There's a slight difference here... Metallica, et al made music for the expectation of sufficient monetary compensation to make a living from it.
Those of us who did data-entry for CDDB over the years did it as a service to the music-listening-geek community, with only the expectation that CDDB would continue to be of, by, and for the people.
Now Gracenote has taken over a collective work without compensating those who produced it, and is charging the people who built it to use it. This is like being charged admission to get into your own house, which strikes me as more outrageous than people downloading copyrighted music to get back at the RIAA because they're tired of paying damn near twenty bucks each for two-dollar CDs with two or three good songs on them.
Eventually, though, just like they shut down www.lyrics.ch, the RIAA will decide to enforce the fact that the names of songs and albums are their intellectual property, and Gracenote will be the one on the wrong end of the legal gun.
Of course, that's only if the manufacture of computer-unreadable music CDs doesn't render Gracenote irrelevant first.
...that was a reference to the easter-egged Apex DVD players that display "You Should Not Be Here" (in all CAPS, stupid lameness filter!) on the bottom of the secret option screen that lets you pick your region, disable Macrovision, etc.
I never heard about the IE4 beta thing, but that's amusing as well.
I doubt he's busy with that movie. It was in the can in late August, and the release was delayed due to the terrorist attacks because the movie has a scene where a bomb is on a plane. They had to delay it since all the CGI people in the movie industry were already busy excising images of the WTC from every movie and TV show at the time and chucking them into memory holes.
Actually, the 5GB Microdrive is already available for purchase. Apple has been selling them for a while now, with a free carrying case that has a FireWire interface and plays MP3s.
In another few years, LCDs will be more or less equal to CRTs in terms of quality and low cost, AND they'll be able to be made *huge* without requiring a desk made of rebar-reinforced concrete to sit on.
These guys are working on improving the horse-drawn cart, while people are whizzing past their lab in Porsches.
I think he was a little hasty killing off the Newton, though. The MP2000 was a very slick piece of hardware.
I still own one (though it has since been retired in favor of my trusty Palm V), and I have to agree with you. I had three Newtons: the original MessagePad, bought for $100 as a goof when they were getting blown out, a MessagePad 120, and then a 2000, later upgraded to a 2100.
I still have the OMP, because for all its flaws it is still the granddaddy of 'em all. The MP120 was sold at close to what I bought it for on eBay when I got my MP2000. The 2000 was a great laptop replacement, I kept all kinds of data in it when I traveled. And text-to-speech on it rocked. But yeah, the huge size killed it. The Palm, I don't have to think about carrying it around, I just drop it in my pocket.
I think that if Apple had given it a couple more years, and let Newton, Inc. complete the spinoff and start making their own shit, the Newton could have owned the PDA industry.
~Philly
Re:Big announcement with be OS X for Intel
on
Apple PDA?
·
· Score: 2
I don't see the problem now that Apple is able to operate on their own without Uncle Bill's dollars.
The problem is that this country is populated mostly by unthinking, gullible morons-- these are, after all, the same people who basically thought that a Microsoft's $150M investment in non-voting Apple stock meant that Microsoft had bought Apple.
Sure, the intelligent people out there know that Apple can get by without Microsoft, but since we're vastly outnumbered by the stupid, guess what would still happen to Apple if Bill got on TV tonight and said, "Oh, the Mac is dead. We're ceasing development of all of our Mac products effective immediately"?
If you think M$ is not able to track outbound e-mail messages, think again.
I know we're talking about Microsoft people here, but wouldn't the smartest thing be to save a copy of the text of the message to a floppy or print it out, and then leak the message from one's non-M$ e-mail account at home?
Lucky for Microsoft they are big enough to usually just get away with blatantly copying competing products-- they don't seem to be too swift in the 'discreet corporate espionage' department, if they think they only way to pass confidential info is via the company's own mail system.
~Philly
Re:Picture of bills with US bill
on
The Euro
·
· Score: 2
They do in fact exist. They are just not so common.
Which, if you have a sense of humor like mine, makes it great, great fun to use them to pay for things when the cashier is too young to know they exist, or older and obviously uneducated.
