And note how they emphasize that reneging will result in a "willfull infringment" case. That's important because they're suggesting that they're not necessarily pursuing willfull infringement claims the first time around. And that makes sense because obviously a lot of people are going to plead ignorance so proving evidence of infringement rather than demonstrating willful infringement is going to be much easier in court. But, this becomes very important if the defendant files for personal bankruptcy.
Unless the tort was for willful infringement, it's unlikely they will be able to pursue your assets after personal bankruptcy. So, this so-called amnesty results in allowing yourself to get locked into a position much more serious than what you might be in for without it.
And, looking at it from another angle, this should not be called an amnesty. Compare this to a parking ticket amnesty or a political prisoner amnesty. They don't say, okay this amnesty means you capitulate totally to our demands. That's not what amnesty is. Amnesty means both parties agree to cease pursuing their goals. It doesn't mean one party retroactively concedes anything the other party wants.
The bottom line is this: the legislators and the courts refuse to acknowledge that "copy" is no longer a stable term in the digital age. Until that idea is addressed by the laws and upheld by the courts, our legal systems will be fighting technology.
Well, I think Taiwan, rather than Samsung, oops I mean Korea is where all the boards come from. And it was not that long ago that we saw a post here on/. about a board coming out of Taiwan from a comapny called Abit with a special chipset they call the X-Wall that they claimed in their marketing materials could be used to keep out both the RIAA and government agencies. So, I would have to imagine that the notion of the entire motherboard market being controlled by a dark mysterious anti-consumer entity is a bit far fetched.
Funny you mention that. But check it out, I have a Master's Degree . . . in Rhetoric! And odd as it may seem, it just happens to cover all those areas perfectly. While good lawyers develop fierce rhetorical skill in the course of practicing law, they don't learn much of it in law school; rather, law school teaches the practice of law. In fact, most law schools don't even teach much about the history of law outside of reviewing specific cases. Law school teaches you how to practice law so you can get your license. Rhetoric is not the primary focus of law school, they leave that up to people who major in Rhetoric. You'll learn rhetorical skills from experience if you're a good lawyer that argues in court frequenently, but that paper was most likely written by a student and his rhetorical skills were lacking as I illustrated in the previous post.
Glad to oblige.
It was an amusing argument. But first note that it was only an argument and it was an argument with quite a few holes as you'd expect from a lawyer trying to argue tech issues.
Let me draw your attention to this quote: RAM is a volatile memory type, not a permanent memory type, and thus the copy of the phonorecord that was loaded into RAM will be destroyed when the device is turned off.
That's his definition that fits his argument because he wants to argue that copying into RAM isn't creating a fixed copy. But look what he said --he says that RAM is a volatile memory. But RAM is an acronym that simply means Random Access Memory. It is certainly not the case that RAM is always volatile. It could be, but it' not necessarily the case and these are the kinds of difficulties that the courts have to deal with. You can't just take some acronym and place all this meaning into it that isn't really there simply because casual observers might buy into it.
For the sake of your friend's argument he simply glazes over this enormous assumption about what RAM is in a cheap steet magician style that lawyers and hustlers of all stripes are so fond of.
Hey, don't get me wrong. I do multimedia. I got that same way. It's all illusion. I don't blame a sucker for trying, but I don't buy it. It isn't clear what a copy is in the digital age. Indeed, this is a philisophical underpinning of postmodernity.
Dearest Graff.
While you've quoted the exclusive rights section, you forgot the fair use section. That's why the law is many many pages long. You can't just take out one part and say this quote is all there is to it because the fact is that other section make exceptions to the rules laid out in prior sections. And fair use itself is divided into sections. There is no simple test of what is and what is not fair use in all contexts. If there was, the law would be much shorter.
In fact, you will find that for archives it is quite legal to make and use an unauthorized copy if your original is damaged. If it wasn't, libraries would be screwed by vandals. I know we're not talking about libararies here, but the point is that there is no one sentence black and white rule that define fair use in all contexts.
Although I appreciate your poetic manner of expressing yourself, I doubt what you've stated. If fear cannot be shared between people and serve as a form of social discourse then the horror genre would be nowhere near as important as it is. I've heard a similar assertion about pain. Wittgenstein uses it as an example in discussing literacy among other things. But even then there are problems because the division between physical and emotional pain are not clear at all and emotional pain can certainly be shared. Grief is a commonly shared emotional pain.
I admire your expressive ability though. We don't get a lot of thoughtful writers on/..
