A Peer2Peer application that traded, and then firewalled IP addresses known to belong to RIAA and MPAA companies, or the 'IP Watchdog' companies that work for them?
Well, there you go. You hallucinated everything you heard!
Seriously, very strange things happen when you transmit large amounts of power. I've seen videos of aluminum 'flying saucers' that have a few hundred millions volts running through them at micro-amp power levels. They levitate, and then detonate.
Sure - you should be able to make perfect digital copies, or even make ternary or quadrany copies... But who's going to have the reader to interpret those bits? Unless you keep that CD of Photoshop or Gimp backed up, with a CPU that can run it - you may have to re-write your own program to interpret the binary and display it as an image.
The oldest image format I can find is 'PIC' which was used by PC Paint in 1984, right around the time PC's could start representing image data on their screens. ACDsee, Photoshop, Gimp, and Irfanview still all support this format, even though it is
horribly limited, and very nearly 20 years old.
Even before that, people have been trading ASCII-style art since the invention of the Teletype. Sure, it's not supported by most graphic programs, because you only need a text editor to view it.
One of the most popular formats for a long time was 'PCX', which was created by Zsoft in 86, I beleive. PCX format later became Microsoft BMP format. The two are fairly similiar in construction, except that BMP's are not limited to 8 bit color. A lot of webmasters still use Gif87 despite the fact that PNG is better in many ways. No image program I know
of does not support Gif87 in one way or another. (Gimp users can download those illegal plugins, remember.)
Today, you can represent an image in more detail than the human eye can see with a 24 bit image. You can print it out how ever large you want it, assuming you have a large enough lens to capture it, and enough disk space to store the pixels. Then you can choose to compress it either losslessly or lossy. We've pretty much hit the end of the road for image file formats. Their may be more formats that come along in the future that compress better or have special features, but you can bet your bottom dollar that common image formats of today will be supported by computer software for decades, if not centuries to come.
By that time, who would want to waste time on 2-D non-holographic static images? They'd be boring, you wouldn't be able to taste or smell anything...
Same reason we still look at and keep glass-plate photos of Civil-War Era scenes. It's a look back in history. The only photos we'll have until your holo-photos arrive will be Boring 2-d's. Sure, they may not be as wonderful as a more immersive format, but you can bet that they'll still be a major part of our society's history.
When I take a digital photo, it goes on a Sony Memory-stick. I copy it over to CDR.
The average lifespan of a CD is about 20 years. Slightly less if you use CDR.
We still have some of the very first photos taken, about 150 years ago... around the time of the end of the civil war. They're in pretty bad shape however. The ones that are best preserved are kept in airtight storage. Nobody ever gets to look at them. Only their copies... And with each successive analogue copy, even with the most loving attention to preserving the quality of the original, a little is lost.
Twenty years from now, if I'm dilligent, I can copy all my CDR to Super-DVDR or whatever. I'll have perfect digital copies of everything I kept before... if I was dilligent and made backups in case of fire, etc.
Twenty years from now, the only format we'll be able to see most of the ancient photos we have will be digital. Those who own them will no doubt be dilligent in making sure both the originals and the digital copies are kept secure one way or the other.
Fifty Years from now, I can make copies of my Super-DVDR to Quantum Storage, or something similiar.
Fifty Years from now, those ancient photos will still reside in a digital format, probably alongside my digital photos.
Even when the copies of the copies have broken down, if we're careful and follow data saftey and purity rules, we'll still have digital versions of
*all* the photos. The question you have to ask yourself is that digital storage the wave of the future, but can we, as a historically-minded society, be dilligent enough to make sure that our data is always secure?
Off-site backups on the moon, anyone?
I keep being turned off by K-Meleon...
on
Netscape 6.2
·
· Score: 2
I browse with the latest milestone of Moz. Have been for about six months now. Not quite as stable as IE on the same system, but it gives me a little more control over my browsing environment.
I download the new build of K-Meleon whenever it comes out, get really excited, and then go back to using Moz after a few days of crashes and inconsistent behavior. Frankly, I'm getting a little burnt on the cycle. Still, I bet K-Meleon will reach 1.0 before Mozilla does.
all human-readable text is assumed to be HTML or XML, instead of Notepad-style plain text, and formatting can be customized with cascading style sheets.
Chicken and egg problem that no real MIT OS guru would allow himself to be caught in. If every document is considered to already be HTML or XML by the OS, how do you create HTML or XML above the OS layer? Use a text editor? Ah, but all text is considered to be HTML or XML at the OS level.
Sorry guys. There are some really great ideas here, but the article is really just a troll. It's just an interesting wishlist of OS feature desires.
I could never understand the sheep-bandwagon, "I hate Wesley" nonsense.
Unfortuneately, and this is no aspersion on Mr. Wheaton's acting ability, Wesley Crusher was written to be a whining pussy and an annoying jerk. I think it was because the writers of the show had no idea the way a teenager thinks or speaks. When it became apparent that his character was not really going anywhere, they tried the out of making him a super-genius, and therefore on par with the rest of the adult crew. This made Wesley even more obnoxious, mostly because he had become an unrealistic parody of what the writers were trying to accomplish with his character.
