http://www.speakeasy.com/ already offers a "naked DSL" option, but they do charge a premium for it over standard DSL-- and they're not even a phone company.
Ideally with companies being required to separate the two there will be companies like Speakeasy that are now able to offer unbundled connectivity without charging extra for it.
Nope. If you'd been reading your Slashdot regularly, you'd know that the FCC ruled earlier this year that phone companies are not required to lease their lines to DSL re-sellers like SpeakEasy. These services are on the way out, not the way in.
This kind of unbundling merely means that the phone company would be required to sell you DSL without voice, not that they would have to let anyone else use their lines to do the same.
Yea... but you can get a cheapy line from broadvoice.com for $5.95 per month... (Total with Fees & Taxes - $7.67)
Broadvoice supplies VOIP service, which you must use over a broadband connection, which you could get over your DSL, for which you have to pay for a bundled voice... never mind.
You can, in fact, add a calendar. Start the sidebar, go to Settings -> Add/Remove Panels. Click the Show ActiveX Plug-Ins. Select Calendar Control 9.0. Viola!
Re:Is it going to index my Outlook mail on Exchang
on
Google Releases GDS 2.0
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I can't tell from my cursory review of the web page... So I'll ask here: The Google Desktop Search engine claims to index my "Outlook EMail." What does this mean? Does it contain an Exchange client? Is it going to sift through all my eleventy-million e-mails on my company's Exchange server
GDS indexes your Outlook mail by communicating directly with Outlook. It should index anything that's in an Outlook folder, including IMAP, POP, or Exchange mail. It doesn't have any ability to talk directly to your Exchange server, though if you don't keep a local copy of your mail, it's going to hit the server quite a bit as it retrieves each and every message in your Exchange folders and indexes them.
You should DEFINITELY check with your company network admin before you install GDS -- most of them are not big fans, because of the potential security risks.
Doesn't it make sense to just run a small electric motor with, wich would make the vehicle weigh much less. I guess this would work only if they plan this to be an add-on modules to the already existing hydrogen cars.
While you're right that this would be more efficient, the problem comes the moment that the sun goes behind the clouds, and your car stops moving. Also, what happens to all of the power you collect while parked or stopped? Hydrogen can be stored in a tank, or adsorbed onto a catalyst, for later use. Sure, you could load the truck up with batteries, but batteries are pretty bad at high-density energy storage, when it comes down to it. The bottom line is, a car equipped with hydrogen storage and a tuned hydrogen combustion engine will do much better than a current-generation electric car, IF there is a convenient hydrogen source at hand whenever you need to fill up.
How about blocking all traffic from the DMV department to the internet? Why the hell do their license computers need to be on the net anyways? A local net to talk to your databases and internal email, sure. But internet access?
In this case, that's like closing the gate after the wolf is already inside. This virus will spread just fine on an intranet, once it's inside. In general, while it might be practical to lock down Web access, e-mail is an important business tool that can't just be turned off.
To be entirely accurate, the preface doesn't say anything about the GAO. It's the Congressional Budget Office releasing this, not the General Accounting Office.
Yeah, my bad. Had a little screw-up with my TLA's.
An inability to make official policy recommendations shouldn't be taken to imply that they can't express any opinion at all.
While true, most of the sections in the document say things like, "eliminating fair use could hurt the consumer, but it could also help the consumer by encouraging content providers to create and distribute more content." Pretty equivocal stuff.
The study basically recommends not changing the copyright legislation in favor of any particular stakeholder, including consumers or lobbyists.
That's not entirely accurate. The preface to the study states that the GAO, by definition, does not make any policy recommendations. Thus, the lack of recommendations in the study does not mean that the data contained in it won't be used by one side or the other to push for change.
Gotta read those source documents before submitting!
It's quite simple. There are a lot of times when one comes up with an idea, and your place of employment has no incentive to develop it, but you still see the potential. It is therefore asinine for any employer to balk at it when an employee develops the idea on their own time and resources. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
There's a good way to deal with this. When you have an idea that you're interested in pursuing, pitch it to your employer. If they're interested, then presumably they'll pay you to work on it on company time. If they're not interested, then ask them to officially sign over the rights to you. Have that argument BEFORE you invest your time and resources, not after. And, as others have noted, you should be certain to document any significant side projects BEFORE signing any IP agreement at the start of employment.