Well with all the hype that this case is getting ---jeez 300 posts and it's only been up for a few minutes-- all I know is this chick better be hot and have a hell of a wardrobe with a nic like that because she's going to be getting some major media attention either way and if she's even halfway decent looking and willing to wear some revealing or suggestive outfits this could rather ironically be the beginning of a huge media career. Pick those nics carefully. It could be the most imporant thing you ever do.
If it's not this particular case, it will be one of the other 1300. The DMCA was written by a Congress and approved by an Administration who stated in the press at the time that there was nothing to fear about the elements of the DMCA, in particular the highly questionable subpeona elements coming to the fore at this point, because they would be revised when the courts got ahold of it.
This will go to the Supreme Court in one form of the other because it's well known that the DMCA was not a strong piece of legislation and it was particularly the subpeona parts that were problematic.
If the Supreme Court was to take the surprising and unlikely stance that the subpeona provisions of the DMCA don't violate the right against unreasonable search and seizure then I suspect that broadband adoption in the US will continue to remain far behind that of other countries resulting in a long term competitive disadvantage.
While it's an interesting idea, it reminds me with the nutrient pill idea. You know, that in the future there will be this pill and it will be all you need to survive.
The main problem with this is not just the technology, it's that so many people actually enjoy eating a good meal. It's like a cure for sex. Certain people might think it's a great idea, but most people don't really want it.
I saw a similar thing about high tech nano fiber clothes where the author said, isn't this great, you could wear the same outfit all year long. I looked over at my wife browsing her fashion magazines and thought, this was clearly written by a man.
So many of these solutions for the future are answers to problems that aren't really problems across the board.
But I wonder if these yeast cells can be made to produce growth hormone and human fetal serum. That would be intriguing as all hell.
After the big scene a few weeks back where they showed off their supposed code and had dozens of predated generic counter examples on the web within hours I thought the whole thing sort of faded out.
It was pretty obvious there was no case to be made. It seemed to have been covered pretty well in the mainstream press as well. At least I that was the impression I got. Oh well, I guess they're just puffing their chests till they can unload the rest of their shares.
I was just going over this in a story yesterday on multimedia. Running Macromedia multimedia packages under Wine leads to a similar effect. If the author puts in some sort of crude DRM that would prematurely exit under Windows or Mac, Wine just pops up a dialogue and says, the application is attempting to exit, would you like to ignore this?
I was rolling on the floor the first time I saw this. So much for wannabee DRM strategies in Macromedia presentations.
Well, I thought your original post was a bit off base as the article was clearly referring to a multimedia CD. Not only was it the topic of the article, it was much more so the topic I had focused on in my post about how thankless multimedia work can be. I even specifically refered to the use of Macromedia authoring tools which use high level scripts to control and or prevent interactivity and rarely touch upon low level functionality. So your comment about "referencing invalid pointers" which would be an unlikely problem since we're talking about high level media packaging environments was either ignorant of the topic at hand or a kind of sniping.
So, I called you a cowboy to offend you in return as I correctly doubted you like to be called a cowboy.
The reference to your user ID was nothing but jealousy.
And although I've already said it once, I'll say it again. It was my fault for using the word crash because your whole issue rests on defining crash from a low level point of view rather than from the user's point of view. Since the topic was multimedia and not intro to C I used the word crash to mean the program does not continue.
I am like so freakin' sorry. In the future I will not use the word crash without sending along a memory dump from the logs so you'll know exactly which crash I'm referring to.
Can I go now?
Well slap me for feeding the trolls, but fair use is a complex issue that has many different meanings in many different contexts.
You can find the text of the multiple fair use sub-sections of US copyright law at www.loc.gov/copyright. If you were seriously interested, you'll find them in the first chapter, but I doubt you really care in the least what the law says because you obviously know better than to be concerned with such trivia.
But something has to give. If the copyright holders are gonna play hard ball about eliminating fair use, what's the motivation for the consumer to pay for the broadband that's got to be there for these services to work? It seems to me there are two courses.
1. P2P becomes fair use and broadband adopting goes through the roof.
2. Fair use is essentially eliminated and broadband stagnates.
I find it hard to see both happening unless broadband gets extremely cheap by, for instance, being subsidized by the copyright holders that want to sell these new content services. You can't beat up the customer in the jungle ball approach that has been taken and then play dumb when they won't subsidize the infrastructure for your new business model.
I had no idea so many feeds were available. This kind of thing is not good for someone like me. I've got a lifelong obsession with news that came from a childhood filled with the constant drone of NPR. Now, here's this vast new frontier of news. Dear lord save me. My whole family is going to end up stung on this. We'll never talk to each other again.