I liked everything I saw Wil Wheaton in EXCEPT for ST:TNG. I think it's a shame that he stayed on it for so long when he could have been doing other stuff, and according to his website and discussion, he probably agrees.
I truly enjoyed some of the better anti-Wesley jokes and fan-stories out there. It's a shame, but no surprise, that they should have impacted so personally on the real person behind the annoying character.
Well, here's to you, Wil Wheaton. You're a cool guy, and I hope you or any other Trek actor never gets stuck with another 'Wesley' again.
ranging from $0.79 each (100 on a spindle for $79) to $1.09
Hmmm... Regular 700MB CDR costs about $20.00/100 (or free, if you can find a good enough rebate). A MP3 CDrom player costs around $99.00 at BestBuy and a decent CDRW Drive costs about the same at the same place.
Sure, this new toy is possibly more convenient, but not $200 convenient, especially when you figure in a higher 'cost of ownership' per MB of storage.
That Rowling guy must feel pretty good with the success of his books...
J(oanne) K(athleen) Rowling is probably very happy with HER success. Unlike many authors who have had their stories ported to the screen, she has a huge amount of creative control over the Chris Columbus directed Harry Potter movie.
...Make an OS layer of some kind that multimedia developers can get behind.
The number 1 problem with the Linux OS, at least as far as I'm concerned, is that multimedia developers cannot fully support Linux. Each and every one of use has to dual boot to get anything done. I long for the day that I can truly be well and gone be done with Windows. For a long time, it seemed like BEos was the way to go, but then BeOS went Belly up and sold off to sony to keep from dying.
Well, here is a tired Windows/MacOS/Linux user who is tired of dual booting. Please make OpenBe what we can all look forward to in the way of multimedia OS.
I don't know about you, but I noticed in most Starcraft games with multiple players (>3) and reasonably low resources + Fog of War, strategy comes into play.
If you play Starcraft online (on Battlenet, probably), most of the people you'll play against want to play on maps that have 'infinite minerals', ie, enough minerals so that they don't have to concern themselves with resource production when playing. This is the primary factor that makes Blizzard games like Warcraft and Starcraft enjoyable as strategy games. Remember that it's only *half* a war game. The rest of the game is about expansion and controlling territory.
Classic Strategy examples include keeping cloaked/burrowed units around the map in areas which players are forced to expand to. This may also involve camping and controlling 'choke points', although really good maps will never have so few choke points that you can't flank your enemy, just like in the real world.
Also, when it comes time to controll bases with limited resources, diversionary tactics and alliances become paramount.
Attack the front lines with enough planes to make your enemy commit his troops, then fall back to regroup with a greater force, drawing the troops out of the base.
Then have an ally invade the base with the bulk of his forces, preferrebly with cloaking or teleportation techniques.
The point is that strategy does exist in these games. The vast majority of people who play them don't understand this. When these kind of people play against people who do understand strategy, they lose.
This is something that I think that the OSS movement underemphasizes due to the socialist image that is so feared in the software industry.
OSS is a very socialist movement. That's not necessarily a bad thing. It's been made into a bad thing by decades of 'red scare' propoganda and negative indoctrination by the companies who stand to be hurt by a less capitalist system of software development.
Software companies, like all companies, beleive as if they have a right to exist and profit. There would be no such thing as 'intellectual property' if they didn't. They've been telling everybody else this same thing for so long that it's become 'unamerican' to try to deny a company its profit. Thus, when a mode of business has become obsoleted (Are you listening, music distributors?), that company starts engaging in negative propoganda to try to preserve their business model. Thus Disney's anti-napster cartoon and things like the 'Virus' speech from MS.
Companies do not have the right to exist and profit. The existance of a company should never be protected from consumer pressure.
In this case, it is the pressure to use free software. Here, I am referring to the cost, and not the ideology. Microsoft puts enormous pressure on businesses to use IIS, despite the fact that Apache is better, more stable, and costs 100% less. The same is true for all the Java servlet engines. Jakarta is the best, despite a wealth of options. The same will probably be true of Mono over.Net in the way of application servers.
OSS Developers: Stress the 'free' nature of your product. In cases like Star Office/Open Office, it has already started to win 'Normal Joe' converts from pay for software.
VirtualDub, the GPL'd video editor, has already become a defacto standard for internet video publishing. This is mostly because it combines excellent usage with zero cost.
If you want Joe-sixpack to use your OS app, stress how much he gets and how little it costs.
"Oh? Your soundcard? I've never really gotten that to work under Linux..."
Is this something that only I have heard mulitple times?
Of course, gaming performance is what many Linux companies see as their ticket to profit and fame. Thus Mandrake's upcoming 'gaming' distro and the distros mentioned in the article.
What would cause artists and multimedia professionals to migrate en masse from MacOS and Windows 2000 would be a good, comprehensive, artist-targeted multimedia suite for Linux. This means support for video and sound capture devices, graphic, sound, and video editing along the lines of Adobe, Ulead, or similar products. Protools for Linux, anyone? It also means not having to fight to configure a system for multimedia uses rather than coding or networking.