Let's see what else Comcast/@Home has done since I signed up three years ago:
-Added upload speed caps, after they discovered that all of us who paid for the high speed connection they advertised, actually wanted to *use it for something*! The horror!
-Ran mailservers that, for long periods, were the poster children for the term "unreliable."
-Shut down their irc server because they were too incompetent to maintain it and lock out the assholes who were abusing it.
-Blocked port 80 across the board, instead of cracking down on only their idiot customers who don't know how to maintain their own machines and got socked by Nimda/Code Red.
-And yes, dropping Usenet when they transition to their @Home-independent service.
Once this AT&T/Comcast merger is approved, I expect rates to go up, my existing services to be pruned even further, and the "Acceptable Use" guidelines to be vigorously enforced once they try to foist that 'tiered' service crap on us (and you know they will).
This, friends, is why I plan to switch to DSL in the very near future, hopefully before Comcast switches me over to their own service. [rant] I want someone who will sell me bandwidth and a few services, period, not someone who will sell me high speed and then pout and eventually restrict me when I don't do only what they want me to do with it. I want static IPs, I want to run servers, and I want reliable mail, even if it means running my own mailserver to get it. I'm not interested in your "portal," your stupid, bland, corporate idea of what my "Internet Experience" should be. So f off! [end rant]
When you say that MiB, GiB, etc, will be just as successful as the metric system, to me you're suggesting that it will be adopted with roughly a 95% success rate worldwide.
Well, if your reading comprehension is for shit, I'm sorry, but what I meant was, worldwide, this will be about as successful as America's switch to the metric system. Nobody else seemed to misunderstand.
You don't think that everyone in the world is an American -- you just think that the rest of the world are all Europeans!
No, but it's a fairly valid assumption on Slashdot that someone posting disdainfully about us 'ignorant Americans,' from behind the 'Anonymous Coward' moniker is European, probably French.:-)
Notice, ASSWIPE, that I specifically said the UNITED STATES switching over to the metric system was unsuccessful. I am well aware that the rest of the planet did it.
See, in 1980 we 'ignorant Americans' made a choice: we chose to get busy spending our defense budget in case we had to save your smarmy, unappreciative European asses for a THIRD time, instead of making sure McDonald's started selling the "One Hundred Thirteen Grammer" instead of the "Quarter Pounder."
Seriously, this is going to be about as successful as the United States' official switchover to the metric system in 1980. The old ways are too ingrained, and the new ones, no matter how much more appropriate they are, will never catch on. The people who really need to know that 1KB=1024B and not 1000KB, already know, and without some fancy-schmancy new nomenclature to tell us.
And manufacturers won't try to force everyone to use the new naming, because the vast majority of their customers can't even be bothered to learn the current terminology-- ever hear someone in CompUSA asking a salesperson how many RAMs or Megahertzes is in the computer they're looking at? I know I sure have.
I'm on Comcast@Home in Philadelphia. According to a letter I received from Comcast, as part of the impending switchover to Comcast High-Speed Internet, I need to have my current 3 year-old cable modem replaced. I have to schedule an appointment for someone to come out and do this, though it is nothing more than unhooking the old cable modem, and replacing the new one, and probably changing from my beloved static IP to DHCP. So I'll have to waste a vacation day waiting for a tech who's probably less qualified than I am, to come out and do something I could do myself if they'd let me.
I put up with upload speed caps. I put up with @Home shutting down their IRC server because they were too incompetent to maintain it and keep assholes from abusing it. I put up with them restricting the Usenet groups I can read. I put up with some majorly spotty mail services. And now, Comcast states they have no plans to run their own Usenet servers once they are out from under the @Home umbrella. AT&T, who Comcast plans to merge with, is tightening the leash in other ways.
I have to ask myself, what the fuck am I paying for? Crappy mail, throttled speeds, no Usenet and no ISP-run IRC?
I've been pondering switching over to DSL, where I'll get 2 static IPs from SpeakEasy, and can do everything that I'm doing now and more, but without having to worry about Comcast putting their boot to my throat at some point for violating their sacred ToS. I'll run my own Goddamned mail server, web server, and DNS, and it'll be a hell of a sight more reliable than the ones I paid someone else to run.
So, Comcast, Excite@Home, and AT&T, thanks for helping me decide that I can find a better ISP than any of you.
