As I read the parent comment, something occurred to me that could cause further consideration of the contents of the original article:
P2Ping, Napstering, and posting are three different things. Napstering and posting share some similarities, but make no mistake they are different beasts.
1) In the strictest P2P model, one person has a file. Another person knows about it and wants it. Both go online. A connects up to B's computer, downloads the content, and sign off.
This is the technological equivalent of inviting someone over to listen to tracks off an album, and when people talk about fair use getting trampled on, this is the classic example.
3) Posting to a network involves uploading the content to a different source. A has a file. B wants to experience it. A uploads the file to C where B can fetch it later.
This could also be considered P2P distribution, but depending on how C has his computer set up, the file can be searched up and downloaded by D, E, F, G, H, etc.
If it's private, and not everybody has access, then everything should be okay and the thing falls squarely under fair use, abusable as the technology might be. If it's public, requires no login or identification, and C advertises his computer as the w4r3z5h4cK, then legal trouble ensues.
Now for the piece de resistance:
2) Under Napster's model, A has a file. A logs on, signs onto the file sharing service, and his computer registers its presence. B signs on, wants to see the file, and seeks it out by author. If it's not a popular file, he'll turn up A's computer. If it's a popular file, he'll turn up A's computer, C's computer, F's computer, etc. Then he can download the file from A, C, F, etc. And so can D, E, G, H, etc.
Under models (1) and (2), the file stays accessible only as long as A keeps his computer connected up to the net which, depending on his security savvy, may not be such a good idea knowing that there are people who want to stop him from making the file available to anybody else.
Under model (3), it's done as a one-shot action. Connect, upload, disconnect, and it's there for other people to get while A's computer remains turned off.
The trouble comes in partially under (3), but mostly under (2), where all sorts of people, friends and strangers alike, can access the song. This more closely resembles the mass distribution model that the Content Cartels want to shut down. And can't because the technology is so widespread.
That's why they're trying to stick themselves in the middle of everything, why they propose draconian DRM systems to plug as many of the holes as possible, and stomp way the hell all over model (1) which I see as the least threatening to them.
Now, as for the poster's original comment (Yes, I haven't forgotten that):
I don't follow. If you can casual-copy it, generally speaking you can P2P-it. I don't see how someone capable of casually copying would be deterred by DRM from posting it on a network.
There are a few things to prevent it:
A) Lack of bandwidth. 56k dialup customers (and there are more of them out there than you might think -- I'm one of them) will not want to leave their computer hooked up a whole lot of time to do stuff, either because they're charged by the hour, don't want to tie up the phone line, or both. Even if they have a monthly unlimited account and second phone line (like I do), they may still have a:
B) Lack of a permanent connection. Their computer just might not be set up for leaving on all the time. I know that I wouldn't want to leave my connection on all the time; then again, I'm using a laptop. People without permanent hook-ups might be willing to share one or two files for friends, but leaving the thing hooked up all the time might just not appeal to them.
C) Respect for the artists/developers. Yes, I know, that's in somewhat short supply these days (in
Napster, Casual Copying, and Capacitance
on
DRM and Threat Analysis
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
The talk of two copying models and the level of protection needed to minimize each is profound. It speaks of a deep wisdom which many have overlooked.
But I want to add something to it. Everyone here knows what a capacitor is, right? It's two metal plates separated by a little insulator. When enough of a charge builds up between those two plates, the current will briefly jump the gap through the insulator.
The same applies to the Napsterizing/Casual-Copying model. Under casual copying, people make copies and distribute them to one or two friends. With Napsterization, one copy is made and broadcast to a great many people who want it.
The two are separated by a small gap. Will someone make one or two copies, or make it available for hundreds to download? That's where the capacitance comes in. If there's enough pressure, sooner or later a piece of media will jump the gap from casual copying and appear somewhere for everyone to grab a copy of.
What affects capacitance between the two? Well, the better the content is, the more people will want to show it to other people. The easier it is to show to other people, the more people will do so. P2P software today has cut the gap considerably. DRM is an attempt to add insulation and keep things from making the jump from casual copying to mass distribution.
It's been demonstrated, preventing any copies from being made is theoretically impossible, but the Content Cartels continue to try to prevent it. Likewise, preventing the jump to from casual copying to underground mass distribution is nearly impossible, but the Content Cartels continue suing every P2P, university, or network service that doesn't outlaw it outright.
It'd be interesting to see statistics on which results in more copies being made: P2P distribution or casual copying. Because it seems that P2P networks do more damage, but are much harder to prevent. And, in fact, if a DRM is put into place which prevents casual copying, I could see MORE people going to P2P systems to get copies from those who CAN break the "anti-fair-use technologies."
Thoughtful as the piece on different types of copying threat is, it becomes moot as the different types come closer together.
The Two-Headed Beast of SCIENCE!!
on
Professors vs. WiFi
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
It's been mentioned enough times on this topic, but it bears repeating: technology has both good and bad points. Furthermore, given the extensive use of technology, a solution may exist which nobody's thought of yet.
Good point: Wireless networking allows students ways to remotely research class topics outside the classroom. Yes they could go to the library before, or stay in their dorm rooms and look this stuff up, but the new technology allows that work to fit more neatly into campus life. Result: More opportunity to study.
Bad point: Wireless networking allows students ways to slack off inside the classroom. Yeah, attention deficiency is nothing new in the classroom, but considering the things the modern laptop can do, its presence can be an awful temptation to those already inclined to play around. Result: More opportunity to ignore the teacher.
Both are valid, and to take one side is to trivialize the other.
As another aside, there's been some talk of whose fault it is students get bad grades. It's the teacher's responsibility to present the course's subject matter in a reasonable, easy-to-follow fashion. It's not his responsibility to spoon-feed the student a passing grade, no matter how undeserved.
Rule of thumb: if one student does poorly in a class, odds are it's the student's fault. If almoast everyone does poorly in a class, odds are it's the teacher's fault.
SWAT team member: "Captain, it's worse than we thought -- they have a computer with a CD burner. It may have a net connection as well."
Captain: "I see. Confiscate that equipment and then shoot those entertainment criminals!"
(A paraphrasing from a cartoon in a college newspaper many, many years ago)
Think about it -- what's the most popular way for spammers to get their "goods" out into public?
Open mail relays!
