It would also break the 'route around damage' paradigm that has served the internet so well.
Not that this already isn't the case, thanks to consolidation by backbone providers, but...
Say that the internet in the US is routed through 20 or so central hubs. I think this is about how many DNS root servers we have, but feel free to correct me. Hitting any one of those hubs with a 'terrorist attack' could knock massive sections of the internet offline.
Who multihomes their website? There are maybe a double handful of ISP's who multihome, and only a very few commercial websites.
Internet consolodation is a very bad thing. Instead, let's get in the habit of using wireless connections.
Breaking 2048 bit DH compression on one packet or transmission is feasible, given time and a (very) powerful computer.
If the FBI were to have to crack even 2-5% of the billions of packets that went through their system, however, it would make this system completely unworkable.
Use PGP or GPG. Sign your messages. Let other people know that you prefer messages sent to you in encrypted formats. Surf and download from sites who use SSL. It's not that hard, and once you get in the habit of encrypting data, you'll feel safer and more secure.
I've often wanted a wooden case for my PC, and even drew up plans once. Then I remembered exactly how much heat my Athlon and 3dfx video card put out.
(I cooked a nic in my first PCI slot until it wouldn't work any more, not realizing how hot the 3dfx's heatsink really was.)
Wood is not known for its heat conductance. In fact, one of the reasons people started building homes out of wood was that wood is a better insulator than stone or metal.
This is a very good point. It's all well and good to say you like a particular product, but hate the company for its actions. It's not so cool to give that company lots of money to continue those actions you hate.
I know a guy who vehemently hates the RIAA because of their anti-fair use actions and will not buy any RIAA label CD's etc... When it came time to buy a laptop, apparently my friend forgot that Sony Music (one of the 'Big 4') and Sony Computers are actually the same company, at least at the highest levels, and shelled out around $2500 for a nice Vaio notebook. There's lawyers' fees for a day or so...
My experience with workstation switches from several different
manufacturers is that they are very expensive (around $1200 for a quality 8 pt switch) and that they have siginificant maintenance issues.
Where I work, we use a couple dozen switches on many, many server machines, and are RMA'ing them all the time because they simply break down quickly. Mice are the first to go. Then monitors. Maybe we're just unlucky. Personally, I feel that if a piece of hardware is dipsosable, it should be given a disposable price.
We have to have these for space reasons, however, so we keep plugging away at trying to keep them working. Recently, we've been reducing the costs associated by picking up several nice switches from dot.bomb auctions. We're getting them from anywhere between 10 and 20%. For high-maintanence hardware, this is *much* better than paying full price.
Don't even get me started on Adobe's 'Rights Management' crap.
My company has spent a little over $1300 on Adobe products. Of course, I could never justify spending this much personally for what many consider to be 'essential' tools for web design and publishing. A great deal of this. I imagine that a great deal of this goes to fund Adobe's legal departement and executive management layer. We know for a fact that that all three of these flagship products could be replicated by OSS programmers with not a lot of difficulty. It would be a large project, but most of that art functionality is already in GIMP. The rest is spread around a few other art and publishing tools.
That's right. Adobe's hideously inflated prices go to support their vast corporate empire, and *not* to better their products. They could be doing better, but they're not.
Macromedia is no better, having done their best to replace Adobe in the position of being an unofficial 'industry standard' when it comes to web design. If they did this with quality products, it would be one thing, but they try to do it with lawsuits, legal gimmicks, and customer abuse. Flash could be so much bigger than it is now if it were an open standard. Most of the web developers I know would vastly prefer to work with Flash rather than crank out lameo HTML and CSS.
I didn't really see a lot of new information in the article, but it did mention some radio-dating techniques I had heard of.
What's left to consider are the reprocussions from this kind of discovery. It's important to remember that all of human social sciences... language, philosiphy, psychology... all of them will benifit dramatically from knowing not only the exact time of origin of the human species, but early human's movement patterns.
One of the problems about human history that this kind of dating will help solve is the origin of human language. When did humans learn to speak? What languages descended from which? Why do many 'fairy tales' appear in more than one culture? Was there a single human 'parent' language that was responsible for this?
This kind of 'early' human history dating will help us probe out these kind of conundrums.
Let us not forget that these will be distributed in the land of conformity and social obligation. If people are told 'These are to be used only in this manner', it *will* siginificantly deter those interested in chewing up their guts. Even those who do manage to make their disposable camera into a real camera will never be seriously considered by the companies distributing the camera because they will not significantly impact profits in any way. No, this would not work in the U.S., but it just might in Nippon.