Once again, the "you can't afford lawyers as good as ours" comes into play. Good luck proving in court that you were put out of business by a DDoS attack via XP machines taken over by the UPnP exploit. Microsoft's sharks will poke holes in your server and firewall logs and probably ultimately get the court to fine you for wasting everyone's time.
Microsoft marketing: "Windows XP is the most secure and crash-proof OS ever!"
Microsoft EULA: "...but if it turns out not to be, tough titties on you for trusting us when we said it was. You can't sue us, because you agreed you wouldn't at install-time. And we think we can afford better lawyers than you, anyway. So neener neener neener!"
The no-liability stuff in license agreements, I'm sure, began life with the noble purpose of protecting companies from getting hit with lawsuits by morons who should have known better, or greedy individuals just out to screw a company out of a quick million. Typical of everything it does, though, Microsoft has twisted the purpose of the EULA into its current form-- that of a "lawsuit-proof vest" used to prevent people or companies with, in many cases, very valid beefs about Microsoft products, from taking them to court over it, and allowing Microsoft to push crap on us with impunity and just shrug when we get bitten by bugs or security holes.
Imagine if other companies did this. What if you had to agree to a EULA on a train ticket before boarding the train, then then the train derailed because the operator was high on crack and speeding around a curve, and you wound up in a wheelchair for the rest of your life? You'd probably never take the train again. But what about companies who have to spend large sums of money on antivirus software and on employees who have to stay late to undo the damage done by the Outlook/Windows Virus/Worm of the Week. They just accept it and keep on using the same shitty software.
If it were possible to sue the living fuck out of Microsoft over these bugs and security holes, I think Microsoft QC might get a little budgetary upgrade. But nobody wants to be the first person to test the validity of the shrinkwrap/disk envelope/click-to-be-bound-by-it EULA in a court of law.
Since the government these days seems to be all about protecting innocent corporations from us evil individuals, you'd think something this would have happened after, say, the second "ILOVEYOU"-style worm brought corporate mailservers around the country to a screeching halt-- during an administration that was actually prosecuting Microsoft for its monopolistic misdeeds.
But now the Republicans are in office, and faced with a real conundrum: what do they do when one mega-corporation is selling dangerous, unsecure products to all the other mega-corporations? Because that's who they're thinking about here. If it warmed the cockles of your heart that the government was concerned for all those consumers who ran out and bought XP, you're delusional-- they're worried about seeing more shit like this once XP gets widely adopted in the corporate world.
You ought to round it UP, to $18 million. Microsoft's servers must have been getting slammed last night by thousands of people trying get the update-- the normally speedy Windows Update downloads were absolutely glacial, even on a cable modem. Probably be much the same way today.
And how is the Internet supposed to draw people together when the same old language barrier still exists?"
Because on the Internet, we can communicate through the universal language of pr0n. Well, unless you're in one o' them loser countries that filters it out.
People know that when they have a problem with a MS product, they call Microsoft. If you have a problem with your Dell Laptop, you call Dell.
And if you have a problem with Windows running on a Dell, each company will pin the blame on the other and keep sending you in circles.:-)
~Philly
No "maybe" about it-- it's been done
on
Swaying CPU Fans
·
· Score: 2
So I wouldn't want a box designed for natural convection only. But for the user that finds adding a USB peripheral challenging, doesn't need 1GHz, and doesn't want that fan humming, maybe it would work.
It's been done, by apple (who else?). Since the introduction of the models that had slot-loading CD drives in October 1999, iMacs have been fanless, cooled totally by convection currents. Not surprisingly, the iMac was designed for the novice user who doesn't need 1GHz and won't ever be dinking around in the thing's innards, so convection cooling was the way to go.
The G4 Cube was also cooled in this manner, but that model was directed at studio managers and CEO types who likewise wouldn't need expandability.
...since I'm about to make the switch from @Home to Comcast's own cable modem service. If it turns out to suck, now I'll have a viable alternative to Verizon DSHell.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a slight difference here... Metallica, et al made music for the expectation of sufficient monetary compensation to make a living from it.
Those of us who did data-entry for CDDB over the years did it as a service to the music-listening-geek community, with only the expectation that CDDB would continue to be of, by, and for the people.