Spammers are already using a great deal of other peoples' computing power without compensating them any for the cycles used, the black eye of blacklisting, etc.
From the sound of it, many people here don't believe that the pre-screen piracy actually took place. But let's suppose for a moment that it's true: that "The Two Towers" DVD hit the streets in Asia even before the movie is due to hit the theaters.
Shameful! Shocking! The movie is pirated even before it's released here! How could such a thing happen? Why, the only organization who has the film is the studio itself.Hmmmmm...
This could have been accomplished either of two ways:
Someone snuck a camcorder into one of the test showings and recorded it. In this case, the studio didn't have enough security at their screens to check for recording equipment. This would produce a really low quality movie since there's no way to set up a tripod. Odds are it would not produce a good DVD, so there's only one other option:
Someone within the studio itself pirated it. This is a monstrous accusation, I know, but think how easy it would be. These big films are already digitally mastered, and sneaking a single disc out of the studio probably wouldn't be so hard. Or there's email. I don't know what kind of computer security the studios have working for them (it can't be that good given how they're universally reviled on/.) but someone could probably pack up the film (or even the contents of the finished DVD) out of the studio.
These are the only ways that I can think of (reply with your own ideas, please!), and in either case, the piracy is due to the studio's own negligence and/or delusions of invulnerability. Bottom line: There's no way they can pin this on Joe Consumer and his tricked out VCR/DVD rig, or Joe Geek with his Linux box running DeCSS.
Perhaps we should believe them, and help them to understand where their problems really lie. Because I bet they're too thick to figure it out for themselves.
I'm anti-piracy, pro-fair-use, and anti-bullshit. Just like 98% of everyone else out there.
[Longhorn] will have a new look and feel, very different from Windows XP's. Its guts will also be radically different from Windows XP's, because they're based on XML -- extensible markup language, the emerging lingua franca of the Internet.
I must have missed something somewhere -- when did XML become a programming language?
Has anyone here ever worked with RTF? It's a way of adding basic font, size, layout, and color information and whatnot to a text file. You can think of it as a sort of HTML-lite. It was supposed to be cross-platform too, but Microsoft produced a version of it which was so alien that no other RTF system could handle it without preprocessing.
Now Microsoft is using XML, a cross-platform, open data markup system, and using it extensively in a proprietary, closed operating system?
XML is pretty open (at least, now anyway). What's going to make Microsoft's implementation of it "special" (in that Microsoft-special way) is the internal and proprietary XSLs which read and interpret the tags to display the information on screen and in print. Other systems can read the XML documents, but to make sense of them the way Longhorn's software will requires information that Microsoft yet again won't share.
It should be possible to recreate XSLs from the structure of the XML, which would seem to make it extremely easy to reverse-engineer. In order to prevent that, Microsoft has to "extend" XML in such a way that it breaks on other systems.
...from the description and talk, 3G may not be as dead as people seem to be pronouncing it around here. Sure, it makes sense to say that a certain type of customizeability, that could easily be replicated somewhere else, is no guarantee to success, but we're not necessarily dealing with sensible people here. No, we're dealing with consumers.
Why do technologies become standard? Because they're used frequently.
Why do people use technologies? Because they get some sort of benefit from them.
And "Hello Kitty," inane as it sounds, is a benefit that many in that market seem to want.
Remember that whole VHS/Betamax thing? Betamax had the smalller cassette with superior quality, but despite its "advantages," VHS still won out.
VHS had the bigger advantages in that fight: consumer and industry support.
The notion of the translation of data for another sense is not a new one. Many years ago, as a last piece on a news show somewhere, I saw how some scientists were considering converting chemical assay data to a recognized tune so that they can work on other things and "hear" any anomalies in the sample.
I can remember it that clearly for two reasons:
The piece of music they mentioned as an example (the Star Spangled Banner), and
The specific chemical application they were going to use it for (urinalysis).
That's right, whatever wise man said "Never whistle while you're pissing" (I remember it first in connection with Robert Anton Wilson, but I could be wrong) had no idea this day was coming. (And if you ever hear the Star Spangled Banner playing in the washroom, try not to salute!)
Numbers on a terminal window don't have much meaning unless put in perspective, or the perspective is known very well to begin with. Music is a "given" perspective that most people know already. They may not be able to play a note, but they know what sounds right and what doesn't. This method is a good way to convert numeric data into something more immediately recognizeable.
Now, the bad news: The connection between doctor and patient in a telesurgery operation must be both low latency and low jitter. When either one isn't there, the participants have good reason to panic. And all that auditory monitoring of ping times and jitter will do is enable that panic to set in that much more quickly. Can you say "liability," boys and girls?
I just don't consider the modern Internet to be sufficiently reliable for any application, and I expect its quality will continue to degrade as time goes by, more people get on, ISPs save money by not upgrading their equipment to handle the new press of people, and certain forces work to pollute the net with carnality, banality, and commercialism.
It doesn't surprise me at all that it would go down fast under a vigorous slashdotting, but not because it's run on Macs but because it's run about Macs.
Servers cost money. So anyone building a website will try to use the minimum server power they can get away with. Microsoft will run massive banks of servers because they expect lots of people to connect to them for security patches, bug fixes, security patches, product information, bug fixes, technical support, and security patches.
So here's TidBITS, a site run for the Apple community (which is admittedly small), which only expects traffic from those people who use and appreciate Apples. So they run it on just a few machines. They normally only need one or two.
But then they posted a general interest story, someone told Slashdot about it, and boom! Instant DoS Attack! Find me a one-machine server that has that kind of instant scalability, and I'll buy one.
And how, exactly, would something like this be accomplished?
2) The "I've moved!" bounce would require that your former provider use their resources to support this service, essentially forwarding part of their business to a competitor. Can you think of anyone willing to spend thier money to do that?
Here's how I envisioned the procedure:
A) The user cancels the account. He or she may have a replacement email address in use. Then for a few weeks (two is reasonable):
B1) If there is no forwarding address, emails are just bounced back to the sender with a notice.
B2) If there is a forwarding address, the server forwards the message to the ex-customer, and sends a change-of-address message back to the sender.
C) After the x-week period, the account is recycled and the system generates standard fail messages.
Is it smart business? Not for ISPs that see customers as little more than revenue streams. Some businesses fail because they focus so much on revenue that they drive off all their customers with unrepentent cheapness.