Not a Number?
Not a (real) Network?
Nanites against Nanotechnology?
NAK ACK NAK?
news.admin.net-abuse?
Nethack all night?
Nontrivial Address Nodes?
NAN is already overused, and might lead to confusion. I could go on for some time. Why don't we instead call these something like 'Residental Area Networks' or 'LANS for Blocks'.
Mind you, I'm no mathemitician, but the limiting factor that has created the science of binary logic (which shouldn't be confused with pure Boolean logic) is the fact that transistors operate in two states when used as logic gates. On or Off. 1 or 0. Powers of 2 are so important to computer people because that's the way our machines think.
It's going to be much easier to build a decimal or hexidecial adder/math device with optical components since light can be controlled more precisely than electricity. This is, assuming of course, that the process can be carried out on a truly optical chip. Currently the only benefit to optical technology when used inside a logic system is speed of transmission.
Can we make new things with this that we couldn't before, or will this just help us shrink down current things?
Assuming these get cheap enough for research purposes in the near future, imagine a few pounds worth of sub-cellular sized nodes arranged in a neural net processing pattern, maybe attached to some video and audio imput.
I see into minds, you see, and you have no idea how complicated they are. -- Isaac Asimov
Usually, when there is an issue I'm concerned about, I fire off a quick email to my rep and both senators, since they (oddly) both seem to send a staffer-written reply that is pertinent to what I've written.
Larry Combest, R-TX,(or his staffer) said something to the effect of, "Senator Hollings has not introduced legislation known as the SSSCA to the House yet. When and if he does, I will keep your opinions in mind," in response to the email I sent about the SSSCA.
Encryption controls, even more than roving wiretaps or secret warrants or anything else was the thing I was concerned about most, and put in a 'my vote for you depends on this' line into my correspondance to my reps. I'm glad to see that there was enough pressure to 'force this off the plate'.
Remember that at least some of these people were bright enough to get through various law-schools on their own merits. Corruption and campaign finance-whoring aside, they can be made to understand the issues if they get pounded hard enough often enough.
I wonder how long until they have their own, seperate internet, just for msn... okay..
If only... Gawd... to never have to deal with an AOL'er again. The internet would revert to the kind of place it was back when the big online service providers were 'private communities' rather than fungi and parasites on the main body of the internet. No, I don't think I'm that lucky in real life.
Actually, I can see it happening. Between them, AOL-TW and MS will carve up the internet into two huge, vast pieces, and anyone who really cares about having a 'real' internet will start to use a 'piggyback' service ala freenet, or something inbetween freenet and ip6. This is feasible now that there are so many cable modems and DLS connections.
Who are we kidding, though? The big ISP-Software-As-a-Service-Provider will simply block any traffic that doesn't directly connect to their online applications.
If you took volunteers and told them they were (for example) staffing a career counseling intranet chat system, and had them interact with a blind mix of real people and machine systems, then I'd be more impressed by machines convincing judges that the machines are people.
Just look at the people who appear to be fooled when they come across AOLiza
Yeah, experts in AI should probably not be juding these contests. I was seriously creeped out by chatting with an Alice bot. Despite the fact that I knew it was a bot, I couldn't break it and get it to say something stupid in just a few minutes like I can with any given Eliza implimentation. I *know* it would fool someone of my parents' or grandparents' generation if they weren't told in advance that it was a computer program.
If I were sysadmin at an ISP...
on
RIAA to DoS Pirates?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
And I have a few good friends who are, so I have a basic idea about how they think...
I would start banning IP's and entire Class C's at the edge or backbone level that I knew belonged to record companies or the people who worked for them to distribute this kind of attack^H^H^H^H^H^Htechnology. This is the same kind of tactic that sysadmins use against DOS attacks, but in this case there's likely to be no distribution since there is no way to get around that legally, and no ability to spoof ip's since they are planning to act like they're really downloading a track. They have to negotiate a connection and send ack's back and forth, right?
It's a very simple argument if you look at it from a financial or a resource usage point-of-view. It is in an ISP's best interest to keep as much of its network resources free for its customers. If my customers are subject to frequent DOS attacks, then I may ban certain services, such as Ping or Telnet and refuse those packets at my edge router or on my backbone connection if I have a decent backbone provider.
It's the same deal here. It's in an ISP's best interest to keep the RIAA from using up their network resources as well, because the number one reason people leave an ISP (at least when I worked at one) was a perceived 'slow connection'. If a joe sixpack-type customer knows he's going to get online to find music, and if he has heard from his buddies who got him hooked up in the first place that one ISP is worse than another when it comes to having RIAA related problems, then he's not going to sign up for service with that ISP.