Now Gracenote has taken over a collective work without compensating those who produced it, and is charging the people who built it to use it. This is like being charged admission to get into your own house, which strikes me as more outrageous than people downloading copyrighted music to get back at the RIAA because they're tired of paying damn near twenty bucks each for two-dollar CDs with two or three good songs on them.
Eventually, though, just like they shut down www.lyrics.ch, the RIAA will decide to enforce the fact that the names of songs and albums are their intellectual property, and Gracenote will be the one on the wrong end of the legal gun.
Of course, that's only if the manufacture of computer-unreadable music CDs doesn't render Gracenote irrelevant first.
~Philly
...that was a reference to the easter-egged Apex DVD players that display "You Should Not Be Here" (in all CAPS, stupid lameness filter!) on the bottom of the secret option screen that lets you pick your region, disable Macrovision, etc.
I never heard about the IE4 beta thing, but that's amusing as well.
~Philly
You Should Not Be Here
~Philly
I doubt he's busy with that movie. It was in the can in late August, and the release was delayed due to the terrorist attacks because the movie has a scene where a bomb is on a plane. They had to delay it since all the CGI people in the movie industry were already busy excising images of the WTC from every movie and TV show at the time and chucking them into memory holes.
I think they bumped it back to a spring release.
~Philly
Actually, the 5GB Microdrive is already available for purchase. Apple has been selling them for a while now, with a free carrying case that has a FireWire interface and plays MP3s.
~Philly
In another few years, LCDs will be more or less equal to CRTs in terms of quality and low cost, AND they'll be able to be made *huge* without requiring a desk made of rebar-reinforced concrete to sit on.
These guys are working on improving the horse-drawn cart, while people are whizzing past their lab in Porsches.
~Philly
Will they make these things the proper size, or will everyone who has them look like they just stepped out of anime?
~Philly
I think he was a little hasty killing off the Newton, though. The MP2000 was a very slick piece of hardware.
I still own one (though it has since been retired in favor of my trusty Palm V), and I have to agree with you. I had three Newtons: the original MessagePad, bought for $100 as a goof when they were getting blown out, a MessagePad 120, and then a 2000, later upgraded to a 2100.
I still have the OMP, because for all its flaws it is still the granddaddy of 'em all. The MP120 was sold at close to what I bought it for on eBay when I got my MP2000. The 2000 was a great laptop replacement, I kept all kinds of data in it when I traveled. And text-to-speech on it rocked. But yeah, the huge size killed it. The Palm, I don't have to think about carrying it around, I just drop it in my pocket.
I think that if Apple had given it a couple more years, and let Newton, Inc. complete the spinoff and start making their own shit, the Newton could have owned the PDA industry.
~Philly
I don't see the problem now that Apple is able to operate on their own without Uncle Bill's dollars.
The problem is that this country is populated mostly by unthinking, gullible morons-- these are, after all, the same people who basically thought that a Microsoft's $150M investment in non-voting Apple stock meant that Microsoft had bought Apple.
Sure, the intelligent people out there know that Apple can get by without Microsoft, but since we're vastly outnumbered by the stupid, guess what would still happen to Apple if Bill got on TV tonight and said, "Oh, the Mac is dead. We're ceasing development of all of our Mac products effective immediately"?
~Philly
If you think M$ is not able to track outbound e-mail messages, think again.
I know we're talking about Microsoft people here, but wouldn't the smartest thing be to save a copy of the text of the message to a floppy or print it out, and then leak the message from one's non-M$ e-mail account at home?
Lucky for Microsoft they are big enough to usually just get away with blatantly copying competing products-- they don't seem to be too swift in the 'discreet corporate espionage' department, if they think they only way to pass confidential info is via the company's own mail system.
~Philly
They do in fact exist. They are just not so common.
Which, if you have a sense of humor like mine, makes it great, great fun to use them to pay for things when the cashier is too young to know they exist, or older and obviously uneducated.
~Philly
Same here, every time SciFi runs TZ all day I usually have nothing to do or can do it near a TV.
And "Time Enough at Last" is one of my favorites, as well.