Gaming features might attract kiddies and get them to shell out $x for your distro, assuming that they just don't download the code from your website. Art and multimedia features will gain you loyalty for life from art and design professionals who're all itching like crazy to get away from Windows and MacOS.
I have to answer emails and write all day
This is almost exactly what I would have said.
It's funny you say this, because this is exactly the kind of attitude that the parent article is about and the kind of attitude I was complaining about in my post.
I did ISP support for a while, so I know what it's like to have to support idiots who want free service. I also know that if someone genuinely had a problem, I did my best to help them, especially if they made an attempt to work with me to solve their problem. This was over the phone or via e-mail. I know that it *is* possible for support people to give quality support if they are supporting a quality product, which the scanner I mentioned is. The support people that I talked just didn't want to.
A little while back, my old flatbed scanner quit working. It had had heavy use, and was several months out of warranty, so I figured it was a write-off.
I did my research and tried to pick the best USB scanner out there in terms of price, features, and reliability. I ended up with an Acer 640U flatbed scanner. It's a nice scanner, and works preotty well. It's advertised to work with Windows 9x, 2000, MacOS, and Linux, if I remember correctly.
Well, I work under W2k for the great deal of my multimedia and graphics tasks. Just after a fresh install of the Operating System, the scanner works like a champ. However, after more than a little bit of use, the driver starts malfunctioning. Obviously a DLL conflict or something similar, right?
Well, a quick call to Acer to try to track down the conflict let me know that I was not privaleged to phone support any more because my product was out of warranty. Do they offer per-incident pricing for phone support?
I resorted to newsgroup and messageboard searches for problems like mine, but couldn't really find any. I'm certain we've all had problems like this before, right? Where we are absolutely the onle ones to have them?
So, after a while, I tried emailing Acer's support like the page linked above suggests. I included detailed system specs including hardware specs, OS installed, a fairly comprehensive list of software installed, error codes and anything else I could think of. I specifically stated in the email that I thought that my problem was being caused no doubt by a software conflict, and asked for help tracking down the conflict.
The reply I received was along the lines of:
"Apparently there is a software conflict between the Acer driver and software applications installed on your system if your scanner will work with other computers. You should try to track down this conflict and uninstall the confilicting software."
This is adding insult to injury in my opinion. Either the support staffer who answered my mail was so untrained as to be useless, which is a real possibility in any support staff, or he or she didn't care, or had been instructed not to provide specific help to email support problems. So, despite the fact that the Acer scanner is actually a very good scanner, the software can't be trusted to keep working, and Acer's support of that software is in no way useful.
Remember that Linux has only gotten really good and has gained the kind of acceptance it needs to be taken serious in the eyes of application developers in the last few years.
I would love to see an openBe implimentation, because it would be really nice to have an opensource OS geard toward multimedia instead of networking and programming. (Linux is many wonderful things, but it simply not geared for multimedia.)
It would take at least the same amount of time to reach 'critical mass'.
Hey, it's not only old video games that run into the ol' "this hasn't been sold by anyone for years, yet it's still illegal to distribute it yourself" problem.
I agree totally. This same problem applies to authors, many of which hold on to copyrights for decades after their book has ceased to make them any money. What's the point?
so, the big question is: if YOU were a major media corporation's CEO, and YOUR family's livelihood depended on keeping your corporation afloat in the face of underground distribution channels, what would YOU do?
That's the trick, though, isn't it? It's not their welfare that's being hurt by underground distribution channels. BSA companies in particular are some of the wealthiest companies in the world despite rampant piracy of their products. Truthfully, it's not even their pocketbook.
As has been said many, many times before, you *cannot* assume that a sale of your product through piracy would have resulted in a sale for you had the pirate copy not existed.
Case in point:
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,47617,00.html '"It's not that people would just buy legitimate software if they can't get pirated copies," Cheng Yi, a self-described "alternative software dealer" from the Guangdong province said through a translator. "Many people here can't afford the legitimate software, and it is capitalist to say that only the rich should have the advantages."'
Do you think that every 15 yeal old webmaster who uses a warezed copy of Photoshop could get mommy or daddy to drop the $600 for a real copy? Does *anyone* think that less affluent people who build their own computer but don't really know linux can really afford a $300 Windows 2000 license?
The same goes for music. I don't buy RIAA CD's any more because of the RIAA's actions, but beforehand, I wouldn't even consider buying a CD without hearing at least some, and preferrably all the music from the disc. Napster was providing this service for millions. Accordingly, CD sales rose. Now that Napster is gone, CD sales have plummeted.
What is being hurt by underground distribution channels is control. In the case of the software companies, it's the ability to say who and who does not use their software. They lose the ability to lock people into licenses and 'upgrade cycles' if they are illegally using software. Even though they would never profit from those people, the loss of control is unbearable.