This war of words and technology isn't just confined to the elite circles of geekdom, as most of you know. The RIAA has made a big enough a deal out of it that they're starting to build a Microsoft-like reputation for evil and greed. Joe-sixpack *does* know that the industry wants to keep him from trading music online.
By the same token, even a marginally experienced user is going to be picky about his service when he has better luck running his file-sharing apps with one ISP than a another, and we do know that ISP's are starting to refuse to TOS their users more and more often, just so they don't get negative reputations.
In the long run, this is going to be just another class of people who are routinely denied network access for their actions, via organizations similiar to MAPS RBL or the like. I've already seena few posts by people who plan to 'collect' offending IP's. Again, you can't spoof IP's if you have to send Ack's or do any sort of encyrption negotiation for your attack to work.
A humourous side-effect of what I beleive is going to happen will be the fact that the RIAA companies and 'attack dogs' will by able to claim 'success' because they'll perceive a drop in file-trading because of the network blocks that will no doubt be up hours after this sort of thing gets off the ground.
Good try, Hillary, but you're playing with boys who have been doing this sort of thing for a very long time now. Why don't you try again later.
I've seen these, but can't find them anywhere for sale. Basically, it's just exactly what you're describing... An LCD monitor with a clear screen and no blacklighting behind it. It sits directly on top of the overhead projector of your choice with no special adapters or fitting. A college math professor was using one to graph equations. It was 94, so it was monochrome. Surely these still exist. Anyone know for sure?
Also, there were several popular graphing calculators that came in a 'regular' version and a 'clear' version for use on an overhead projector.
or have they forgotten that the bands exist apart from phony marketing images?
In 1981 or therabouts, the Record Industry almost lost it all to MTV. Why? They suddenly lost control of the promotional media. For the first time all the payola and underhanded promoting meant nothing in the face of artists who could not only be seen, but heard.
Then the record company learned their lesson, and signed all the unpopular bands that MTV 'made', and promptly ruined them. Almost all of the really good 80's bands that didn't understand how the record industry worked are now lucky to show up on Vh1's 'Behind the Music' or 'Where are they Now?'. God, I really had a crush on Belinda Carlisle when I was a kid, too.
Now, the record industry pumps an 'Artist'-- and I do use that term loosely-- as much on their visual image as they do on their sound.
What, you think Britney got those new cookies because she particularly wanted them? Or do you think some fork-tounged record-executive/producer told her that they would boost her popularity and sales enough times that she started to beleive him?
Real good example of the way this works. Look at the Monkees. Crap band with some charismatic, but not really good-looking members. They were made up out of whole cloth. Pete, Peter, Mickey, and Davey were the winners of an audition. They were just barely good enough to get a TV show as part of their promotion package.
Let's contrast and compare with O-town, yet another group that was manufactured by the Hollywood machine. They *started* with a TV show *about* the audtions, because the record industry now understands that video is an important part of the 'image'.
Remember, it has *always* been about the perception of pop music stars, be it 'Sound' or 'Image', and *never* about their musical talents.
If it was about talent, there never would have been Disco.
I had a buddy who went to work for C&G a little while back. After a few months, he left that job and then went to work for a Newspaper.
A little bit ago, I heard that Cassidy and Greene was discontinuing Soundjam, which was really quite an incredible (closed source, alas) audio player for Mac. They're now working on iTunes, or something similiar.
When I played with the Winamp 3 alpha, I couldn't help but think how closely it resembled Soundjam in terms of features and skinnability. About the only feature it was missing that Soundjam had was a built in CDRipper/Encoder. I dunno. Is that in the new beta? NS seems to have replaced that with it's rather overdone playlist database.
There's you Tivo-like Playlist, Taco.
At any rate, I found the Winamp Alphas to be quite processor intensive, even on a P3 500 and a Duron 800, especially with the more data-intensive features like the playlist database or the animated skins running.
An entire database in an audio player? Thanks, but I'm going to err on the side of sleekness. This may be a neat feature, but I never play my MP3's in any other way than drag and drop. I drag and drop a particular track I wanna hear, or drag a whole folder and then hit 'shuffle'. I'm certain others will find it useful, but for me, it's unecessary bloat.
After I had it pointed out to me, I realized that my Apex DVD player made an excellent MP3 CD stereo component. The only downside is that the TV has to be turned on to use any of the menus.