It is great to see a way to lurk newsletters in one conveient package without having to deal with the spam of using e-mail. I'm very impressed, but slightly embarrassed that I wasn't already using it.
I don't see why this limits interactivity. Most people reading newsletters are just lurking most of the time. There's no reason you can't still post an e-mail if you wish. If anything it should make newsletters much more active as more people feel free to lurk and keep up with the discussion.
Okay, fair enough. Let me rephrase it by saying that I've seen dozens of Macromedia packaged applications targeted for the educational market that do work fine under Wine although not being mentioned in the Wine apps database. Perhaps my assertion was too bold, but I don't regret suggesting that people should try it because I think it is more common that people don't try and assume it doesn't work than that they do try and fail. But again, that's just my personal feeling that comes from seeing it work so many times when I assumed it was unlikely.
Okay, perhaps you don't like the word crash. Would you prefer another phrase like "prematurely exit" or "conclude" or "restart." Those are all suitable replacements to what I was referring to. Perhaps you've never worked with DRM. And that's great. I'm happy for you. Really. It's a better worls without it. But some companies in the past have actually tried to force their users to purchase passowrds or other such inconveiences and one of the enforcement techniques is to not allow the program to continue.
So, all I was saying was that a lot of these techniques that a developer using Macromedia's authoring tools might use to accomplish these things don't work when the packages are run under Wine because Wine simply says, there was an error would you like to continue. And often it can continue without a problem.
I can see from your low user number that you are a cowboy and would not consider Macromedia's multimedia authoring tools to be REAL development, but it seemed from the article that this was what was being used.
I was just pondering the same thing on a weekend trip to south-eastern Taiwan. Enforce copyrights? My god, there was no traffic light on a gigantic six way intersection in front of the main train station and most drivers seemed to prefer the aggressive chicken technique. People speak two or three of about six different dialects. We were glared down a group of Russian merchant marines walking around like a fist-to-fist recon platoon. Yeah, copyright issues will get all sorted out there real quick. Making sure the RIAA gets their props is the top priority all over the world right now. All those other local problems can wait.
And even if Asians are too busy with other things to comply right away, I'm sure the people of the Middle East and Africa are very concerned about setting these things straight with their friends in corporate America as soon as possible. Who knows what horrors might happen if they delay another monent. The RIAA has really got things under control. Let's give them a big hand.
In fact, the answer is obvious. Allow me to explain.
You see, what we do is establish a new electronic currency that is the currency of the welfare state. This new currency is radically different than anything Marx or any historical economic ponderer could ever have imagined because it is self-deflating. You can't save this currency. It must be spent within a few months or it will dissapear. This allows a welfare state without inflation. This is important because it is inflation which is the real scourge of socialist welfare states as we've seen over and over in South America, Africa and the various other macro-economic laboratories of the world.
Now, how is this pro-business? Simple, the only entities that are allowed to accept this electronic welfare currency are private businesses. In essence, it is corporate welfare that is filtered through the masses with an internal check on inflation. Any establishment abusing the system, especially by allowing people to translate the welface currency to hard cash to create illicit savings, is temporarily banned from accepting the electronic currency and thus loses market share. By providing a reward up front, you create a form of soft punishment by withdrawing the reward rather than actually having to resort to a punishment like jails that are a hidden tax on the system. This is a common technique in education and child rearing.
One thing that is totally incompatible with this system is policies that create black markets such as the war on drugs. These obstacles must be overcome first.
Reading through the comments, I saw the reaffirmation of my ongoing belief that you've got to have a serious masochistic streak to do multimedia development these days. People are never satisfied because the desireable media experience is such a personal preference.
I've little doubt the product sucks and the criticisms are justified, but I was trying to imagine what it would be like to be on the, most likely, small staff cranking out a multimedia CD every week and I thought --you know, it's probably not such a happening position.
And for the people complaining that it doesn't work on their Gnu-Linux systems I have to ask --did they even try running it under Wine? From the article it sounds like a Macromedia based product and I've yet to see a Director or Authorware packaged piece that doesn't work under Wine. In fact, these types of products often work better under Wine than on Mac or MS systems because when Wine encounters an error that would freeze the program on the proprietary OS's, Wine simply pops up a dialogue and asks you if you'd like to ignore the error. This makes life difficult for multi-media people trying to create DIY DRM techniques that work by intentionally crashing the program under a given condition on Mac or Windows platforms.
Take the case of microsilica AKA silica fume. This is a material used in a vast number of products but perhaps most famous for making ultra-high strength concrete.
There are two common forms known as amorphous and crystalline microscilica. The amorphous product is not known to produce the lung disease silicosis while the larger scale crystalline variety does so quite readily.
