so much as a boycott but rather because it is not very interesting. I am beginning to find books more interesting than music. It is difficult to find actual books on the P2P networks. People don't read and the people that do read don't scan books for upload/sharing. Almost all of the books available on Kazaa! are of the Fantasy-Science Fiction-Horror-Military genre. It is impossible to find anything from the New York Times bestseller list on P2P, even great stuff that has been published years ago.
I would like to suggest to the slashdot community that if you have a favorite book, by all means get a flatbed scanner and OCR program and scan/proofread/post it to your favorite P2P network.
I'm reminded of 1991 when Willie Brown was asked why he rammed a 20% increase in the California state sales (from 4 to 6 percent) without any public input. He replied 'What kind of person don't wanna pay two pennies to help the poor?"
There is a distopian possiblity that the majority of cultural product created in the years 1960 to 2030 could disappear from the long term historical record. This could result from having the creations of this period be considered corporate 'property' and having their availability subjected to restriction by powerfull encryption. Should the ability to decode this encryption be lost, then the cultural artifacts created in this period be unavailable hundreds of years in the future.
This the the real long term danger from corporate DRM. Think if all the paintings in the Louvre or Uffizi (Florence) Museum were to have been lost because their 'owners' at the time had chosen to destroy them (the same thing as applying an unbreakable DRM to an art work) hundreds of years ago in order to keep them from being seen by people who hadn't 'paid'.
Actually only two in seven people now in Oregon can read English.
As a long time Oregon resident, let me fill in the slashdotters with some background.
One: Oregonians are poor. We have the highest unemployment rate in the country. When you run out of unemployment benefits, you automatically get taken off the unemployment rolls and become 'employed'. Real unemployment is 15-20 percent. Our forest product, tourist, fishing, and electronic industries are decimated.
Two: Oregonians are dumb. We have the shortest school year in the country and are about to shorten it another twenty or so days. We have one of the highest dropout rates in the USA. Most of the jobs requiring advanced skills and education to people moving here from other places.
Three: Oregonians are cheap. We voted down all major tax increases in the past ten years. We defeated the sales tax proposals put forth by our betters five times in the past twenty years. Being cheap is a direct result of being poor and dumb.
Four: Oregon is big. Bigger than New England. A third of the people live in the Portland metro area; one third live in other 'cities'; and the rest live far out in the country and drive lots of miles.
Five: Our state legislators are either over-educated Jane Jacobs followers from Portland or Eugene (the Dems) or dumb-as-dirt bible-thumping morons from the woods (the Repubs). Each side hates each other and would gladly shut down the state rather than cooperate or give an inch on anything. Both sides pride themselves on coming up with truly dumb laws to show that they are meaner than the other side. For example, get caught with any amount of voter-approved medical mar1juana, lose your driver's license for a year.
Or, drop out of high school at age sixteen? Can't get a driver's license until you're twenty-one.
To point of all this? Don't take anything that the Oregonians say or do seriously.
Hello,
I also make CDs of all high-resolution scans of important documents, records, and photos. The files that are sensitive are encrypted. I make copys and give them to my friends and relatives along with the decryption keys according to level of trust and need.
It is so easy to lose everything that I'm surprised that everybody doesn't do this. Certainly now that it is so cheap and easy to make backups of huge amounts of information.
I do this myself, I have put all old photographs from scans and documents like birth certificates, school diplomas, ect along with bank statements and financial data onto CD-R. Everything sensitive is encrypted on the file level.
I give these 'life CDs' as I call them to my close friends and relatives along with the decryption codes and keys according to the level of need and trust.
I've been in house fires, earthquakes (7.2 Richter in Silicon Valley in 1989), police SWAT raids (Campbell CAlifornia 1991 - had local cops hold load assault rifles at my head as they tore apart the house looking for 'condoms and condom wrappers'. Since my landlady was a recent Chinese immigrant and didn't trust US banks, she kept about $100,000 hidden in the wall of her home office. The Campbell CA police found the money, gave her a receipt for half of it, pocketted the rest for themselves, and deported her... plus ca change, plus ca meme chose).
Anyway, the point of putting your life on easily replacable media like CD-R and DVD-R is that it is easy to lose everything that is in paper form after a fire, earthquake, or home invasion. You of course backup your computer files so why would it be so unusual to accept that all of life's paper records and photos should be widely back-uped also?
In sort-of related news to the music industry's decision to allow listeners to copy music from the net and burn songs onto CDs, the Horseshoe industry has decided to allow illegal users of automobiles (declared illegal by the Transportation Alternatives Abatement Act of 1895) to use public roadways.
"It's an experiment to see if this is really what public wants." said Mortimer Snerd, spokesman for the powerfull Horseshoe Manufacturers Association. "However, we must still constantly remind the public of the dangers of allowing non-bio based transport to get out of hand. Otherwise they could start taking it for granted!"