I just happened to have it installed instead of GPG, but I will probably make the switch now that it's being discontinued.
1. Private Data... There's a lot of stuff that I do and say through email that is perfectly kosher, but is none of my company's or coworker's business, like emailing my wife whilst at work. I know for a fact that there are nosy people in my networking department, but 2048 bit D-H encryption makes this Somebody Else's Problem (tm) even thought I am forced to use Exchange at work.
2. Insecure Mail Servers... By the same token, I am forced to keep sensitive data on an Exchange server. It doesn't take a genius to see that any given company's Directory/Mail/Personal Info server is going to be one of a malicious cracker's first targets, if he or she is interested in doing anything other than 0vvnZ'ing the website. When the time comes... and it will... I will be able to say... 'No, my sensitive data was NOT compromised, because it was securely Encrypted.
3. Personal Liability. I'm a freely spoken individual. Some people don't appreciate it. If I say something in an email that could possibly be used against me later by the owner of a mail server, it goes in encrypted. By the same token, any personal files on my work PC belong to me, and not my company. Without my passphrase, they can't do shit with them.
4. Geek factor. It is oh, so cool to be able to 'sign' an email, and advertise your public key. Mine is:
Good point. What I said above was true in 1994. You can be certain that Tricon Global still has strong ties to PepsiCo, probably including several members on both boards of directors.
Slashdot Mirror
It would also break the 'route around damage' paradigm that has served the internet so well.
Not that this already isn't the case, thanks to consolidation by backbone providers, but...
Say that the internet in the US is routed through 20 or so central hubs. I think this is about how many DNS root servers we have, but feel free to correct me. Hitting any one of those hubs with a 'terrorist attack' could knock massive sections of the internet offline.
Who multihomes their website? There are maybe a double handful of ISP's who multihome, and only a very few commercial websites.
Internet consolodation is a very bad thing. Instead, let's get in the habit of using wireless connections.
And make this unfeasable for real production use.
Breaking 2048 bit DH compression on one packet or transmission is feasible, given time and a (very) powerful computer.
If the FBI were to have to crack even 2-5% of the billions of packets that went through their system, however, it would make this system completely unworkable.
Use PGP or GPG. Sign your messages. Let other people know that you prefer messages sent to you in encrypted formats. Surf and download from sites who use SSL. It's not that hard, and once you get in the habit of encrypting data, you'll feel safer and more secure.
I've often wanted a wooden case for my PC, and even drew up plans once. Then I remembered exactly how much heat my Athlon and 3dfx video card put out.
(I cooked a nic in my first PCI slot until it wouldn't work any more, not realizing how hot the 3dfx's heatsink really was.)
Wood is not known for its heat conductance. In fact, one of the reasons people started building homes out of wood was that wood is a better insulator than stone or metal.
This is a very good point. It's all well and good to say you like a particular product, but hate the company for its actions. It's not so cool to give that company lots of money to continue those actions you hate.
I know a guy who vehemently hates the RIAA because of their anti-fair use actions and will not buy any RIAA label CD's etc... When it came time to buy a laptop, apparently my friend forgot that Sony Music (one of the 'Big 4') and Sony Computers are actually the same company, at least at the highest levels, and shelled out around $2500 for a nice Vaio notebook. There's lawyers' fees for a day or so...
My experience with workstation switches from several different
manufacturers is that they are very expensive (around $1200 for a quality 8 pt switch) and that they have siginificant maintenance issues.
Where I work, we use a couple dozen switches on many, many server machines, and are RMA'ing them all the time because they simply break down quickly. Mice are the first to go. Then monitors. Maybe we're just unlucky. Personally, I feel that if a piece of hardware is dipsosable, it should be given a disposable price.
We have to have these for space reasons, however, so we keep plugging away at trying to keep them working. Recently, we've been reducing the costs associated by picking up several nice switches from dot.bomb auctions. We're getting them from anywhere between 10 and 20%. For high-maintanence hardware, this is *much* better than paying full price.
...this is why software patents are bad juju.
Don't even get me started on Adobe's 'Rights Management' crap.
My company has spent a little over $1300 on Adobe products. Of course, I could never justify spending this much personally for what many consider to be 'essential' tools for web design and publishing. A great deal of this. I imagine that a great deal of this goes to fund Adobe's legal departement and executive management layer. We know for a fact that that all three of these flagship products could be replicated by OSS programmers with not a lot of difficulty. It would be a large project, but most of that art functionality is already in GIMP. The rest is spread around a few other art and publishing tools.