So, substances don't necessarily become more dangerous at smaller scales, the opposite can also be true.
Well, now let's get this straight. I couldn't agree more that people want cheap notebooks. But I think a big part of why we don't see them is for a very similar reason we don't see my little SOC/RAM modeules: packaging issues.
There is a difference between these ideas though. There's no market motive to make cheap notebooks. Sure, people want them, but you're wiping out the market for expensive notebooks without adding a new product. My plan creates a new market while at the same time appealing to existing consumer habits.
But I can tell you're not sold. Let me break it down on how we can use these babies.
In the freezer unit, we've got say a mini base package with ten CPUs. It's like the size of a beer cooler and it has bright green LEDs. There will be a blue mid-sized unit and then the full freezer size monster will be violet. Remember, Costco is our target outlet.
Alright, in the base model we've got one CPU acting as a router. We've got three CPUs dedicated to the load balanced web server. Yeah, it's overkill, but this is for Costco. We've got another one, possibly more depending on the configuration, dedicated to streaming media to the local network. Another is dedicated to streaming your data onto the net when you're away from home. We've got another one encrypting the local RAID file system in real time. One is managing your P2P. There's plenty of uses and separating them onto their own systems is going to make them much more reliable than trying to run them all off the same board. I know that's the case, because I already do something similar using my unsightly assortment of motherboards I have now.
Now, that's the base station. But the cool part is these little modules have a passive air cooled housing that they snap into for remote use in all the rooms of the house.
Check it out. These guys don't need discs at all. Each module has 500megs of DRAM, they boot Live-CD distros off a USB DVD-R. If one goes down, you just reload off the DVD and you don't need a DVD for each room. One is enough for the whole house. I already use this technology in my home, but with diskless motherboards. It's doable and quite useful.
So all you need in the rooms of the house is a display, if you want one, and speakers if you want them etc.
This system leverages the strengths of Debian on both sides. On one side you've got cluster management and on the other side you've got thin clients running our of RAMDisk.
Sure, people want cheap notebooks. But there's no motive to make them. If you can make a cheap notebook, you can make an expensive one.
You're overlooking the motive force behind American productivity gains. It's not IT, it's bulk consumption. The Financial Times just did a fascinating article on this last week.
We need to move the PC consumer to the ten-pack mentality. And don't discount the power of flashing lights in this equation. I'm telling ya, it's a key ingredient.
This is the economy man! Damn the purposes. As long as it's on the shelf in a tidy container and looks cute, it will work.
And I want one already.
Look at what you get on a motherboard. Besides the chipset you've got a bunch of outdated plastic adaptors that can almost all be replaced with USB 2.0. Move the chipset onto the CPU's silicon and dump the board.
This is clearly the way to go and if you market it as a product to be bought in bulk it could revive the hardware market --albeit in a new form, but sales are sales.
Why do kids buy Pokeman cards? Okay? To what purpose? Who cares?
Okay picky.
Let's put it another way. There ya go, the next way to market excessive computing power to to the consumer so the IT economy doesn't freeze up.
I want one. This is the killer appliance. It literally IS an applicance in the traditional sense. A nice black enamel finish or perhaps stainless with a glass top and frost along the edges to reflect the LEDs inside.
Scroll compressors are a genuine technological advance in mechanical efficiency. Such a machine might not be all that power hungry if the SOC/DRAM packs were relatively low heat. You wouldn't need each node to be the absoulte fastest, so each one could be relatively low temperature.
What I like best about it though is that you have the central batch of these babies and then you can also use them independently in different rooms of the house. If one of your remote units goes down in a bathroom or the garage, no biggie. You've got a whole freezer full. Buy them in ten packs at Costco.
Lately, fab prices are going down.
Canon, the number three player in steppers is trying to muscle its way past ASML and Nikon at the 90nm level and they're using aggressive pricing to get there. Check out their home page, you can find details on their 90nm steppers and google around from there.
More interestingly is that Grace and SMIC, which are the two largest fabs in Mainland China are the biggest customers this year. The barriers that prevented Japan from selling directly to China fell when the German comapny Infineon violated international agreements drafted by the US shortly after the US violated UN agreements by invadin Afganistan and Iraq.
Subsequently --hind sight is 20/20-- it was agreed that it's okay to sell cutting edge fab equipment to China. So, Canon is doing most of its business there this year and you can't sell products at US prices in China. It just doesn't work that way.
But as cool as diamonds are, platinum would also be useful. Platinum is the killer catalyst for all kinds of great reactions. Anybody out there have a recipe for, say aluminum to platinum?