I and my co-workers have used both of these approaches with our employer (which indeed has a we-own-everything clause in the employment agreement), and had great results.
Unfortunately, credit checks are at least as popular as drug tests for employment these days. The rationale is that an employee with lots of debt and bad credit is more likely to embezzle or sell company secrets, and this viewpoint is supported by companies selling credit-check services. It's distasteful, true, but it's a free market, you can find work somewhere else.
Hmmm, yeah companies like turtle beach or Sonic Blue should have came up with and idea like this...
they could have sold it under the names like audiotron [turtlebeach.com] or Rio reciever [sonicblue.com]
what a great Idea! you are such a smart feller!
No, no, no. The Rio receiver and audiotron are more complicated devices, with displays and browser dials and all that. This is a simple receiver -- in a commercial device, it could be no bigger than a dongle with an Ethernet jack on one end and two RCA plugs (or a SPDIF port) on the other.
This is a pretty elegant solution for how to get your MP3 collection from your computer to your stereo(s). Think about it -- you can have your own radio station at your house. Add a wireless uplink, and you can carry it around with you. All for only $100! Made into a commercial product with an ASIC instead of an FPGA, you could probably put it on the commercial market for well under $200.
Slashdotters, before you slam this thing, please consider the following facts:
not everyone has a spare PC or two lying around the house
some people DON'T have their PC sitting in the middle of their family room, right next to the stereo.
I wouldn't be surprised if a time-to-live feature is added to "swapping" devices. I.e., you can swap all you want, but the swapped copy has a limited lifetime and then erases itself.
You mean like the one that the record companies have added to CD's? Or the one that video game distributors have added to their games? And these are people who've had a lot longer to contemplate their fate at the hands of file swapping.
Such digital enhancement might be useful for getting leads, but the result isn't evidence; it's just a computer-assisted guess.
Why not? That's like saying if I use DNA sequencing to find the identity of a criminal, it's just a chemically-assisted guess. Or, using a microphone to detect and record a distant conversation is just an electronically-assisted guess. The data is still there in the photo, it's just not visible to the human eye. What IS unfortunate is that they use Photoshop for this analysis. If they used a respected scientific image processing program like NIH Image, which doesn't have any pixel editing or distorting capabilities, I bet no one would bat an eye.
I see the distributed part, except our computers aren't doing the processes in the background, we're doing it in the foreground.
I beg to differ. Foreground and background are all relative -- everything your computer does is foreground to IT -- it's devoting 100% of its attention (if it's a single-processor machine) to one task at a time.
In this case, the term is relative to your boss -- foreground is that report that's due tomorrow, background is reading Slashdot, drinking coffee and doing distributed proofreading. Which is all fine as long as bosses don't have good human-load-management tools...
ssh bob's-head
uptime
10:40am up 2 days straight, 1 user, load average: 2.06, 2.08, 2.08
killall slashdot-reading
uptime
10:41am up 2 days 1 minute, 1 user, load average: 0.85, 0.83, 0.89
For some reason, people seem to think that the cable company has an obligation to supply them as much bandwidth as they can suck down, for a low monthly fee. Just because most broadband services have been operating on a flat-rate basis to date does not make it wrong or sinister for them to switch to metered service in the future. Shouldn't you pay for what you use, or are you saying that your neighbor should subsidize your MP3 habit?
What IS scary about this trend is that, with this kind of fine-grained control over network traffic, it would be a breeze to cut off access to a particular web site, or exclude certain protocols. When service providers start differentiating based on the TYPE of data you're downloading, not the QUANTITY, it's time to worry.
But let me get back to my question of ownership. Inanimate objects are capable of being possessed, not simply because they can't argue (unlike slaves for example) but because they have no will. If you possess, do you not also own?
It's not that simple. I may indeed possess the disks on which the software is stored, so I guess I own them. But I don't own the information on them. This isn't anything new with software. When I buy a book, I own it. That doesn't mean I have the right to photocopy it and pass it out to all my friends. Nor do I have the right to record myself reading the book and sell that recording, without paying royalties to the author. As you say, things, by which you mean objects, have innate value. But ideas aren't objects, and they don't have innate commercial value -- if you steal my idea from me, I still have it. Intellectual property is only commercially valuable when protected by law.