~Philly
Let's see what else Comcast/@Home has done since I signed up three years ago:
-Added upload speed caps, after they discovered that all of us who paid for the high speed connection they advertised, actually wanted to *use it for something*! The horror!
-Ran mailservers that, for long periods, were the poster children for the term "unreliable."
-Shut down their irc server because they were too incompetent to maintain it and lock out the assholes who were abusing it.
-Blocked port 80 across the board, instead of cracking down on only their idiot customers who don't know how to maintain their own machines and got socked by Nimda/Code Red.
-And yes, dropping Usenet when they transition to their @Home-independent service.
Once this AT&T/Comcast merger is approved, I expect rates to go up, my existing services to be pruned even further, and the "Acceptable Use" guidelines to be vigorously enforced once they try to foist that 'tiered' service crap on us (and you know they will).
This, friends, is why I plan to switch to DSL in the very near future, hopefully before Comcast switches me over to their own service. [rant] I want someone who will sell me bandwidth and a few services, period, not someone who will sell me high speed and then pout and eventually restrict me when I don't do only what they want me to do with it. I want static IPs, I want to run servers, and I want reliable mail, even if it means running my own mailserver to get it. I'm not interested in your "portal," your stupid, bland, corporate idea of what my "Internet Experience" should be. So f off! [end rant]
~Philly
When you say that MiB, GiB, etc, will be just as successful as the metric system, to me you're suggesting that it will be adopted with roughly a 95% success rate worldwide.
:-)
Well, if your reading comprehension is for shit, I'm sorry, but what I meant was, worldwide, this will be about as successful as America's switch to the metric system. Nobody else seemed to misunderstand.
You don't think that everyone in the world is an American -- you just think that the rest of the world are all Europeans!
No, but it's a fairly valid assumption on Slashdot that someone posting disdainfully about us 'ignorant Americans,' from behind the 'Anonymous Coward' moniker is European, probably French.
Notice, ASSWIPE, that I specifically said the UNITED STATES switching over to the metric system was unsuccessful. I am well aware that the rest of the planet did it.
See, in 1980 we 'ignorant Americans' made a choice: we chose to get busy spending our defense budget in case we had to save your smarmy, unappreciative European asses for a THIRD time, instead of making sure McDonald's started selling the "One Hundred Thirteen Grammer" instead of the "Quarter Pounder."
~Philly
MiBs!?! MiBs!?! Un-ac-cept-a-ble!
Seriously, this is going to be about as successful as the United States' official switchover to the metric system in 1980. The old ways are too ingrained, and the new ones, no matter how much more appropriate they are, will never catch on. The people who really need to know that 1KB=1024B and not 1000KB, already know, and without some fancy-schmancy new nomenclature to tell us.
And manufacturers won't try to force everyone to use the new naming, because the vast majority of their customers can't even be bothered to learn the current terminology-- ever hear someone in CompUSA asking a salesperson how many RAMs or Megahertzes is in the computer they're looking at? I know I sure have.
~Philly
I'm on Comcast@Home in Philadelphia. According to a letter I received from Comcast, as part of the impending switchover to Comcast High-Speed Internet, I need to have my current 3 year-old cable modem replaced. I have to schedule an appointment for someone to come out and do this, though it is nothing more than unhooking the old cable modem, and replacing the new one, and probably changing from my beloved static IP to DHCP. So I'll have to waste a vacation day waiting for a tech who's probably less qualified than I am, to come out and do something I could do myself if they'd let me.
I put up with upload speed caps. I put up with @Home shutting down their IRC server because they were too incompetent to maintain it and keep assholes from abusing it. I put up with them restricting the Usenet groups I can read. I put up with some majorly spotty mail services. And now, Comcast states they have no plans to run their own Usenet servers once they are out from under the @Home umbrella. AT&T, who Comcast plans to merge with, is tightening the leash in other ways.
I have to ask myself, what the fuck am I paying for? Crappy mail, throttled speeds, no Usenet and no ISP-run IRC?
I've been pondering switching over to DSL, where I'll get 2 static IPs from SpeakEasy, and can do everything that I'm doing now and more, but without having to worry about Comcast putting their boot to my throat at some point for violating their sacred ToS. I'll run my own Goddamned mail server, web server, and DNS, and it'll be a hell of a sight more reliable than the ones I paid someone else to run.