Slashdot Mirror
And note how they emphasize that reneging will result in a "willfull infringment" case. That's important because they're suggesting that they're not necessarily pursuing willfull infringement claims the first time around. And that makes sense because obviously a lot of people are going to plead ignorance so proving evidence of infringement rather than demonstrating willful infringement is going to be much easier in court. But, this becomes very important if the defendant files for personal bankruptcy.
Unless the tort was for willful infringement, it's unlikely they will be able to pursue your assets after personal bankruptcy. So, this so-called amnesty results in allowing yourself to get locked into a position much more serious than what you might be in for without it.
And, looking at it from another angle, this should not be called an amnesty. Compare this to a parking ticket amnesty or a political prisoner amnesty. They don't say, okay this amnesty means you capitulate totally to our demands. That's not what amnesty is. Amnesty means both parties agree to cease pursuing their goals. It doesn't mean one party retroactively concedes anything the other party wants.
The bottom line is this: the legislators and the courts refuse to acknowledge that "copy" is no longer a stable term in the digital age. Until that idea is addressed by the laws and upheld by the courts, our legal systems will be fighting technology.
Well, I think Taiwan, rather than Samsung, oops I mean Korea is where all the boards come from. And it was not that long ago that we saw a post here on /. about a board coming out of Taiwan from a comapny called Abit with a special chipset they call the X-Wall that they claimed in their marketing materials could be used to keep out both the RIAA and government agencies. So, I would have to imagine that the notion of the entire motherboard market being controlled by a dark mysterious anti-consumer entity is a bit far fetched.
Funny you mention that. But check it out, I have a Master's Degree . . . in Rhetoric! And odd as it may seem, it just happens to cover all those areas perfectly. While good lawyers develop fierce rhetorical skill in the course of practicing law, they don't learn much of it in law school; rather, law school teaches the practice of law. In fact, most law schools don't even teach much about the history of law outside of reviewing specific cases. Law school teaches you how to practice law so you can get your license. Rhetoric is not the primary focus of law school, they leave that up to people who major in Rhetoric. You'll learn rhetorical skills from experience if you're a good lawyer that argues in court frequenently, but that paper was most likely written by a student and his rhetorical skills were lacking as I illustrated in the previous post.
Glad to oblige.
It was an amusing argument. But first note that it was only an argument and it was an argument with quite a few holes as you'd expect from a lawyer trying to argue tech issues.
Let me draw your attention to this quote: RAM is a volatile memory type, not a permanent memory type, and thus the copy of the phonorecord that was loaded into RAM will be destroyed when the device is turned off.
That's his definition that fits his argument because he wants to argue that copying into RAM isn't creating a fixed copy. But look what he said --he says that RAM is a volatile memory. But RAM is an acronym that simply means Random Access Memory. It is certainly not the case that RAM is always volatile. It could be, but it' not necessarily the case and these are the kinds of difficulties that the courts have to deal with. You can't just take some acronym and place all this meaning into it that isn't really there simply because casual observers might buy into it.
For the sake of your friend's argument he simply glazes over this enormous assumption about what RAM is in a cheap steet magician style that lawyers and hustlers of all stripes are so fond of.
Hey, don't get me wrong. I do multimedia. I got that same way. It's all illusion. I don't blame a sucker for trying, but I don't buy it. It isn't clear what a copy is in the digital age. Indeed, this is a philisophical underpinning of postmodernity.
Dearest Graff.
While you've quoted the exclusive rights section, you forgot the fair use section. That's why the law is many many pages long. You can't just take out one part and say this quote is all there is to it because the fact is that other section make exceptions to the rules laid out in prior sections. And fair use itself is divided into sections. There is no simple test of what is and what is not fair use in all contexts. If there was, the law would be much shorter.
In fact, you will find that for archives it is quite legal to make and use an unauthorized copy if your original is damaged. If it wasn't, libraries would be screwed by vandals. I know we're not talking about libararies here, but the point is that there is no one sentence black and white rule that define fair use in all contexts.
Although I appreciate your poetic manner of expressing yourself, I doubt what you've stated. If fear cannot be shared between people and serve as a form of social discourse then the horror genre would be nowhere near as important as it is. I've heard a similar assertion about pain. Wittgenstein uses it as an example in discussing literacy among other things. But even then there are problems because the division between physical and emotional pain are not clear at all and emotional pain can certainly be shared. Grief is a commonly shared emotional pain. /..