It is, however, very helpful to the customer, may make up for previous problems, and touches like this could eventually win the customer back.
Clarification noted, and I concede it. But I believe they forward the mail without any extra charges, don't they? And they will sometimes send out notifications if smail is marked "Address Correction Requested."
Am I the only one bothered by the notion that there is something that email could learn from the processing of smail?
(I wrote:) (Side question: does this mean she can sue the Discovery Channel for not trying to contact her some other ways?)
(Kerith wrote:) Good God, please tell me you're joking. Hell, let's sue EVERYONE! Sue the guy who sent the email, he didn't follow-up with a phone call! Sue the guy he works for, because he didn't track her down and cram the job offer down her throat!
Oh, that? Yes, I was joking. Perhaps I should have been clearer on that. Yeah, I could have stuck a smiley on it, but humor is best delivered in a deadpan...
For starters, I can't see anything the woman did wrong. If it was a well enough written resume that she could land a $65K contract with a media conglomerate, then she probably included her phone and smail (snail-mail) addresses too. (Side question: does this mean she can sue the Discovery Channel for not trying to contact her some other ways?)
Now, as for the ISP...
Some say that email is free, which makes it different from smail. This isn't entirely true; while smail requires "stamps," email works on a subscription service. Pay your ISP, the ISP provides you with an address which you can send to and from. Because they have costs too -- supporting the lines and hubs you dial in on, connecting to other hubs, etc.
If you change addresses, and start getting mail sent to a different address, what happens?
In the case of the smail, you get the stuff forwarded from your old address to the new address -- and that's perfectly fair because the sender paid to get the letter or package to you. This is helped considerably by the fact that all the post offices are owned by the same company. BTW, this is probably the only case I can think of in which a monopoly helps the consumer.
In the case of email, what happens? One person pays a fee to send the email, which goes out onto the network. (This is a recipe for disaster in some peoples' minds -- we promisenot to read it. Really!) All other systems agree to pass it along, until it gets to the other end.
The receiver pays as well, to send and receive messages. This would seem to last as long as the user pays. But some of that time is wasted at the start because people have to publish or otherwise get that new email address out, same as if you changed your smail address.
And when the user changes services, what happens to the email still inbound to the box? Some people will say that the email should be shut off, any new messages bounced. Anyone with any sense of fair play would also say that since there was a lag time before the address could be used that anything new that comes into the address should be bounced to the new address, with a message back to the sender that a new address is being used. These are ethical solutions that may be overlooked because we are talking about "business" here, which seems to work by different rules.
The article on C|Net is clear enough on the point: ISPs' handling of email under special circumstances is not merely twisted but actually sprained.
And I consider it a very good point.
Much of the Internet is still frontier-grade in its rules, with its share of rail barons and robber barons and common horse thieves and a government that lives very very far away and has little hope of understanding this wild frontier for the next several generations.
What's missing here is not legislation but common sense.
I think that when a user stops service, old and new mail should be forwarded if possible for two to four weeks, and then simply handled like any other bounce. I consider this ethical and sensible. Other peoples' common senses and ethics may say other things.
Which leads to the questions: a) How do we decide on an optimal solution, and b) how do we make the non-ethical, non-sensible people follow suit?
Great! Then all we need is some sort of disaster that convinces everybody... that music and movies should be shared.
Does anyone else see a problem with this idea?
The sad thing is not how unlikely it is (it is, really), but that I can think of a case: if the people become so unwilling to pursue culture (music becomes unavailable except on specific devices at specific times, television can't be recorded and must be watched when scheduled, etc.) that they learn to do without, and sink into a sort of modern-day sociopathic barbarism.
Yes, it's unlikely, but we have the makings of such a disaster in play already. Some could say it's already started:
Then: William Shakespeare. Beethoven. René Descartes.
Now: Dean Koonz. Britney Spears. Dan Rather
Yes, feel free to argue that there still quality producers of content out there now. But how many of them can you name? I can't because I haven't been buying much music lately, and culture just seems irrelevant these days since few people actually seem to be paying attention to it...
Part of me actually wishes this would happen, except that I'd be stuck in the middle of it myself too.
There's Ambrosia's Cold Stone game development package, if you want to build your own adventure game. I believe it makes standalones, too.
Also, as a matter of curiosity, amid the false hits, I occasionally get good tidbits on Google (search for "Build your own" and "game").
I did my part by posting the links. Now, why won't they get looked at seriously? Because they, like, use those grody 2D graphics, or worse yet, text! What are they, 1D? Everything these days is 3D or better!
I think it's a matter of three different problems: 1) technical sophistication, 2) thematic sophistication, 3) and a need for immediate gratification, and I think the Cold Stone above highlights all three.
1) Technical Sophisticaion involves the game's engine. How sophisticated by today's standards is it? 2D graphics won't get taken seriously. People spend thousands cobbling together the latest and utmost hardware, they want something that'll *use* that hardware. Construction set games like the Cold Stone above will take up a shamefully small resource footprint on the machine of your choice.
Another factor under this banner is the complexity of construction: "Welcome to the Turing Tarpits, where everything is possible but nothing interesting is easy." How much work would it take to build a game with a full degree of technical sophistication? By the time you did that, you might as well be programming in C++ and OpenGL, and prepping the blasted thing to market.
To make a long point short (too late!), any toolkit which makes game which meet peoples' technical expectations will be too complicated and hard to use for casual use -- nobody will want to play with them.
2) Thematic Sophistication is a matter of story within a game. Some times this isn't necessary; a pinball machine isn't going to have much of a story line behind it (unless it was made after 1988), and first person shooters don't necessarily need a lot of plot.
But adventure games do, and to expect the average person to sit down with something like ColdStone and put together a compelling adventure is akin to having the average person sit down with a word processor and put together a compelling novel.
Most people realize that they lack the talent for something like this, and so they don't. Maybe to experiment with, which makes the construction sets little more than a toy in that regard.
3) Immediate Gratification means you want to be satisfied *now now now now now!* And you're not going to get that kind of gratification if you have to sit down with the toolkit and read the f'ing manual to learn how it works. Then there's the time spent assembling graphics, selecting (or recording?) sounds, and making the package coherent. No, people plunk down $30-$50 for something, and they want to be amused by it right away.