I don't know if this has changed, but it clearly shows that music companies get more than their share of value by letting radio stations play their music.
Not in the USA, you have to pay to play. Check out ASCAP for details. Knowing how harmonized world IP laws are, I'd be pretty surprised if this isn't the case in Canada as well. Note, however, that the license is in terms of revenue, so college stations might get off for free.
As far as I know (in canada, at least), it is legal to play radio in a public place without paying royalties.
Again, check the link above, but the ASCAP license (USA) specifically forbids public re-broadcast.
When I lived in Japan from 1992-1996, I saw the state of intellectual property there first hand. For example, normal broadcast radio does not play top 40 hits. Actually any transmission of copyrighted songs over the air, even a sample, must have a royalty paid to the publisher. If you want to listen to music on the radio, you find an American military station broadcasting on base. Japanese singers also do not commonly own the copyright to their own songs, they couldn't give them away even if the wanted to. Concert recordings are also illegal. There is also royalties you have to pay for the subtle music played in department stores, doctor's offices, and on the phone when you are on hold.
And, except for not playing Top 40 on the radio, how is this different from the Good ol' USA? Ever heard of ASCAP, buddy? Here in the US, radio stations sure as heck pay royalties for the songs they play. Muzak is a pay service, and they've got to pay their composers. If you play CD's or commercial radio as background music in a store, without paying royalties, you are violating US law! And, how much of their own stuff do you think Garth Brooks and Mariah Carey write?
On a related note, there are 2 apps that I'd love to see on Linux, but only have Windows versions. The first is the Unabridged Oxford English Dictionary 2nd Edition on CD-ROM, and the other is that huge CD-ROM collection from National Geographic that spans from 1888-2000 (or there abouts). Quite a project, to be sure, and I've always wondered myself if I'd catch hell if I ever figured out the DB structures and released the code to the OSS community.
A few years ago, a friend of mine wrote a Linux/Unix app to access a CD-ROM encyclopedia. He had bought a copy of the CD, but it only came with DOS software. Then he released the app as open source, figuring the dictionary folks would be thrilled that he was opening up an entirely new market for their software -- this was in the days before CD-R's, and you would have had to buy the package to use the disc.
A few months later, he got a cease-and-desist letter in the mail from the dictionary company's lawyer. Seems they viewed this software as a violation of their license agreement. Whether it was or not is anyone's guess. Not having the money for a legal fight, he withdrew the software.
The moral of this story: Be prepared to pay through the nose for the privilege of being right.
This is just one more challenge that peer-to-peer networks will have to recognize and avoid. Right now, the biggest problem for Gnutella is that a large percentage of network nodes aren't actually sharing any files, they're just downloading everything they can get their hands on. But, clients are already getting smart to the freeloader crisis. In the same way that LimeWire allows you to dump users who aren't actually sharing any files, future clients will have to be on the lookout for RIAA DoS-bots.
... the scanner is not half bad! We took a couple of them apart at work, and it seems like they could be made for about $5. I'd bet there are a lot of people and businesses out there that could use a sub-$10 bar code scanner, even if it's just to inventory their CD and book collections. Bundle it with a Linux distribution and some open-source point of sale software, and you have a $10 sales terminal (PC not included). Of course, that's assuming that:CueCat didn't exhaust the market by giving these things away for free...
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.speakeasy.com/ already offers a "naked DSL" option, but they do charge a premium for it over standard DSL-- and they're not even a phone company.
Ideally with companies being required to separate the two there will be companies like Speakeasy that are now able to offer unbundled connectivity without charging extra for it.
Nope. If you'd been reading your Slashdot regularly, you'd know that the FCC ruled earlier this year that phone companies are not required to lease their lines to DSL re-sellers like SpeakEasy. These services are on the way out, not the way in.
This kind of unbundling merely means that the phone company would be required to sell you DSL without voice, not that they would have to let anyone else use their lines to do the same.
Yea... but you can get a cheapy line from broadvoice.com for $5.95 per month... (Total with Fees & Taxes - $7.67)
Broadvoice supplies VOIP service, which you must use over a broadband connection, which you could get over your DSL, for which you have to pay for a bundled voice ... never mind.