That's right. Adobe's hideously inflated prices go to support their vast corporate empire, and *not* to better their products. They could be doing better, but they're not.
Macromedia is no better, having done their best to replace Adobe in the position of being an unofficial 'industry standard' when it comes to web design. If they did this with quality products, it would be one thing, but they try to do it with lawsuits, legal gimmicks, and customer abuse. Flash could be so much bigger than it is now if it were an open standard. Most of the web developers I know would vastly prefer to work with Flash rather than crank out lameo HTML and CSS.
For shame!
I didn't really see a lot of new information in the article, but it did mention some radio-dating techniques I had heard of.
What's left to consider are the reprocussions from this kind of discovery. It's important to remember that all of human social sciences... language, philosiphy, psychology... all of them will benifit dramatically from knowing not only the exact time of origin of the human species, but early human's movement patterns.
One of the problems about human history that this kind of dating will help solve is the origin of human language. When did humans learn to speak? What languages descended from which? Why do many 'fairy tales' appear in more than one culture? Was there a single human 'parent' language that was responsible for this?
This kind of 'early' human history dating will help us probe out these kind of conundrums.
Register is handling its slasdotting with grace... but not perfectly. Here's a mirror of the zipfile. It contains an EXE and several C src files.
http://www.furinkan.net/mirror/657.zip
Let us not forget that these will be distributed in the land of conformity and social obligation. If people are told 'These are to be used only in this manner', it *will* siginificantly deter those interested in chewing up their guts. Even those who do manage to make their disposable camera into a real camera will never be seriously considered by the companies distributing the camera because they will not significantly impact profits in any way. No, this would not work in the U.S., but it just might in Nippon.
At JC Penny, Walmart, ToysRUs, etc...
Not a Number?
Not a (real) Network?
Nanites against Nanotechnology?
NAK ACK NAK?
news.admin.net-abuse?
Nethack all night?
Nontrivial Address Nodes?
NAN is already overused, and might lead to confusion. I could go on for some time. Why don't we instead call these something like 'Residental Area Networks' or 'LANS for Blocks'.
Mind you, I'm no mathemitician, but the limiting factor that has created the science of binary logic (which shouldn't be confused with pure Boolean logic) is the fact that transistors operate in two states when used as logic gates. On or Off. 1 or 0. Powers of 2 are so important to computer people because that's the way our machines think.
It's going to be much easier to build a decimal or hexidecial adder/math device with optical components since light can be controlled more precisely than electricity. This is, assuming of course, that the process can be carried out on a truly optical chip. Currently the only benefit to optical technology when used inside a logic system is speed of transmission.
Can we make new things with this that we couldn't before, or will this just help us shrink down current things?
Assuming these get cheap enough for research purposes in the near future, imagine a few pounds worth of sub-cellular sized nodes arranged in a neural net processing pattern, maybe attached to some video and audio imput.
I see into minds, you see, and you have no idea how complicated they are. -- Isaac Asimov
Usually, when there is an issue I'm concerned about, I fire off a quick email to my rep and both senators, since they (oddly) both seem to send a staffer-written reply that is pertinent to what I've written.
Larry Combest, R-TX,(or his staffer) said something to the effect of, "Senator Hollings has not introduced legislation known as the SSSCA to the House yet. When and if he does, I will keep your opinions in mind," in response to the email I sent about the SSSCA.
Encryption controls, even more than roving wiretaps or secret warrants or anything else was the thing I was concerned about most, and put in a 'my vote for you depends on this' line into my correspondance to my reps. I'm glad to see that there was enough pressure to 'force this off the plate'.
Remember that at least some of these people were bright enough to get through various law-schools on their own merits. Corruption and campaign finance-whoring aside, they can be made to understand the issues if they get pounded hard enough often enough.
I wonder how long until they have their own, seperate internet, just for msn... okay..
If only... Gawd... to never have to deal with an AOL'er again. The internet would revert to the kind of place it was back when the big online service providers were 'private communities' rather than fungi and parasites on the main body of the internet. No, I don't think I'm that lucky in real life.
Actually, I can see it happening. Between them, AOL-TW and MS will carve up the internet into two huge, vast pieces, and anyone who really cares about having a 'real' internet will start to use a 'piggyback' service ala freenet, or something inbetween freenet and ip6. This is feasible now that there are so many cable modems and DLS connections.
Who are we kidding, though? The big ISP-Software-As-a-Service-Provider will simply block any traffic that doesn't directly connect to their online applications.