The same was true way back when, too, but at least the toolkits were simplistic enough then that you could have fun experimenting. I remember not having to read a manual on Pinball Construction Set (a copy of which I still have somewhere at home for the Apple II). I bet Cold Stone has a lot of manuals with it.
Commentary welcome. I would especially like to be proved wrong here...
The situation in regards the high cost of replacement inkjet cartridges reminds me a lot of the famous case where the US government said that IBM could not force users of punch card readers to use ONLY punch cards manufactured by IBM.
I'll drink to that. The printer manufacturers are essentially trying to lock people, by both technological (like smartchips and whatnot) and legislative (?!?) means into using just their ink.
I can see only one possible reason to even try to lock consumers into using one and only one source for their ink -- because each manufacturer uses a different configuration of ink paths and print nozzles in their cartridges, and a sufficiently wrong third party formulation of ink might leak out, print funny, etc.
But then it gets back to the question of why the printer manufacturers would object if the printer got busted and leaked all over everything, since it's the customer's fault for "tampering" with the standard operation of the printer.
More likely they don't want the consumer thinking "Ho hum, this printer's broken, might as well go out and by another underpriced printer."
The actual quote on the barrier arm that Edison Carter smacked into face-first was:
MAX. HEAD ROOM 2.3M
That's how, in the American series at least, Max got his name: it was the last thing Edison saw before being walloped into unconsciousness and having his brain scanned. When his braindump came online, it was the first thing it tried saying, and it stuck as a name.
The cyber-battle leading up to that was also loads of fun to watch, but I won't spoil how it happens; it's well worth a chuckle.
What a trivia geek I am too, but in this case I don't see that as a bad thing.
Why do employees become thieves and vandals? Because they are angry at the company they work for.
Why do they get angry at the company they work for? Because the company that they work for treats them like an expendable, replaceable resource. And especiallylike an expendable, replaceable resource whose output is directly proportional to the pressure applied to get work out of it.
We worked our asses off for minimum wage (back in the 70s when jobs were REAL hard to come by). The joint treated us like slaves. They even removed the chairs where we wrote up the paperwork and install a table at standing height. Some manager was concerned we were taking too long to write up paperwork. We also in the beginning got two 15 minute breaks a day and then they took one of them away.
Sure sounds like the problem here. (Is your washroom breeding Bolsheviks?)
Just as well though, since the store went "tits up" three years later.
You have to wonder how much longer the company might have lasted had they treated their workers like people and not hemmhoraged inventory out the dumpster in back.
And now, because someone has to draw the parallel... almost the same principle can be used to explain any increase in the use of P2P software, music sharing, CD burning, etc. -- some people might be interested in spreading the tunes, but a few, sick of being treated like criminals by the music and video industry anyway, decide they have nothing to lose and want some way to lash out.
In the above post, certainly that $500 stereo didn't do anything to hurt anybody. And yet...
There's a feature that's been on almost every Mac, from low end to high end, since Steve Jobs decided to give the company's products their first image makeover. It's strangely absent from the eMac, and now I wonder why it lacks--
--the handles.
Oh yeah, scoff if you must, but think about it -- nearly every non-laptop machine in Apple's post-beige era has had handles of some sort, either on the corners (blue G3 and G4 towers) or set in the top (iMacs from the get-go). Even the old iBooks had the plastic carrying handle.
And if you think back, remember the very very original 128K Macintosh with the big square mouse? It had a handle too. SE/030? Handle.
The eMac represents a departure from the standard design for a number of reasons as stated by other posters, and now there's this too.
Yeah, I know, the handle isn't quite as nice as, say, the BSD-compatible core, but it's something I'd grown to rely on. I begin to wonder what's going through the designers' minds.
If a server starts throwing garbage over a network, most network engineers that have two brain cells to rub together will either take it offline (if they have access) or blacklist it (if they don't).
What do you think the networks will do when a nation's government proves to spew this kind of noise all over the world? China could get on everybody's hit list by doing something like that. In that regard, it seems somehow counterproductive.
I'm not saying it's impossible, a sufficiently short-sighted government (say, one that calls itself the "Peoples' Liberation Army" and expects people to believe it after mashing students with tanks) might attempt it.
But in light of the possible consequences, it seems somehow e-suicidal.
Save the free speech argument for those times when it really applies
Therein lies the trap: when does it not apply?
Much as I'd like to see more intelligence injected into contempory video games (a lot of them are simply "product"), I want more to see foresight injected into our judiciary. So I see any claim that something is not protected as a basic right to be at best dubious, and at worst depressing and/or frightening.
People who want to nullify basic rights don't just come out and say "You no longer have this right -- deal with it." They eliminate them piecemeal, one at a time, starting with the most heinous because nobody likes them, and then working toward banning the whole thing much farther down the road.
"'A' is not Free Speech." Soon as the people generally accept that assumption, someone will come out and say "'B' is not Free Speech, it too closely resembles 'A'." And many people will see the reason and go along with it, though some are inconvenienced by it.
And so it continues through the alphabet, chaining together all those things that people want to outlaw until the right itself means nothing; nobody can do anything worthwhile with it. Around X or Y, most people will be outraged and want to fight back, but by then it'll be too late.
Somewhere in the grand scheme, some sort of firebreak must be set up to protect what we have left of those rights, or some push to take back what narrow-minded so-called "decent" people want to give away (not because we want to use those freedoms, but because they see no use for them).
But sometimes I wonder if we haven't passed that point already.
Internet2 pulling together? Good for the universities and research organizations that get it. I actually hope it stays that way for a good long time too.
Consider the state of the current Internet -- banner ads, pop-ups, pop-unders, email virii, web browser virii, web server virii, Flash web design, and 'content delivery' systems which are more annoying than their content is valuable.
If the Common Man gets access to the Internet2, then the Common Business will follow, trying to suck his pockets clean. Many of the Common Problems above will follow as side-effects.
Consider also that many areas still aren't wired with sufficient bandwidth to handle the garden-hose-like Internet1, much less the firehose-like Internet2. (Thank you, telephone hegemony.) Dialups will become all but worthless, as the only way to get decent speed for all those new Internet2 services is to move into increasingly crowded population centers. Or people will learn to do without, diminishing the value of the Internet2 that way.