The same goes for the music industry. As has been noted by many research firms, Napster helped CD sales. Long and Short, CD sales rose while Napster was in operation and have now leveled off and even decreased. It was never about money for RIAA labels. It was about the ability to control not only their pet artists, but their listeners as well. Do you think that listener choice controls what is a 'hit' and what is not? Think again. A song may be catch, true, but the labels pour big $$$ into artist, songs, and music videos they want to be popular. This includes paying radio stations to play it, as well as putting together concerts, commercials, and promotional material. Look at 'O-Town' for chrissakes! The band is so fake they made a TV show about how fake it was. They have singles in the top 40 though. You think that wasn't entirely due to the effort of their label?
The same thing goes for movie studios, newspapers, televison networks, etc... etc.. etc...
We are living in a time that is analogous to the late middle-ages, just before the emergence of a real middle class. We have an oligarchy of rich, powerful individuals, Corporations and their executives in this case, who know that their continued survival is entirely dependant upon the serf classes. If those classes cannot be controlled, they cannot be trusted to allow the oligarchy to remain in power. Just like the French nobility, however, the aristocracy of money and power in the United States has decided not to try to adapt to the changing world.
Orv wiv'er heads...
Reasonable Limits on Copyrights...
on
Ultima Revived
·
· Score: 2
The big reason a lot of these old, quality games are not being reproduced and retooled for newer platforms, (Win32, GTK, etc...) is because they are still under copyright. Many of them (Like the old Ultima games) are owned by companies who never sold them and never really plan to.
The answer to this is limiting duration of copyright on software. I mean, how much can you sell a game for even 3 years after its initial release? The last time I went to Walmart, they had a consolodated 'Starcraft' package for 19.95, but the Starcraft CD was in the bargin bin for 4.95. How about after five years? Seven? If software copyrights just simply expired after seven years with no chance of renewal, the companies who owned those games would have extracted all the revenue they could from them, and then the pulic would profit by getting older, quality games (and preferrable their source code) into the public domain.
Mind you, I think that copyright is wrong to begin with, but if there is a good compromise to be found, don't you think it would be something like this?
Re:Ads are not necessarily bad...
on
Slashdot Updates
·
· Score: 2
I agree. The big square boxes in ZDnet or CNet pages are really not that bad. I prefer them infinitely over the dread x-10 camera pop behind ad. And the all the flag companies that are attempting to profit from the disaster... *sigh*
The in-page ads are even better at catching my attention, especially if they are well designed, or offer something interactive, like the HP graphing calculator add, or the Sun breakout ad from a little while back.
The problem with the graphic calculator ad (which worked a lot like the 3d calculator from macOS for those who didn't see it) was that I spent all my time playing the controls, but never actually visited HP's site.
How bout a mini-Tux Racer applet ad? I'd click if it meant I got to race Tux again.
OSDN Bar was disabled for me...
on
Slashdot Updates
·
· Score: 2
And I never set it one way or the other. Did some/.ers get a lucky draw of the hat or was this a db column add that defaulted to 'null' instead of 'true'.
From the article - After weeks of conference calls and quiet rallying of the troops, technology companies including Intel, IBM, Microsoft and Compaq Computer held a coming-out press conference Monday to oppose a broad copyright protection proposal being backed by Walt Disney and Sen. Ernest Hollings, D-S. C.
Can I see a show of hands from everyone who never thought that they'd be in the same boat as Microsoft?
Still, this just doesn't completely jive. I thought that Microsoft was a big propenent of screwing the little guy over for intellectual property rights. Thus, WMA DRM, right?
Maybe it boils down to the simple fact that the proposed SSSCA legislation is so outrageous and would cause so many problems that it really is getting the negative attention it deserves.
It works on immature crackers, so why not apply it to the FBI as well?
There's no real way to catalogue every packet on the internet this without some sort of computerized searching technology. They may even call it 'AI', but what it will boil down to is an application looks for suspicious strings to flag for human eyes.
Therefore, it would be very possible to fool and overtax any kind of system like this by building a new kind of honeypot-style server.
Some Ideas:
Have this server connect to different IRC nodes bot style and create suspicious sounding chanels like '#BombUSA' or something similiar. Have it talk to itself Eliza style through IRC, but with terrorist keywords like 'Anthrax', 'Jihad', 'Hijack', etc... You could also substitute keywords for other kinds of illegal activity. Drugs, Pr0n, and other illegal/questionable vices all have keywords which would raise any LEO's eyebrows.
If two servers happen to meet on a chanel like this, they can exchange POP email addresses and start sending smtp packets to eachother with the same kind of information. Maybe throw in a few uuencoded attachments of the Osama and Bert poster.
One last thing. Have each server that does this engage in plaintext dialogue 4/5ths fo the time, and then, psuedo-random bitstreams the rest to simulate encryption. If/when they do try to crack those streams, it will use up their resources so that they can't as effectively be used against individuals who do have valid reasons to use crypto.
Slashdot Mirror
A Peer2Peer application that traded, and then firewalled IP addresses known to belong to RIAA and MPAA companies, or the 'IP Watchdog' companies that work for them?
sushi and absinthe
Well, there you go. You hallucinated everything you heard!