... wanders off mumbling something about RTFA.
You can, in fact, add a calendar. Start the sidebar, go to Settings -> Add/Remove Panels. Click the Show ActiveX Plug-Ins. Select Calendar Control 9.0. Viola!
I can't tell from my cursory review of the web page... So I'll ask here: The Google Desktop Search engine claims to index my "Outlook EMail." What does this mean? Does it contain an Exchange client? Is it going to sift through all my eleventy-million e-mails on my company's Exchange server
GDS indexes your Outlook mail by communicating directly with Outlook. It should index anything that's in an Outlook folder, including IMAP, POP, or Exchange mail. It doesn't have any ability to talk directly to your Exchange server, though if you don't keep a local copy of your mail, it's going to hit the server quite a bit as it retrieves each and every message in your Exchange folders and indexes them.
You should DEFINITELY check with your company network admin before you install GDS -- most of them are not big fans, because of the potential security risks.
Doesn't it make sense to just run a small electric motor with, wich would make the vehicle weigh much less. I guess this would work only if they plan this to be an add-on modules to the already existing hydrogen cars.
While you're right that this would be more efficient, the problem comes the moment that the sun goes behind the clouds, and your car stops moving. Also, what happens to all of the power you collect while parked or stopped? Hydrogen can be stored in a tank, or adsorbed onto a catalyst, for later use. Sure, you could load the truck up with batteries, but batteries are pretty bad at high-density energy storage, when it comes down to it.
The bottom line is, a car equipped with hydrogen storage and a tuned hydrogen combustion engine will do much better than a current-generation electric car, IF there is a convenient hydrogen source at hand whenever you need to fill up.
How about blocking all traffic from the DMV department to the internet? Why the hell do their license computers need to be on the net anyways? A local net to talk to your databases and internal email, sure. But internet access?
In this case, that's like closing the gate after the wolf is already inside. This virus will spread just fine on an intranet, once it's inside.
In general, while it might be practical to lock down Web access, e-mail is an important business tool that can't just be turned off.
Yeah, my bad. Had a little screw-up with my TLA's.
An inability to make official policy recommendations shouldn't be taken to imply that they can't express any opinion at all.
While true, most of the sections in the document say things like, "eliminating fair use could hurt the consumer, but it could also help the consumer by encouraging content providers to create and distribute more content." Pretty equivocal stuff.
That's not entirely accurate. The preface to the study states that the GAO, by definition, does not make any policy recommendations. Thus, the lack of recommendations in the study does not mean that the data contained in it won't be used by one side or the other to push for change.
Gotta read those source documents before submitting!
There's a good way to deal with this. When you have an idea that you're interested in pursuing, pitch it to your employer. If they're interested, then presumably they'll pay you to work on it on company time. If they're not interested, then ask them to officially sign over the rights to you. Have that argument BEFORE you invest your time and resources, not after. And, as others have noted, you should be certain to document any significant side projects BEFORE signing any IP agreement at the start of employment.
I and my co-workers have used both of these approaches with our employer (which indeed has a we-own-everything clause in the employment agreement), and had great results.
Unfortunately, credit checks are at least as popular as drug tests for employment these days. The rationale is that an employee with lots of debt and bad credit is more likely to embezzle or sell company secrets, and this viewpoint is supported by companies selling credit-check services. It's distasteful, true, but it's a free market, you can find work somewhere else.
they could have sold it under the names like audiotron [turtlebeach.com] or Rio reciever [sonicblue.com]
what a great Idea! you are such a smart feller!
No, no, no. The Rio receiver and audiotron are more complicated devices, with displays and browser dials and all that. This is a simple receiver -- in a commercial device, it could be no bigger than a dongle with an Ethernet jack on one end and two RCA plugs (or a SPDIF port) on the other.
Slashdotters, before you slam this thing, please consider the following facts:
You mean like the one that the record companies have added to CD's? Or the one that video game distributors have added to their games? And these are people who've had a lot longer to contemplate their fate at the hands of file swapping.
Why not? That's like saying if I use DNA sequencing to find the identity of a criminal, it's just a chemically-assisted guess. Or, using a microphone to detect and record a distant conversation is just an electronically-assisted guess. The data is still there in the photo, it's just not visible to the human eye. What IS unfortunate is that they use Photoshop for this analysis. If they used a respected scientific image processing program like NIH Image, which doesn't have any pixel editing or distorting capabilities, I bet no one would bat an eye.