Or to paraphrase Basil Fawlty, "This would be a great Internet if it weren't for all the users."
Pessimism? I prefer to think of it as a "crushing lack of faith in the general public and human nature."
Another thing to consider is that booksellers have a rigid stock they can deal in: books. The one book that a seller gets is the same book that ever seller gets, and so they have fierce competition for eyeballs to sell you their copy of that book.
They may specialize and carry more of certain kinds of books, but you won't see much difference between The Hunchback of Notre Dame as carried by Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or Borders.
Meanwhile, each and every photographer has his or her own unique vision which they commit to film. Two photographers can snap pictures of the same subject, but composition of each shot would be different.
Booksellers usually sell the same goods. Photographers usually sell their own product, which can't be found anywhere else.
Important factoid to remember when looking at sources for Flash-compatible software: Macromedia makes the Flash plug-in for your users' browsers.
Now that I drove that home, on with my story:
Macromedia did try to open up the Flash 4 format so that other people could create software compatible with it. And in fact, LiveMotion was Adobe's entry into that market.
This was Flash 4, though. They're now essentially up to Flash MX (read: 6), and the spec has grown significantly since then. The first big change was scripting from 4 => 5, and while I have no idea what they added from 5 => MX, but I'm sure it's sizeable. (Memo to myself: look into it, consider upgrading just because it might be fun to try some animation.)
Remember, once again, that Macromedia makes the player plug-in, and if you base a site on Flash, you're still going to be at their mercy no matter whose development tools you use. And if you use someone else's tools, they may not keep up with Macromedia's changes.
Now, it's doubtful that they'll do anything to break an animation when viewed through an older plug-in or browser, but there may be side-effects, and they will affect both usability and user perceptions of your site.
Yes, I'll admit, this argument smacks of FUD, but sometimes the unthinkable happens.
Barring my qualms against it, I'll side with everyone else who answered so far and recommend not using Flash to build a website because it can prevent normal navigation, SWFs can take a long time to play over slow connections (I'm still stuck on a 56K dialup--I know from whence I speak), and as of Flash 5, Macromedia's authoring environment had some seriously "avant-garde" (read: bad) user interface design philosophies. There are those who believe [really C|net news] the Flash-based web is not necessarily a good idea.
The load speeds and display times could be the biggest issue, since web surfers have notoriously short attention spans.
But that's just my opinion, as always. The salt shaker is to the left; take as many grains as you need.
Slashdot Mirror
P2Ping, Napstering, and posting are three different things. Napstering and posting share some similarities, but make no mistake they are different beasts.
1) In the strictest P2P model, one person has a file. Another person knows about it and wants it. Both go online. A connects up to B's computer, downloads the content, and sign off.
This is the technological equivalent of inviting someone over to listen to tracks off an album, and when people talk about fair use getting trampled on, this is the classic example.
3) Posting to a network involves uploading the content to a different source. A has a file. B wants to experience it. A uploads the file to C where B can fetch it later.
This could also be considered P2P distribution, but depending on how C has his computer set up, the file can be searched up and downloaded by D, E, F, G, H, etc.
If it's private, and not everybody has access, then everything should be okay and the thing falls squarely under fair use, abusable as the technology might be. If it's public, requires no login or identification, and C advertises his computer as the w4r3z5h4cK, then legal trouble ensues.
Now for the piece de resistance:
2) Under Napster's model, A has a file. A logs on, signs onto the file sharing service, and his computer registers its presence. B signs on, wants to see the file, and seeks it out by author. If it's not a popular file, he'll turn up A's computer. If it's a popular file, he'll turn up A's computer, C's computer, F's computer, etc. Then he can download the file from A, C, F, etc. And so can D, E, G, H, etc.
Under models (1) and (2), the file stays accessible only as long as A keeps his computer connected up to the net which, depending on his security savvy, may not be such a good idea knowing that there are people who want to stop him from making the file available to anybody else.
Under model (3), it's done as a one-shot action. Connect, upload, disconnect, and it's there for other people to get while A's computer remains turned off.
The trouble comes in partially under (3), but mostly under (2), where all sorts of people, friends and strangers alike, can access the song. This more closely resembles the mass distribution model that the Content Cartels want to shut down. And can't because the technology is so widespread.
That's why they're trying to stick themselves in the middle of everything, why they propose draconian DRM systems to plug as many of the holes as possible, and stomp way the hell all over model (1) which I see as the least threatening to them.
Now, as for the poster's original comment (Yes, I haven't forgotten that):
There are a few things to prevent it:
A) Lack of bandwidth. 56k dialup customers (and there are more of them out there than you might think -- I'm one of them) will not want to leave their computer hooked up a whole lot of time to do stuff, either because they're charged by the hour, don't want to tie up the phone line, or both. Even if they have a monthly unlimited account and second phone line (like I do), they may still have a:
B) Lack of a permanent connection. Their computer just might not be set up for leaving on all the time. I know that I wouldn't want to leave my connection on all the time; then again, I'm using a laptop. People without permanent hook-ups might be willing to share one or two files for friends, but leaving the thing hooked up all the time might just not appeal to them.
C) Respect for the artists/developers. Yes, I know, that's in somewhat short supply these days (in
The talk of two copying models and the level of protection needed to minimize each is profound. It speaks of a deep wisdom which many have overlooked.
But I want to add something to it. Everyone here knows what a capacitor is, right? It's two metal plates separated by a little insulator. When enough of a charge builds up between those two plates, the current will briefly jump the gap through the insulator.
The same applies to the Napsterizing/Casual-Copying model. Under casual copying, people make copies and distribute them to one or two friends. With Napsterization, one copy is made and broadcast to a great many people who want it.
The two are separated by a small gap. Will someone make one or two copies, or make it available for hundreds to download? That's where the capacitance comes in. If there's enough pressure, sooner or later a piece of media will jump the gap from casual copying and appear somewhere for everyone to grab a copy of.
What affects capacitance between the two? Well, the better the content is, the more people will want to show it to other people. The easier it is to show to other people, the more people will do so. P2P software today has cut the gap considerably. DRM is an attempt to add insulation and keep things from making the jump from casual copying to mass distribution.