Seriously, very strange things happen when you transmit large amounts of power. I've seen videos of aluminum 'flying saucers' that have a few hundred millions volts running through them at micro-amp power levels. They levitate, and then detonate.
Sure - you should be able to make perfect digital copies, or even make ternary or quadrany copies... But who's going to have the reader to interpret those bits? Unless you keep that CD of Photoshop or Gimp backed up, with a CPU that can run it - you may have to re-write your own program to interpret the binary and display it as an image.
The oldest image format I can find is 'PIC' which was used by PC Paint in 1984, right around the time PC's could start representing image data on their screens. ACDsee, Photoshop, Gimp, and Irfanview still all support this format, even though it is
horribly limited, and very nearly 20 years old.
Even before that, people have been trading ASCII-style art since the invention of the Teletype. Sure, it's not supported by most graphic programs, because you only need a text editor to view it.
One of the most popular formats for a long time was 'PCX', which was created by Zsoft in 86, I beleive. PCX format later became Microsoft BMP format. The two are fairly similiar in construction, except that BMP's are not limited to 8 bit color. A lot of webmasters still use Gif87 despite the fact that PNG is better in many ways. No image program I know
of does not support Gif87 in one way or another. (Gimp users can download those illegal plugins, remember.)
Today, you can represent an image in more detail than the human eye can see with a 24 bit image. You can print it out how ever large you want it, assuming you have a large enough lens to capture it, and enough disk space to store the pixels. Then you can choose to compress it either losslessly or lossy. We've pretty much hit the end of the road for image file formats. Their may be more formats that come along in the future that compress better or have special features, but you can bet your bottom dollar that common image formats of today will be supported by computer software for decades, if not centuries to come.
By that time, who would want to waste time on 2-D non-holographic static images? They'd be boring, you wouldn't be able to taste or smell anything...
Same reason we still look at and keep glass-plate photos of Civil-War Era scenes. It's a look back in history. The only photos we'll have until your holo-photos arrive will be Boring 2-d's. Sure, they may not be as wonderful as a more immersive format, but you can bet that they'll still be a major part of our society's history.
When I take a digital photo, it goes on a Sony Memory-stick. I copy it over to CDR.
The average lifespan of a CD is about 20 years. Slightly less if you use CDR.
We still have some of the very first photos taken, about 150 years ago... around the time of the end of the civil war. They're in pretty bad shape however. The ones that are best preserved are kept in airtight storage. Nobody ever gets to look at them. Only their copies... And with each successive analogue copy, even with the most loving attention to preserving the quality of the original, a little is lost.
Twenty years from now, if I'm dilligent, I can copy all my CDR to Super-DVDR or whatever. I'll have perfect digital copies of everything I kept before... if I was dilligent and made backups in case of fire, etc.
Twenty years from now, the only format we'll be able to see most of the ancient photos we have will be digital. Those who own them will no doubt be dilligent in making sure both the originals and the digital copies are kept secure one way or the other.
Fifty Years from now, I can make copies of my Super-DVDR to Quantum Storage, or something similiar.
Fifty Years from now, those ancient photos will still reside in a digital format, probably alongside my digital photos.
Even when the copies of the copies have broken down, if we're careful and follow data saftey and purity rules, we'll still have digital versions of
*all* the photos. The question you have to ask yourself is that digital storage the wave of the future, but can we, as a historically-minded society, be dilligent enough to make sure that our data is always secure?
Off-site backups on the moon, anyone?
I browse with the latest milestone of Moz. Have been for about six months now. Not quite as stable as IE on the same system, but it gives me a little more control over my browsing environment.
I download the new build of K-Meleon whenever it comes out, get really excited, and then go back to using Moz after a few days of crashes and inconsistent behavior. Frankly, I'm getting a little burnt on the cycle. Still, I bet K-Meleon will reach 1.0 before Mozilla does.
all human-readable text is assumed to be HTML or XML, instead of Notepad-style plain text, and formatting can be customized with cascading style sheets.
Chicken and egg problem that no real MIT OS guru would allow himself to be caught in. If every document is considered to already be HTML or XML by the OS, how do you create HTML or XML above the OS layer? Use a text editor? Ah, but all text is considered to be HTML or XML at the OS level.
Sorry guys. There are some really great ideas here, but the article is really just a troll. It's just an interesting wishlist of OS feature desires.
I could never understand the sheep-bandwagon, "I hate Wesley" nonsense.
Unfortuneately, and this is no aspersion on Mr. Wheaton's acting ability, Wesley Crusher was written to be a whining pussy and an annoying jerk. I think it was because the writers of the show had no idea the way a teenager thinks or speaks. When it became apparent that his character was not really going anywhere, they tried the out of making him a super-genius, and therefore on par with the rest of the adult crew. This made Wesley even more obnoxious, mostly because he had become an unrealistic parody of what the writers were trying to accomplish with his character.
I liked everything I saw Wil Wheaton in EXCEPT for ST:TNG. I think it's a shame that he stayed on it for so long when he could have been doing other stuff, and according to his website and discussion, he probably agrees.