I admire your expressive ability though. We don't get a lot of thoughtful writers on
Well with all the hype that this case is getting ---jeez 300 posts and it's only been up for a few minutes-- all I know is this chick better be hot and have a hell of a wardrobe with a nic like that because she's going to be getting some major media attention either way and if she's even halfway decent looking and willing to wear some revealing or suggestive outfits this could rather ironically be the beginning of a huge media career. Pick those nics carefully. It could be the most imporant thing you ever do.
If it's not this particular case, it will be one of the other 1300. The DMCA was written by a Congress and approved by an Administration who stated in the press at the time that there was nothing to fear about the elements of the DMCA, in particular the highly questionable subpeona elements coming to the fore at this point, because they would be revised when the courts got ahold of it.
This will go to the Supreme Court in one form of the other because it's well known that the DMCA was not a strong piece of legislation and it was particularly the subpeona parts that were problematic.
If the Supreme Court was to take the surprising and unlikely stance that the subpeona provisions of the DMCA don't violate the right against unreasonable search and seizure then I suspect that broadband adoption in the US will continue to remain far behind that of other countries resulting in a long term competitive disadvantage.
While it's an interesting idea, it reminds me with the nutrient pill idea. You know, that in the future there will be this pill and it will be all you need to survive.
The main problem with this is not just the technology, it's that so many people actually enjoy eating a good meal. It's like a cure for sex. Certain people might think it's a great idea, but most people don't really want it.
I saw a similar thing about high tech nano fiber clothes where the author said, isn't this great, you could wear the same outfit all year long. I looked over at my wife browsing her fashion magazines and thought, this was clearly written by a man.
So many of these solutions for the future are answers to problems that aren't really problems across the board.
But I wonder if these yeast cells can be made to produce growth hormone and human fetal serum. That would be intriguing as all hell.
After the big scene a few weeks back where they showed off their supposed code and had dozens of predated generic counter examples on the web within hours I thought the whole thing sort of faded out.
It was pretty obvious there was no case to be made. It seemed to have been covered pretty well in the mainstream press as well. At least I that was the impression I got. Oh well, I guess they're just puffing their chests till they can unload the rest of their shares.
I was just going over this in a story yesterday on multimedia. Running Macromedia multimedia packages under Wine leads to a similar effect. If the author puts in some sort of crude DRM that would prematurely exit under Windows or Mac, Wine just pops up a dialogue and says, the application is attempting to exit, would you like to ignore this?
I was rolling on the floor the first time I saw this. So much for wannabee DRM strategies in Macromedia presentations.
Well, I thought your original post was a bit off base as the article was clearly referring to a multimedia CD. Not only was it the topic of the article, it was much more so the topic I had focused on in my post about how thankless multimedia work can be. I even specifically refered to the use of Macromedia authoring tools which use high level scripts to control and or prevent interactivity and rarely touch upon low level functionality. So your comment about "referencing invalid pointers" which would be an unlikely problem since we're talking about high level media packaging environments was either ignorant of the topic at hand or a kind of sniping.
So, I called you a cowboy to offend you in return as I correctly doubted you like to be called a cowboy.
The reference to your user ID was nothing but jealousy.
And although I've already said it once, I'll say it again. It was my fault for using the word crash because your whole issue rests on defining crash from a low level point of view rather than from the user's point of view. Since the topic was multimedia and not intro to C I used the word crash to mean the program does not continue.
I am like so freakin' sorry. In the future I will not use the word crash without sending along a memory dump from the logs so you'll know exactly which crash I'm referring to.
Can I go now?
Well slap me for feeding the trolls, but fair use is a complex issue that has many different meanings in many different contexts.
You can find the text of the multiple fair use sub-sections of US copyright law at www.loc.gov/copyright. If you were seriously interested, you'll find them in the first chapter, but I doubt you really care in the least what the law says because you obviously know better than to be concerned with such trivia.
But something has to give. If the copyright holders are gonna play hard ball about eliminating fair use, what's the motivation for the consumer to pay for the broadband that's got to be there for these services to work? It seems to me there are two courses.
1. P2P becomes fair use and broadband adopting goes through the roof.
2. Fair use is essentially eliminated and broadband stagnates.
I find it hard to see both happening unless broadband gets extremely cheap by, for instance, being subsidized by the copyright holders that want to sell these new content services. You can't beat up the customer in the jungle ball approach that has been taken and then play dumb when they won't subsidize the infrastructure for your new business model.
I had no idea so many feeds were available. This kind of thing is not good for someone like me. I've got a lifelong obsession with news that came from a childhood filled with the constant drone of NPR. Now, here's this vast new frontier of news. Dear lord save me. My whole family is going to end up stung on this. We'll never talk to each other again.