It's been demonstrated, preventing any copies from being made is theoretically impossible, but the Content Cartels continue to try to prevent it. Likewise, preventing the jump to from casual copying to underground mass distribution is nearly impossible, but the Content Cartels continue suing every P2P, university, or network service that doesn't outlaw it outright.
It'd be interesting to see statistics on which results in more copies being made: P2P distribution or casual copying. Because it seems that P2P networks do more damage, but are much harder to prevent. And, in fact, if a DRM is put into place which prevents casual copying, I could see MORE people going to P2P systems to get copies from those who CAN break the "anti-fair-use technologies."
Thoughtful as the piece on different types of copying threat is, it becomes moot as the different types come closer together.
Good point: Wireless networking allows students ways to remotely research class topics outside the classroom. Yes they could go to the library before, or stay in their dorm rooms and look this stuff up, but the new technology allows that work to fit more neatly into campus life. Result: More opportunity to study.
Bad point: Wireless networking allows students ways to slack off inside the classroom. Yeah, attention deficiency is nothing new in the classroom, but considering the things the modern laptop can do, its presence can be an awful temptation to those already inclined to play around. Result: More opportunity to ignore the teacher.
Both are valid, and to take one side is to trivialize the other.
As another aside, there's been some talk of whose fault it is students get bad grades. It's the teacher's responsibility to present the course's subject matter in a reasonable, easy-to-follow fashion. It's not his responsibility to spoon-feed the student a passing grade, no matter how undeserved.
Rule of thumb: if one student does poorly in a class, odds are it's the student's fault. If almoast everyone does poorly in a class, odds are it's the teacher's fault.
Captain: "I see. Confiscate that equipment and then shoot those entertainment criminals! " (A paraphrasing from a cartoon in a college newspaper many, many years ago)
Open mail relays!
Spammers are already using a great deal of other peoples' computing power without compensating them any for the cycles used, the black eye of blacklisting, etc.
Shameful! Shocking! The movie is pirated even before it's released here! How could such a thing happen? Why, the only organization who has the film is the studio itself. Hmmmmm...
This could have been accomplished either of two ways:
These are the only ways that I can think of (reply with your own ideas, please!), and in either case, the piracy is due to the studio's own negligence and/or delusions of invulnerability. Bottom line: There's no way they can pin this on Joe Consumer and his tricked out VCR/DVD rig, or Joe Geek with his Linux box running DeCSS.
Perhaps we should believe them, and help them to understand where their problems really lie. Because I bet they're too thick to figure it out for themselves.
I'm anti-piracy, pro-fair-use, and anti-bullshit. Just like 98% of everyone else out there.
I must have missed something somewhere -- when did XML become a programming language?
Has anyone here ever worked with RTF? It's a way of adding basic font, size, layout, and color information and whatnot to a text file. You can think of it as a sort of HTML-lite. It was supposed to be cross-platform too, but Microsoft produced a version of it which was so alien that no other RTF system could handle it without preprocessing.
Now Microsoft is using XML, a cross-platform, open data markup system, and using it extensively in a proprietary, closed operating system?
XML is pretty open (at least, now anyway). What's going to make Microsoft's implementation of it "special" (in that Microsoft-special way) is the internal and proprietary XSLs which read and interpret the tags to display the information on screen and in print. Other systems can read the XML documents, but to make sense of them the way Longhorn's software will requires information that Microsoft yet again won't share.
It should be possible to recreate XSLs from the structure of the XML, which would seem to make it extremely easy to reverse-engineer. In order to prevent that, Microsoft has to "extend" XML in such a way that it breaks on other systems.
I fear for the future of XML now.
Why do technologies become standard? Because they're used frequently.
Why do people use technologies? Because they get some sort of benefit from them.
And "Hello Kitty," inane as it sounds, is a benefit that many in that market seem to want.
Remember that whole VHS/Betamax thing? Betamax had the smalller cassette with superior quality, but despite its "advantages," VHS still won out.
VHS had the bigger advantages in that fight: consumer and industry support.
I can remember it that clearly for two reasons:
That's right, whatever wise man said "Never whistle while you're pissing" (I remember it first in connection with Robert Anton Wilson, but I could be wrong) had no idea this day was coming. (And if you ever hear the Star Spangled Banner playing in the washroom, try not to salute!)
Numbers on a terminal window don't have much meaning unless put in perspective, or the perspective is known very well to begin with. Music is a "given" perspective that most people know already. They may not be able to play a note, but they know what sounds right and what doesn't. This method is a good way to convert numeric data into something more immediately recognizeable.
Now, the bad news: The connection between doctor and patient in a telesurgery operation must be both low latency and low jitter. When either one isn't there, the participants have good reason to panic. And all that auditory monitoring of ping times and jitter will do is enable that panic to set in that much more quickly. Can you say "liability," boys and girls?
I just don't consider the modern Internet to be sufficiently reliable for any application, and I expect its quality will continue to degrade as time goes by, more people get on, ISPs save money by not upgrading their equipment to handle the new press of people, and certain forces work to pollute the net with carnality, banality, and commercialism.
It doesn't surprise me at all that it would go down fast under a vigorous slashdotting, but not because it's run on Macs but because it's run about Macs.
Servers cost money. So anyone building a website will try to use the minimum server power they can get away with. Microsoft will run massive banks of servers because they expect lots of people to connect to them for security patches, bug fixes, security patches, product information, bug fixes, technical support, and security patches.
So here's TidBITS, a site run for the Apple community (which is admittedly small), which only expects traffic from those people who use and appreciate Apples. So they run it on just a few machines. They normally only need one or two.
But then they posted a general interest story, someone told Slashdot about it, and boom! Instant DoS Attack! Find me a one-machine server that has that kind of instant scalability, and I'll buy one.
A) The user cancels the account. He or she may have a replacement email address in use. Then for a few weeks (two is reasonable):
B1) If there is no forwarding address, emails are just bounced back to the sender with a notice.
B2) If there is a forwarding address, the server forwards the message to the ex-customer, and sends a change-of-address message back to the sender.
C) After the x-week period, the account is recycled and the system generates standard fail messages.
Is it smart business? Not for ISPs that see customers as little more than revenue streams. Some businesses fail because they focus so much on revenue that they drive off all their customers with unrepentent cheapness.
It is, however, very helpful to the customer, may make up for previous problems, and touches like this could eventually win the customer back.
Am I the only one bothered by the notion that there is something that email could learn from the processing of smail?