The sooner these drugs are discovered then the cheaper they will be when you need them.
And the cheaper (and easier) these drugs are to discover, the less money drug companies will have to recoup from insurance companies and patients.
I beg to differ. Foreground and background are all relative -- everything your computer does is foreground to IT -- it's devoting 100% of its attention (if it's a single-processor machine) to one task at a time.
In this case, the term is relative to your boss -- foreground is that report that's due tomorrow, background is reading Slashdot, drinking coffee and doing distributed proofreading. Which is all fine as long as bosses don't have good human-load-management tools...
ssh bob's-head
uptime
10:40am up 2 days straight, 1 user, load average: 2.06, 2.08, 2.08
killall slashdot-reading
uptime
10:41am up 2 days 1 minute, 1 user, load average: 0.85, 0.83, 0.89
lo
Hmmm. Obviously, you have not spent much time following the output of the MIT Media Lab (which is hard to believe if you're a regular /. reader)...
What IS scary about this trend is that, with this kind of fine-grained control over network traffic, it would be a breeze to cut off access to a particular web site, or exclude certain protocols. When service providers start differentiating based on the TYPE of data you're downloading, not the QUANTITY, it's time to worry.
It's not that simple. I may indeed possess the disks on which the software is stored, so I guess I own them. But I don't own the information on them. This isn't anything new with software. When I buy a book, I own it. That doesn't mean I have the right to photocopy it and pass it out to all my friends. Nor do I have the right to record myself reading the book and sell that recording, without paying royalties to the author. As you say, things, by which you mean objects, have innate value. But ideas aren't objects, and they don't have innate commercial value -- if you steal my idea from me, I still have it. Intellectual property is only commercially valuable when protected by law.
Not in the USA, you have to pay to play. Check out ASCAP for details. Knowing how harmonized world IP laws are, I'd be pretty surprised if this isn't the case in Canada as well. Note, however, that the license is in terms of revenue, so college stations might get off for free.
As far as I know (in canada, at least), it is legal to play radio in a public place without paying royalties.
Again, check the link above, but the ASCAP license (USA) specifically forbids public re-broadcast.
And, except for not playing Top 40 on the radio, how is this different from the Good ol' USA? Ever heard of ASCAP, buddy? Here in the US, radio stations sure as heck pay royalties for the songs they play. Muzak is a pay service, and they've got to pay their composers. If you play CD's or commercial radio as background music in a store, without paying royalties, you are violating US law! And, how much of their own stuff do you think Garth Brooks and Mariah Carey write?
A few years ago, a friend of mine wrote a Linux/Unix app to access a CD-ROM encyclopedia. He had bought a copy of the CD, but it only came with DOS software. Then he released the app as open source, figuring the dictionary folks would be thrilled that he was opening up an entirely new market for their software -- this was in the days before CD-R's, and you would have had to buy the package to use the disc.
A few months later, he got a cease-and-desist letter in the mail from the dictionary company's lawyer. Seems they viewed this software as a violation of their license agreement. Whether it was or not is anyone's guess. Not having the money for a legal fight, he withdrew the software.
The moral of this story: Be prepared to pay through the nose for the privilege of being right.
Eligible Customers:
Currently, the plan is to transition those customers who:
and,
So, tell 'em you use Linux. Problem solved.
This is just one more challenge that peer-to-peer networks will have to recognize and avoid. Right now, the biggest problem for Gnutella is that a large percentage of network nodes aren't actually sharing any files, they're just downloading everything they can get their hands on. But, clients are already getting smart to the freeloader crisis. In the same way that LimeWire allows you to dump users who aren't actually sharing any files, future clients will have to be on the lookout for RIAA DoS-bots.
... the scanner is not half bad! We took a couple of them apart at work, and it seems like they could be made for about $5. I'd bet there are a lot of people and businesses out there that could use a sub-$10 bar code scanner, even if it's just to inventory their CD and book collections. Bundle it with a Linux distribution and some open-source point of sale software, and you have a $10 sales terminal (PC not included). Of course, that's assuming that :CueCat didn't exhaust the market by giving these things away for free...