I truly enjoyed some of the better anti-Wesley jokes and fan-stories out there. It's a shame, but no surprise, that they should have impacted so personally on the real person behind the annoying character.
Well, here's to you, Wil Wheaton. You're a cool guy, and I hope you or any other Trek actor never gets stuck with another 'Wesley' again.
ranging from $0.79 each (100 on a spindle for $79) to $1.09
Hmmm... Regular 700MB CDR costs about $20.00/100 (or free, if you can find a good enough rebate). A MP3 CDrom player costs around $99.00 at BestBuy and a decent CDRW Drive costs about the same at the same place.
Sure, this new toy is possibly more convenient, but not $200 convenient, especially when you figure in a higher 'cost of ownership' per MB of storage.
Sorry, please play again.
That Rowling guy must feel pretty good with the success of his books...
J(oanne) K(athleen) Rowling is probably very happy with HER success. Unlike many authors who have had their stories ported to the screen, she has a huge amount of creative control over the Chris Columbus directed Harry Potter movie.
Here is the best FAQ I have seen about her and her rise: http://www.geocities.com/jkrfaq/bio.html
...Make an OS layer of some kind that multimedia developers can get behind.
The number 1 problem with the Linux OS, at least as far as I'm concerned, is that multimedia developers cannot fully support Linux. Each and every one of use has to dual boot to get anything done. I long for the day that I can truly be well and gone be done with Windows. For a long time, it seemed like BEos was the way to go, but then BeOS went Belly up and sold off to sony to keep from dying.
Well, here is a tired Windows/MacOS/Linux user who is tired of dual booting. Please make OpenBe what we can all look forward to in the way of multimedia OS.
With decent graphics hardware and on even mediocre processors, MAME runs close to real-speed for most games emulated.
(Ahh... I can finally play 'Forgotton Realms' and 'Assault' once more.)
While cool, running it at any given level would probably not be a very good test of your setup's limits.
Now, running it at *all* levels?
I don't know about you, but I noticed in most Starcraft games with multiple players (>3) and reasonably low resources + Fog of War, strategy comes into play.
If you play Starcraft online (on Battlenet, probably), most of the people you'll play against want to play on maps that have 'infinite minerals', ie, enough minerals so that they don't have to concern themselves with resource production when playing. This is the primary factor that makes Blizzard games like Warcraft and Starcraft enjoyable as strategy games. Remember that it's only *half* a war game. The rest of the game is about expansion and controlling territory.
Classic Strategy examples include keeping cloaked/burrowed units around the map in areas which players are forced to expand to. This may also involve camping and controlling 'choke points', although really good maps will never have so few choke points that you can't flank your enemy, just like in the real world.
Also, when it comes time to controll bases with limited resources, diversionary tactics and alliances become paramount.
Attack the front lines with enough planes to make your enemy commit his troops, then fall back to regroup with a greater force, drawing the troops out of the base.
Then have an ally invade the base with the bulk of his forces, preferrebly with cloaking or teleportation techniques.
The point is that strategy does exist in these games. The vast majority of people who play them don't understand this. When these kind of people play against people who do understand strategy, they lose.
This is something that I think that the OSS movement underemphasizes due to the socialist image that is so feared in the software industry.
.Net in the way of application servers.
OSS is a very socialist movement. That's not necessarily a bad thing. It's been made into a bad thing by decades of 'red scare' propoganda and negative indoctrination by the companies who stand to be hurt by a less capitalist system of software development.
Software companies, like all companies, beleive as if they have a right to exist and profit. There would be no such thing as 'intellectual property' if they didn't. They've been telling everybody else this same thing for so long that it's become 'unamerican' to try to deny a company its profit. Thus, when a mode of business has become obsoleted (Are you listening, music distributors?), that company starts engaging in negative propoganda to try to preserve their business model. Thus Disney's anti-napster cartoon and things like the 'Virus' speech from MS.
Companies do not have the right to exist and profit. The existance of a company should never be protected from consumer pressure.
In this case, it is the pressure to use free software. Here, I am referring to the cost, and not the ideology. Microsoft puts enormous pressure on businesses to use IIS, despite the fact that Apache is better, more stable, and costs 100% less. The same is true for all the Java servlet engines. Jakarta is the best, despite a wealth of options. The same will probably be true of Mono over
OSS Developers: Stress the 'free' nature of your product. In cases like Star Office/Open Office, it has already started to win 'Normal Joe' converts from pay for software.
VirtualDub, the GPL'd video editor, has already become a defacto standard for internet video publishing. This is mostly because it combines excellent usage with zero cost.
If you want Joe-sixpack to use your OS app, stress how much he gets and how little it costs.
"Oh? Your soundcard? I've never really gotten that to work under Linux..."
Is this something that only I have heard mulitple times?
Of course, gaming performance is what many Linux companies see as their ticket to profit and fame. Thus Mandrake's upcoming 'gaming' distro and the distros mentioned in the article.