Oh, that? Yes, I was joking. Perhaps I should have been clearer on that. Yeah, I could have stuck a smiley on it, but humor is best delivered in a deadpan...Now, as for the ISP...
Some say that email is free, which makes it different from smail. This isn't entirely true; while smail requires "stamps," email works on a subscription service. Pay your ISP, the ISP provides you with an address which you can send to and from. Because they have costs too -- supporting the lines and hubs you dial in on, connecting to other hubs, etc.
If you change addresses, and start getting mail sent to a different address, what happens?
In the case of the smail, you get the stuff forwarded from your old address to the new address -- and that's perfectly fair because the sender paid to get the letter or package to you. This is helped considerably by the fact that all the post offices are owned by the same company. BTW, this is probably the only case I can think of in which a monopoly helps the consumer.
In the case of email, what happens? One person pays a fee to send the email, which goes out onto the network. (This is a recipe for disaster in some peoples' minds -- we promisenot to read it. Really!) All other systems agree to pass it along, until it gets to the other end.
The receiver pays as well, to send and receive messages. This would seem to last as long as the user pays. But some of that time is wasted at the start because people have to publish or otherwise get that new email address out, same as if you changed your smail address.
And when the user changes services, what happens to the email still inbound to the box? Some people will say that the email should be shut off, any new messages bounced. Anyone with any sense of fair play would also say that since there was a lag time before the address could be used that anything new that comes into the address should be bounced to the new address, with a message back to the sender that a new address is being used. These are ethical solutions that may be overlooked because we are talking about "business" here, which seems to work by different rules.
The article on C|Net is clear enough on the point: ISPs' handling of email under special circumstances is not merely twisted but actually sprained.
And I consider it a very good point.
Much of the Internet is still frontier-grade in its rules, with its share of rail barons and robber barons and common horse thieves and a government that lives very very far away and has little hope of understanding this wild frontier for the next several generations.
What's missing here is not legislation but common sense.
I think that when a user stops service, old and new mail should be forwarded if possible for two to four weeks, and then simply handled like any other bounce. I consider this ethical and sensible. Other peoples' common senses and ethics may say other things.
Which leads to the questions: a) How do we decide on an optimal solution, and b) how do we make the non-ethical, non-sensible people follow suit?
Does anyone else see a problem with this idea?
The sad thing is not how unlikely it is (it is, really), but that I can think of a case: if the people become so unwilling to pursue culture (music becomes unavailable except on specific devices at specific times, television can't be recorded and must be watched when scheduled, etc.) that they learn to do without, and sink into a sort of modern-day sociopathic barbarism.
Yes, it's unlikely, but we have the makings of such a disaster in play already. Some could say it's already started:
Then: William Shakespeare. Beethoven. René Descartes.
Now: Dean Koonz. Britney Spears. Dan Rather
Yes, feel free to argue that there still quality producers of content out there now. But how many of them can you name? I can't because I haven't been buying much music lately, and culture just seems irrelevant these days since few people actually seem to be paying attention to it...
Part of me actually wishes this would happen, except that I'd be stuck in the middle of it myself too.
Also, as a matter of curiosity, amid the false hits, I occasionally get good tidbits on Google (search for "Build your own" and "game").
I did my part by posting the links. Now, why won't they get looked at seriously? Because they, like, use those grody 2D graphics, or worse yet, text! What are they, 1D? Everything these days is 3D or better!
I think it's a matter of three different problems: 1) technical sophistication, 2) thematic sophistication, 3) and a need for immediate gratification, and I think the Cold Stone above highlights all three.
1) Technical Sophisticaion involves the game's engine. How sophisticated by today's standards is it? 2D graphics won't get taken seriously. People spend thousands cobbling together the latest and utmost hardware, they want something that'll *use* that hardware. Construction set games like the Cold Stone above will take up a shamefully small resource footprint on the machine of your choice.
Another factor under this banner is the complexity of construction: "Welcome to the Turing Tarpits, where everything is possible but nothing interesting is easy." How much work would it take to build a game with a full degree of technical sophistication? By the time you did that, you might as well be programming in C++ and OpenGL, and prepping the blasted thing to market.
To make a long point short (too late!), any toolkit which makes game which meet peoples' technical expectations will be too complicated and hard to use for casual use -- nobody will want to play with them.
2) Thematic Sophistication is a matter of story within a game. Some times this isn't necessary; a pinball machine isn't going to have much of a story line behind it (unless it was made after 1988), and first person shooters don't necessarily need a lot of plot.
But adventure games do, and to expect the average person to sit down with something like ColdStone and put together a compelling adventure is akin to having the average person sit down with a word processor and put together a compelling novel.
Most people realize that they lack the talent for something like this, and so they don't. Maybe to experiment with, which makes the construction sets little more than a toy in that regard.
3) Immediate Gratification means you want to be satisfied *now now now now now!* And you're not going to get that kind of gratification if you have to sit down with the toolkit and read the f'ing manual to learn how it works. Then there's the time spent assembling graphics, selecting (or recording?) sounds, and making the package coherent. No, people plunk down $30-$50 for something, and they want to be amused by it right away.
The same was true way back when, too, but at least the toolkits were simplistic enough then that you could have fun experimenting. I remember not having to read a manual on Pinball Construction Set (a copy of which I still have somewhere at home for the Apple II). I bet Cold Stone has a lot of manuals with it.
Commentary welcome. I would especially like to be proved wrong here...
I'll drink to that. The printer manufacturers are essentially trying to lock people, by both technological (like smartchips and whatnot) and legislative (?!?) means into using just their ink.
I can see only one possible reason to even try to lock consumers into using one and only one source for their ink -- because each manufacturer uses a different configuration of ink paths and print nozzles in their cartridges, and a sufficiently wrong third party formulation of ink might leak out, print funny, etc.
But then it gets back to the question of why the printer manufacturers would object if the printer got busted and leaked all over everything, since it's the customer's fault for "tampering" with the standard operation of the printer.
More likely they don't want the consumer thinking "Ho hum, this printer's broken, might as well go out and by another underpriced printer."
MAX. HEAD ROOM 2.3M
That's how, in the American series at least, Max got his name: it was the last thing Edison saw before being walloped into unconsciousness and having his brain scanned. When his braindump came online, it was the first thing it tried saying, and it stuck as a name.