It is great to see a way to lurk newsletters in one conveient package without having to deal with the spam of using e-mail. I'm very impressed, but slightly embarrassed that I wasn't already using it.
I don't see why this limits interactivity. Most people reading newsletters are just lurking most of the time. There's no reason you can't still post an e-mail if you wish. If anything it should make newsletters much more active as more people feel free to lurk and keep up with the discussion.
Okay, fair enough. Let me rephrase it by saying that I've seen dozens of Macromedia packaged applications targeted for the educational market that do work fine under Wine although not being mentioned in the Wine apps database. Perhaps my assertion was too bold, but I don't regret suggesting that people should try it because I think it is more common that people don't try and assume it doesn't work than that they do try and fail. But again, that's just my personal feeling that comes from seeing it work so many times when I assumed it was unlikely.
Okay, perhaps you don't like the word crash. Would you prefer another phrase like "prematurely exit" or "conclude" or "restart." Those are all suitable replacements to what I was referring to. Perhaps you've never worked with DRM. And that's great. I'm happy for you. Really. It's a better worls without it. But some companies in the past have actually tried to force their users to purchase passowrds or other such inconveiences and one of the enforcement techniques is to not allow the program to continue.
So, all I was saying was that a lot of these techniques that a developer using Macromedia's authoring tools might use to accomplish these things don't work when the packages are run under Wine because Wine simply says, there was an error would you like to continue. And often it can continue without a problem.
I can see from your low user number that you are a cowboy and would not consider Macromedia's multimedia authoring tools to be REAL development, but it seemed from the article that this was what was being used.
I was just pondering the same thing on a weekend trip to south-eastern Taiwan. Enforce copyrights? My god, there was no traffic light on a gigantic six way intersection in front of the main train station and most drivers seemed to prefer the aggressive chicken technique. People speak two or three of about six different dialects. We were glared down a group of Russian merchant marines walking around like a fist-to-fist recon platoon. Yeah, copyright issues will get all sorted out there real quick. Making sure the RIAA gets their props is the top priority all over the world right now. All those other local problems can wait.
And even if Asians are too busy with other things to comply right away, I'm sure the people of the Middle East and Africa are very concerned about setting these things straight with their friends in corporate America as soon as possible. Who knows what horrors might happen if they delay another monent. The RIAA has really got things under control. Let's give them a big hand.
In fact, the answer is obvious. Allow me to explain.
You see, what we do is establish a new electronic currency that is the currency of the welfare state. This new currency is radically different than anything Marx or any historical economic ponderer could ever have imagined because it is self-deflating. You can't save this currency. It must be spent within a few months or it will dissapear. This allows a welfare state without inflation. This is important because it is inflation which is the real scourge of socialist welfare states as we've seen over and over in South America, Africa and the various other macro-economic laboratories of the world.
Now, how is this pro-business? Simple, the only entities that are allowed to accept this electronic welfare currency are private businesses. In essence, it is corporate welfare that is filtered through the masses with an internal check on inflation. Any establishment abusing the system, especially by allowing people to translate the welface currency to hard cash to create illicit savings, is temporarily banned from accepting the electronic currency and thus loses market share. By providing a reward up front, you create a form of soft punishment by withdrawing the reward rather than actually having to resort to a punishment like jails that are a hidden tax on the system. This is a common technique in education and child rearing.
One thing that is totally incompatible with this system is policies that create black markets such as the war on drugs. These obstacles must be overcome first.
Reading through the comments, I saw the reaffirmation of my ongoing belief that you've got to have a serious masochistic streak to do multimedia development these days. People are never satisfied because the desireable media experience is such a personal preference.
I've little doubt the product sucks and the criticisms are justified, but I was trying to imagine what it would be like to be on the, most likely, small staff cranking out a multimedia CD every week and I thought --you know, it's probably not such a happening position.
And for the people complaining that it doesn't work on their Gnu-Linux systems I have to ask --did they even try running it under Wine? From the article it sounds like a Macromedia based product and I've yet to see a Director or Authorware packaged piece that doesn't work under Wine. In fact, these types of products often work better under Wine than on Mac or MS systems because when Wine encounters an error that would freeze the program on the proprietary
OS's, Wine simply pops up a dialogue and asks you if you'd like to ignore the error. This makes life difficult for multi-media people trying to create DIY DRM techniques that work by intentionally crashing the program under a given condition on Mac or Windows platforms.
Take the case of microsilica AKA silica fume. This is a material used in a vast number of products but perhaps most famous for making ultra-high strength concrete.
There are two common forms known as amorphous and crystalline microscilica. The amorphous product is not known to produce the lung disease silicosis while the larger scale crystalline variety does so quite readily.