What would cause artists and multimedia professionals to migrate en masse from MacOS and Windows 2000 would be a good, comprehensive, artist-targeted multimedia suite for Linux. This means support for video and sound capture devices, graphic, sound, and video editing along the lines of Adobe, Ulead, or similar products. Protools for Linux, anyone? It also means not having to fight to configure a system for multimedia uses rather than coding or networking.
Gaming features might attract kiddies and get them to shell out $x for your distro, assuming that they just don't download the code from your website. Art and multimedia features will gain you loyalty for life from art and design professionals who're all itching like crazy to get away from Windows and MacOS.
I have to answer emails and write all day
This is almost exactly what I would have said.
It's funny you say this, because this is exactly the kind of attitude that the parent article is about and the kind of attitude I was complaining about in my post.
I did ISP support for a while, so I know what it's like to have to support idiots who want free service. I also know that if someone genuinely had a problem, I did my best to help them, especially if they made an attempt to work with me to solve their problem. This was over the phone or via e-mail. I know that it *is* possible for support people to give quality support if they are supporting a quality product, which the scanner I mentioned is. The support people that I talked just didn't want to.
I'll confirm this. I have never dealt with anyone so willing to support hardware as Sun. Mod this guy up.
True Story...
t ml
A little while back, my old flatbed scanner quit working. It had had heavy use, and was several months out of warranty, so I figured it was a write-off.
I did my research and tried to pick the best USB scanner out there in terms of price, features, and reliability. I ended up with an Acer 640U flatbed scanner. It's a nice scanner, and works preotty well. It's advertised to work with Windows 9x, 2000, MacOS, and Linux, if I remember correctly.
Well, I work under W2k for the great deal of my multimedia and graphics tasks. Just after a fresh install of the Operating System, the scanner works like a champ. However, after more than a little bit of use, the driver starts malfunctioning. Obviously a DLL conflict or something similar, right?
Well, a quick call to Acer to try to track down the conflict let me know that I was not privaleged to phone support any more because my product was out of warranty. Do they offer per-incident pricing for phone support?
http://www.acercm.com/support/technical_support.h
Apparently not. Even if they did, I could probably spend less on a brand new scanner than I could on 1 or 2 hours of support calls.
I resorted to newsgroup and messageboard searches for problems like mine, but couldn't really find any. I'm certain we've all had problems like this before, right? Where we are absolutely the onle ones to have them?
So, after a while, I tried emailing Acer's support like the page linked above suggests. I included detailed system specs including hardware specs, OS installed, a fairly comprehensive list of software installed, error codes and anything else I could think of. I specifically stated in the email that I thought that my problem was being caused no doubt by a software conflict, and asked for help tracking down the conflict.
The reply I received was along the lines of:
"Apparently there is a software conflict between the Acer driver and software applications installed on your system if your scanner will work with other computers. You should try to track down this conflict and uninstall the confilicting software."
This is adding insult to injury in my opinion. Either the support staffer who answered my mail was so untrained as to be useless, which is a real possibility in any support staff, or he or she didn't care, or had been instructed not to provide specific help to email support problems. So, despite the fact that the Acer scanner is actually a very good scanner, the software can't be trusted to keep working, and Acer's support of that software is in no way useful.
Sorry guys. Next time, I'll buy the Agfa Scanner.
Remember that Linux has only gotten really good and has gained the kind of acceptance it needs to be taken serious in the eyes of application developers in the last few years.
I would love to see an openBe implimentation, because it would be really nice to have an opensource OS geard toward multimedia instead of networking and programming. (Linux is many wonderful things, but it simply not geared for multimedia.)
It would take at least the same amount of time to reach 'critical mass'.
Hey, it's not only old video games that run into the ol' "this hasn't been sold by anyone for years, yet it's still illegal to distribute it yourself" problem.
I agree totally. This same problem applies to authors, many of which hold on to copyrights for decades after their book has ceased to make them any money. What's the point?
so, the big question is: if YOU were a major media corporation's CEO, and YOUR family's livelihood depended on keeping your corporation afloat in the face of underground distribution channels, what would YOU do?
0 .html '"It's not that people would just buy legitimate software if they can't get pirated copies," Cheng Yi, a self-described "alternative software dealer" from the Guangdong province said through a translator. "Many people here can't afford the legitimate software, and it is capitalist to say that only the rich should have the advantages."'
That's the trick, though, isn't it? It's not their welfare that's being hurt by underground distribution channels. BSA companies in particular are some of the wealthiest companies in the world despite rampant piracy of their products. Truthfully, it's not even their pocketbook.
As has been said many, many times before, you *cannot* assume that a sale of your product through piracy would have resulted in a sale for you had the pirate copy not existed.
Case in point:
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,47617,0
Do you think that every 15 yeal old webmaster who uses a warezed copy of Photoshop could get mommy or daddy to drop the $600 for a real copy? Does *anyone* think that less affluent people who build their own computer but don't really know linux can really afford a $300 Windows 2000 license?
The same goes for music. I don't buy RIAA CD's any more because of the RIAA's actions, but beforehand, I wouldn't even consider buying a CD without hearing at least some, and preferrably all the music from the disc. Napster was providing this service for millions. Accordingly, CD sales rose. Now that Napster is gone, CD sales have plummeted.