So, Comcast, Excite@Home, and AT&T, thanks for helping me decide that I can find a better ISP than any of you.
~Philly
Once again, the "you can't afford lawyers as good as ours" comes into play. Good luck proving in court that you were put out of business by a DDoS attack via XP machines taken over by the UPnP exploit. Microsoft's sharks will poke holes in your server and firewall logs and probably ultimately get the court to fine you for wasting everyone's time.
~Philly
Microsoft marketing: "Windows XP is the most secure and crash-proof OS ever!"
Microsoft EULA: "...but if it turns out not to be, tough titties on you for trusting us when we said it was. You can't sue us, because you agreed you wouldn't at install-time. And we think we can afford better lawyers than you, anyway. So neener neener neener!"
The no-liability stuff in license agreements, I'm sure, began life with the noble purpose of protecting companies from getting hit with lawsuits by morons who should have known better, or greedy individuals just out to screw a company out of a quick million. Typical of everything it does, though, Microsoft has twisted the purpose of the EULA into its current form-- that of a "lawsuit-proof vest" used to prevent people or companies with, in many cases, very valid beefs about Microsoft products, from taking them to court over it, and allowing Microsoft to push crap on us with impunity and just shrug when we get bitten by bugs or security holes.
Imagine if other companies did this. What if you had to agree to a EULA on a train ticket before boarding the train, then then the train derailed because the operator was high on crack and speeding around a curve, and you wound up in a wheelchair for the rest of your life? You'd probably never take the train again. But what about companies who have to spend large sums of money on antivirus software and on employees who have to stay late to undo the damage done by the Outlook/Windows Virus/Worm of the Week. They just accept it and keep on using the same shitty software.
If it were possible to sue the living fuck out of Microsoft over these bugs and security holes, I think Microsoft QC might get a little budgetary upgrade. But nobody wants to be the first person to test the validity of the shrinkwrap/disk envelope/click-to-be-bound-by-it EULA in a court of law.
~Philly
Since the government these days seems to be all about protecting innocent corporations from us evil individuals, you'd think something this would have happened after, say, the second "ILOVEYOU"-style worm brought corporate mailservers around the country to a screeching halt-- during an administration that was actually prosecuting Microsoft for its monopolistic misdeeds.
But now the Republicans are in office, and faced with a real conundrum: what do they do when one mega-corporation is selling dangerous, unsecure products to all the other mega-corporations? Because that's who they're thinking about here. If it warmed the cockles of your heart that the government was concerned for all those consumers who ran out and bought XP, you're delusional-- they're worried about seeing more shit like this once XP gets widely adopted in the corporate world.
~Philly
You ought to round it UP, to $18 million. Microsoft's servers must have been getting slammed last night by thousands of people trying get the update-- the normally speedy Windows Update downloads were absolutely glacial, even on a cable modem. Probably be much the same way today.
~Philly
And how is the Internet supposed to draw people together when the same old language barrier still exists?"
Because on the Internet, we can communicate through the universal language of pr0n. Well, unless you're in one o' them loser countries that filters it out.
~Philly
People know that when they have a problem with a MS product, they call Microsoft. If you have a problem with your Dell Laptop, you call Dell.
:-)
And if you have a problem with Windows running on a Dell, each company will pin the blame on the other and keep sending you in circles.
~Philly
So I wouldn't want a box designed for natural convection only. But for the user that finds adding a USB peripheral challenging, doesn't need 1GHz, and doesn't want that fan humming, maybe it would work.
It's been done, by apple (who else?). Since the introduction of the models that had slot-loading CD drives in October 1999, iMacs have been fanless, cooled totally by convection currents. Not surprisingly, the iMac was designed for the novice user who doesn't need 1GHz and won't ever be dinking around in the thing's innards, so convection cooling was the way to go.
The G4 Cube was also cooled in this manner, but that model was directed at studio managers and CEO types who likewise wouldn't need expandability.
~Philly
...since I'm about to make the switch from @Home to Comcast's own cable modem service. If it turns out to suck, now I'll have a viable alternative to Verizon DSHell.
~Philly