So, substances don't necessarily become more dangerous at smaller scales, the opposite can also be true.
Well, now let's get this straight. I couldn't agree more that people want cheap notebooks. But I think a big part of why we don't see them is for a very similar reason we don't see my little SOC/RAM modeules: packaging issues.
There is a difference between these ideas though. There's no market motive to make cheap notebooks. Sure, people want them, but you're wiping out the market for expensive notebooks without adding a new product. My plan creates a new market while at the same time appealing to existing consumer habits.
But I can tell you're not sold. Let me break it down on how we can use these babies.
In the freezer unit, we've got say a mini base package with ten CPUs. It's like the size of a beer cooler and it has bright green LEDs. There will be a blue mid-sized unit and then the full freezer size monster will be violet. Remember, Costco is our target outlet.
Alright, in the base model we've got one CPU acting as a router. We've got three CPUs dedicated to the load balanced web server. Yeah, it's overkill, but this is for Costco. We've got another one, possibly more depending on the configuration, dedicated to streaming media to the local network. Another is dedicated to streaming your data onto the net when you're away from home. We've got another one encrypting the local RAID file system in real time. One is managing your P2P. There's plenty of uses and separating them onto their own systems is going to make them much more reliable than trying to run them all off the same board. I know that's the case, because I already do something similar using my unsightly assortment of motherboards I have now.
Now, that's the base station. But the cool part is these little modules have a passive air cooled housing that they snap into for remote use in all the rooms of the house.
Check it out. These guys don't need discs at all. Each module has 500megs of DRAM, they boot Live-CD distros off a USB DVD-R. If one goes down, you just reload off the DVD and you don't need a DVD for each room. One is enough for the whole house. I already use this technology in my home, but with diskless motherboards. It's doable and quite useful.
So all you need in the rooms of the house is a display, if you want one, and speakers if you want them etc.
This system leverages the strengths of Debian on both sides. On one side you've got cluster management and on the other side you've got thin clients running our of RAMDisk.
Sure, people want cheap notebooks. But there's no motive to make them. If you can make a cheap notebook, you can make an expensive one.
You're overlooking the motive force behind American productivity gains. It's not IT, it's bulk consumption. The Financial Times just did a fascinating article on this last week.
We need to move the PC consumer to the ten-pack mentality. And don't discount the power of flashing lights in this equation. I'm telling ya, it's a key ingredient.
This is the economy man! Damn the purposes. As long as it's on the shelf in a tidy container and looks cute, it will work.
And I want one already.
Look at what you get on a motherboard. Besides the chipset you've got a bunch of outdated plastic adaptors that can almost all be replaced with USB 2.0. Move the chipset onto the CPU's silicon and dump the board.
This is clearly the way to go and if you market it as a product to be bought in bulk it could revive the hardware market --albeit in a new form, but sales are sales.
Why do kids buy Pokeman cards? Okay? To what purpose? Who cares?
Okay picky.
Let's put it another way. There ya go, the next way to market excessive computing power to to the consumer so the IT economy doesn't freeze up.
I want one. This is the killer appliance. It literally IS an applicance in the traditional sense. A nice black enamel finish or perhaps stainless with a glass top and frost along the edges to reflect the LEDs inside.
Scroll compressors are a genuine technological advance in mechanical efficiency. Such a machine might not be all that power hungry if the SOC/DRAM packs were relatively low heat. You wouldn't need each node to be the absoulte fastest, so each one could be relatively low temperature.
What I like best about it though is that you have the central batch of these babies and then you can also use them independently in different rooms of the house. If one of your remote units goes down in a bathroom or the garage, no biggie. You've got a whole freezer full. Buy them in ten packs at Costco.
Lately, fab prices are going down.
Canon, the number three player in steppers is trying to muscle its way past ASML and Nikon at the 90nm level and they're using aggressive pricing to get there. Check out their home page, you can find details on their 90nm steppers and google around from there.
More interestingly is that Grace and SMIC, which are the two largest fabs in Mainland China are the biggest customers this year. The barriers that prevented Japan from selling directly to China fell when the German comapny Infineon violated international agreements drafted by the US shortly after the US violated UN agreements by invadin Afganistan and Iraq.
Subsequently --hind sight is 20/20-- it was agreed that it's okay to sell cutting edge fab equipment to China. So, Canon is doing most of its business there this year and you can't sell products at US prices in China. It just doesn't work that way.
But as cool as diamonds are, platinum would also be useful. Platinum is the killer catalyst for all kinds of great reactions. Anybody out there have a recipe for, say aluminum to platinum?