I love scanning books. I have done about four so far. Recently I got a UMAX Astra 3400 USB(1.1) scanner and Abbyy FineReader 6.0 (from Kazaa and the working krak from www.cracks4u.com) and have been impressed at the speed at which I can scan books. I recommend that everyone scan their favorite books and share them.
The results from the OCR is OK but not good. I have been learning VBA in order to assemble a series of Word Macros that will analyse and correct many of the scanning spelling and formatting errors with minimum effort on the user's part.
It is important to digitize books regardless of the current absurd copyright laws. This is our cultural heritage. No one has the right to tell us that we can't do this.
Thank you for your consideration of my perspective.
I agree that the FUD factor for buying any new consumer device caused by the manufacturer's undisclosed DRM policies will significantly affect the price that consumers are willing to pay for any new consumer device.
The consumer electronic device manufacturers(sp?) will find to their dismay that people will start to buy new equipment only after its DRM parameters have been established by early adopters.
Smart consumer device makers will hire a third party trusted source (like Consumer Reports) to inspect their source code and report exactly what does and what doesn't work with any new device.
By promising for a year that DRM would be in every new device within a year the consumer electronic device makers have created this mess for themselves!
I think that the time has come that consumers take a 'Soviet' view of new entertainment products: what is unsaid about them is more important that what is said. We need to stop trying to balance the potential of the feature set with the asking price and start requesting that the manufacturers disclose all of the DRM ('Digital Rights Management' i.e. copy and viewing restrictions on the entertainment media) pollution imposed on the new device.
Without complete information on DRM restrictions in any new entertainment-media player, the public should consider the fair price of the new device to be no more than the 'Weird Stuff Warehouse' value on the components inside the box.
I suggest setting up a group of people who are interested in the same genre of music and film as you are and doing a single download of the artistic piece that you wish to purview. (or 'pirate the product' to use the entertainment industry term)
Then make the piece available for other students in a discreet but convenient manner. The sensitive nature of all these types of products such as herbal intoxicants, entertainment recordings, telephone circuitry, political alternative literature, unpopular religious perspectives, Amway, ect... makes their limited and discreet distribution a real challenge.
At least you'll be learning a skill in college that you can use in the real world!
I have been giving a lot of thought lately to this exact topic and I can't escape the conclusion that software is so expensive primarily because the tools for developing it are so primitive.
The price-performance ratio (or productivity) of hardware has gone up by three orders of magnitude since the introduction of the microprocessor in the early 1970's but there has been little change in the productivity of programmers in the same period. Could this be due that that there has been no real change in the programming style of 1) banging out source code in cryptic non-intuitive symbolic format known as a programming 'language' 2) compiling it to binary 3) running it to see how long it runs before it stops 4) goto #1?
I believe that it is time to throw massive resources into a 'go to the moon' style project to enable natural language programming and to finally retire programming languages like C++ and BASIC. In other words, it's time to develop a compiler that converts the comments into binary and not the source code. Why shouldn't people be able to simply type (or better yet , speak) the command 'turn the text in the box red if the amount is less than zero' instead of the incomprensible code:
IF clong(oWorkbook.Cells.value) NULL then oWorkbook.Cells.text.color vbRED
ENDIF
Having natural language compilers would seriously increase the productivity of programming. This increase in productivity would greatly reduce the necessity of charging high prices for software in order to recover its massive development costs.
It's the high costs of writing software that result from its backward, outdated, and inefficient development tools that are the main causes of inflated software prices, not labor costs or unauthorized copying losses. In the long run, moving the software centers to the third world such and India or China and spreading the programming process out over hundreds of programmers (such as the open source development model) will make no difference in bringing down the costs of effective and useful software.
Thank you, Simonetta
I have had a lot of problems with the CD recorders that I have bought in the past two years. Here's a brief history:
Mitsumi - 4x2x8x - May 2000 $165
failed after 7 months usage, about 20 disks.
gradually could not read or write data correctly - no error messages
couldn't contact tech support for RMA
BTC 8x4x24x Dec 2000 $120
-failed after 6 months usage, about 30 disks.
-gave the same stange error message with every attempt to access a CD.
-returned for RMA. Received replacement that is
beginning to fail after 9 months.
QPS Que (Ultima Technologies) 24x10x40x $90
-failed after 6 months usage, about 50 disks.
-no drive letter assigned by Windows. Tried several PC's with same results.
-could not contact Que tech support; sent five e-mails (none answered). Telephone call placed on hold for 45 minutes (my toll charge) with no reply.
Artec 32x12x48x (Ultima Technologies) $60
-still working after one month use, about 20 disks.
What is wrong with this industry???? I really like this technology but I dread having to throw more and more money into these defective products!
Has anyone else had these kinds of experiences?