The cyber-battle leading up to that was also loads of fun to watch, but I won't spoil how it happens; it's well worth a chuckle.
What a trivia geek I am too, but in this case I don't see that as a bad thing.
Why do they get angry at the company they work for? Because the company that they work for treats them like an expendable, replaceable resource. And especiallylike an expendable, replaceable resource whose output is directly proportional to the pressure applied to get work out of it.
Sure sounds like the problem here. (Is your washroom breeding Bolsheviks?)
You have to wonder how much longer the company might have lasted had they treated their workers like people and not hemmhoraged inventory out the dumpster in back.
And now, because someone has to draw the parallel... almost the same principle can be used to explain any increase in the use of P2P software, music sharing, CD burning, etc. -- some people might be interested in spreading the tunes, but a few, sick of being treated like criminals by the music and video industry anyway, decide they have nothing to lose and want some way to lash out.
In the above post, certainly that $500 stereo didn't do anything to hurt anybody. And yet...
There's a feature that's been on almost every Mac, from low end to high end, since Steve Jobs decided to give the company's products their first image makeover. It's strangely absent from the eMac, and now I wonder why it lacks-- --the handles. Oh yeah, scoff if you must, but think about it -- nearly every non-laptop machine in Apple's post-beige era has had handles of some sort, either on the corners (blue G3 and G4 towers) or set in the top (iMacs from the get-go). Even the old iBooks had the plastic carrying handle. And if you think back, remember the very very original 128K Macintosh with the big square mouse? It had a handle too. SE/030? Handle. The eMac represents a departure from the standard design for a number of reasons as stated by other posters, and now there's this too. Yeah, I know, the handle isn't quite as nice as, say, the BSD-compatible core, but it's something I'd grown to rely on. I begin to wonder what's going through the designers' minds.
What do you think the networks will do when a nation's government proves to spew this kind of noise all over the world? China could get on everybody's hit list by doing something like that. In that regard, it seems somehow counterproductive.
I'm not saying it's impossible, a sufficiently short-sighted government (say, one that calls itself the "Peoples' Liberation Army" and expects people to believe it after mashing students with tanks) might attempt it.
But in light of the possible consequences, it seems somehow e-suicidal.
Therein lies the trap: when does it not apply?
Much as I'd like to see more intelligence injected into contempory video games (a lot of them are simply "product"), I want more to see foresight injected into our judiciary. So I see any claim that something is not protected as a basic right to be at best dubious, and at worst depressing and/or frightening.
People who want to nullify basic rights don't just come out and say "You no longer have this right -- deal with it." They eliminate them piecemeal, one at a time, starting with the most heinous because nobody likes them, and then working toward banning the whole thing much farther down the road.
"'A' is not Free Speech." Soon as the people generally accept that assumption, someone will come out and say "'B' is not Free Speech, it too closely resembles 'A'." And many people will see the reason and go along with it, though some are inconvenienced by it.
And so it continues through the alphabet, chaining together all those things that people want to outlaw until the right itself means nothing; nobody can do anything worthwhile with it. Around X or Y, most people will be outraged and want to fight back, but by then it'll be too late.
Somewhere in the grand scheme, some sort of firebreak must be set up to protect what we have left of those rights, or some push to take back what narrow-minded so-called "decent" people want to give away (not because we want to use those freedoms, but because they see no use for them).
But sometimes I wonder if we haven't passed that point already.
Consider the state of the current Internet -- banner ads, pop-ups, pop-unders, email virii, web browser virii, web server virii, Flash web design, and 'content delivery' systems which are more annoying than their content is valuable.
If the Common Man gets access to the Internet2, then the Common Business will follow, trying to suck his pockets clean. Many of the Common Problems above will follow as side-effects.
Consider also that many areas still aren't wired with sufficient bandwidth to handle the garden-hose-like Internet1, much less the firehose-like Internet2. (Thank you, telephone hegemony.) Dialups will become all but worthless, as the only way to get decent speed for all those new Internet2 services is to move into increasingly crowded population centers. Or people will learn to do without, diminishing the value of the Internet2 that way.
Or to paraphrase Basil Fawlty, "This would be a great Internet if it weren't for all the users."
Pessimism? I prefer to think of it as a "crushing lack of faith in the general public and human nature."
They may specialize and carry more of certain kinds of books, but you won't see much difference between The Hunchback of Notre Dame as carried by Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or Borders.
Meanwhile, each and every photographer has his or her own unique vision which they commit to film. Two photographers can snap pictures of the same subject, but composition of each shot would be different.
Booksellers usually sell the same goods. Photographers usually sell their own product, which can't be found anywhere else.
Now that I drove that home, on with my story:
Macromedia did try to open up the Flash 4 format so that other people could create software compatible with it. And in fact, LiveMotion was Adobe's entry into that market.
This was Flash 4, though. They're now essentially up to Flash MX (read: 6), and the spec has grown significantly since then. The first big change was scripting from 4 => 5, and while I have no idea what they added from 5 => MX, but I'm sure it's sizeable. (Memo to myself: look into it, consider upgrading just because it might be fun to try some animation.)
Remember, once again, that Macromedia makes the player plug-in, and if you base a site on Flash, you're still going to be at their mercy no matter whose development tools you use. And if you use someone else's tools, they may not keep up with Macromedia's changes.
Now, it's doubtful that they'll do anything to break an animation when viewed through an older plug-in or browser, but there may be side-effects, and they will affect both usability and user perceptions of your site.
Yes, I'll admit, this argument smacks of FUD, but sometimes the unthinkable happens.
Barring my qualms against it, I'll side with everyone else who answered so far and recommend not using Flash to build a website because it can prevent normal navigation, SWFs can take a long time to play over slow connections (I'm still stuck on a 56K dialup--I know from whence I speak), and as of Flash 5, Macromedia's authoring environment had some seriously "avant-garde" (read: bad) user interface design philosophies. There are those who believe [really C|net news] the Flash-based web is not necessarily a good idea.
The load speeds and display times could be the biggest issue, since web surfers have notoriously short attention spans.
But that's just my opinion, as always. The salt shaker is to the left; take as many grains as you need.
That makes the DCMA warning letter itself a sort of circumvention device.
Ahhhhh, sweet irony...