What is being hurt by underground distribution channels is control. In the case of the software companies, it's the ability to say who and who does not use their software. They lose the ability to lock people into licenses and 'upgrade cycles' if they are illegally using software. Even though they would never profit from those people, the loss of control is unbearable.
The same goes for the music industry. As has been noted by many research firms, Napster helped CD sales. Long and Short, CD sales rose while Napster was in operation and have now leveled off and even decreased. It was never about money for RIAA labels. It was about the ability to control not only their pet artists, but their listeners as well. Do you think that listener choice controls what is a 'hit' and what is not? Think again. A song may be catch, true, but the labels pour big $$$ into artist, songs, and music videos they want to be popular. This includes paying radio stations to play it, as well as putting together concerts, commercials, and promotional material. Look at 'O-Town' for chrissakes! The band is so fake they made a TV show about how fake it was. They have singles in the top 40 though. You think that wasn't entirely due to the effort of their label?
The same thing goes for movie studios, newspapers, televison networks, etc... etc.. etc...
We are living in a time that is analogous to the late middle-ages, just before the emergence of a real middle class. We have an oligarchy of rich, powerful individuals, Corporations and their executives in this case, who know that their continued survival is entirely dependant upon the serf classes. If those classes cannot be controlled, they cannot be trusted to allow the oligarchy to remain in power. Just like the French nobility, however, the aristocracy of money and power in the United States has decided not to try to adapt to the changing world.
Orv wiv'er heads...
The big reason a lot of these old, quality games are not being reproduced and retooled for newer platforms, (Win32, GTK, etc...) is because they are still under copyright. Many of them (Like the old Ultima games) are owned by companies who never sold them and never really plan to.
The answer to this is limiting duration of copyright on software. I mean, how much can you sell a game for even 3 years after its initial release? The last time I went to Walmart, they had a consolodated 'Starcraft' package for 19.95, but the Starcraft CD was in the bargin bin for 4.95. How about after five years? Seven? If software copyrights just simply expired after seven years with no chance of renewal, the companies who owned those games would have extracted all the revenue they could from them, and then the pulic would profit by getting older, quality games (and preferrable their source code) into the public domain.
Mind you, I think that copyright is wrong to begin with, but if there is a good compromise to be found, don't you think it would be something like this?
I agree. The big square boxes in ZDnet or CNet pages are really not that bad. I prefer them infinitely over the dread x-10 camera pop behind ad. And the all the flag companies that are attempting to profit from the disaster... *sigh*
The in-page ads are even better at catching my attention, especially if they are well designed, or offer something interactive, like the HP graphing calculator add, or the Sun breakout ad from a little while back.
The problem with the graphic calculator ad (which worked a lot like the 3d calculator from macOS for those who didn't see it) was that I spent all my time playing the controls, but never actually visited HP's site.
How bout a mini-Tux Racer applet ad? I'd click if it meant I got to race Tux again.
And I never set it one way or the other. Did some /.ers get a lucky draw of the hat or was this a db column add that defaulted to 'null' instead of 'true'.
From the article - After weeks of conference calls and quiet rallying of the troops, technology companies including Intel, IBM, Microsoft and Compaq Computer held a coming-out press conference Monday to oppose a broad copyright protection proposal being backed by Walt Disney and Sen. Ernest Hollings, D-S. C.
Can I see a show of hands from everyone who never thought that they'd be in the same boat as Microsoft?
Still, this just doesn't completely jive. I thought that Microsoft was a big propenent of screwing the little guy over for intellectual property rights. Thus, WMA DRM, right?
Maybe it boils down to the simple fact that the proposed SSSCA legislation is so outrageous and would cause so many problems that it really is getting the negative attention it deserves.
Shame on Disney...
It works on immature crackers, so why not apply it to the FBI as well?
There's no real way to catalogue every packet on the internet this without some sort of computerized searching technology. They may even call it 'AI', but what it will boil down to is an application looks for suspicious strings to flag for human eyes.
Therefore, it would be very possible to fool and overtax any kind of system like this by building a new kind of honeypot-style server.
Some Ideas:
Have this server connect to different IRC nodes bot style and create suspicious sounding chanels like '#BombUSA' or something similiar. Have it talk to itself Eliza style through IRC, but with terrorist keywords like 'Anthrax', 'Jihad', 'Hijack', etc... You could also substitute keywords for other kinds of illegal activity. Drugs, Pr0n, and other illegal/questionable vices all have keywords which would raise any LEO's eyebrows.
If two servers happen to meet on a chanel like this, they can exchange POP email addresses and start sending smtp packets to eachother with the same kind of information. Maybe throw in a few uuencoded attachments of the Osama and Bert poster.
One last thing. Have each server that does this engage in plaintext dialogue 4/5ths fo the time, and then, psuedo-random bitstreams the rest to simulate encryption. If/when they do try to crack those streams, it will use up their resources so that they can't as effectively be used against individuals who do have valid reasons to use crypto.