If you took volunteers and told them they were (for example) staffing a career counseling intranet chat system, and had them interact with a blind mix of real people and machine systems, then I'd be more impressed by machines convincing judges that the machines are people.
Just look at the people who appear to be fooled when they come across AOLiza
Yeah, experts in AI should probably not be juding these contests. I was seriously creeped out by chatting with an Alice bot. Despite the fact that I knew it was a bot, I couldn't break it and get it to say something stupid in just a few minutes like I can with any given Eliza implimentation. I *know* it would fool someone of my parents' or grandparents' generation if they weren't told in advance that it was a computer program.
And I have a few good friends who are, so I have a basic idea about how they think...
I would start banning IP's and entire Class C's at the edge or backbone level that I knew belonged to record companies or the people who worked for them to distribute this kind of attack^H^H^H^H^H^Htechnology. This is the same kind of tactic that sysadmins use against DOS attacks, but in this case there's likely to be no distribution since there is no way to get around that legally, and no ability to spoof ip's since they are planning to act like they're really downloading a track. They have to negotiate a connection and send ack's back and forth, right?
It's a very simple argument if you look at it from a financial or a resource usage point-of-view. It is in an ISP's best interest to keep as much of its network resources free for its customers. If my customers are subject to frequent DOS attacks, then I may ban certain services, such as Ping or Telnet and refuse those packets at my edge router or on my backbone connection if I have a decent backbone provider.
It's the same deal here. It's in an ISP's best interest to keep the RIAA from using up their network resources as well, because the number one reason people leave an ISP (at least when I worked at one) was a perceived 'slow connection'. If a joe sixpack-type customer knows he's going to get online to find music, and if he has heard from his buddies who got him hooked up in the first place that one ISP is worse than another when it comes to having RIAA related problems, then he's not going to sign up for service with that ISP.
This war of words and technology isn't just confined to the elite circles of geekdom, as most of you know. The RIAA has made a big enough a deal out of it that they're starting to build a Microsoft-like reputation for evil and greed. Joe-sixpack *does* know that the industry wants to keep him from trading music online.
By the same token, even a marginally experienced user is going to be picky about his service when he has better luck running his file-sharing apps with one ISP than a another, and we do know that ISP's are starting to refuse to TOS their users more and more often, just so they don't get negative reputations.
In the long run, this is going to be just another class of people who are routinely denied network access for their actions, via organizations similiar to MAPS RBL or the like. I've already seena few posts by people who plan to 'collect' offending IP's. Again, you can't spoof IP's if you have to send Ack's or do any sort of encyrption negotiation for your attack to work.
A humourous side-effect of what I beleive is going to happen will be the fact that the RIAA companies and 'attack dogs' will by able to claim 'success' because they'll perceive a drop in file-trading because of the network blocks that will no doubt be up hours after this sort of thing gets off the ground.
Good try, Hillary, but you're playing with boys who have been doing this sort of thing for a very long time now. Why don't you try again later.
I've seen these, but can't find them anywhere for sale. Basically, it's just exactly what you're describing... An LCD monitor with a clear screen and no blacklighting behind it. It sits directly on top of the overhead projector of your choice with no special adapters or fitting. A college math professor was using one to graph equations. It was 94, so it was monochrome. Surely these still exist. Anyone know for sure?
Also, there were several popular graphing calculators that came in a 'regular' version and a 'clear' version for use on an overhead projector.
Steve Ballmer Says: 'So, you think you can get avay vith abandoning the reich, eh? Don't be so sure. Ve haff vays of makink you upgrade...'
or have they forgotten that the bands exist apart from phony marketing images?
In 1981 or therabouts, the Record Industry almost lost it all to MTV. Why? They suddenly lost control of the promotional media. For the first time all the payola and underhanded promoting meant nothing in the face of artists who could not only be seen, but heard.
Then the record company learned their lesson, and signed all the unpopular bands that MTV 'made', and promptly ruined them. Almost all of the really good 80's bands that didn't understand how the record industry worked are now lucky to show up on Vh1's 'Behind the Music' or 'Where are they Now?'. God, I really had a crush on Belinda Carlisle when I was a kid, too.
Now, the record industry pumps an 'Artist'-- and I do use that term loosely-- as much on their visual image as they do on their sound.
What, you think Britney got those new cookies because she particularly wanted them? Or do you think some fork-tounged record-executive/producer told her that they would boost her popularity and sales enough times that she started to beleive him?
Real good example of the way this works. Look at the Monkees. Crap band with some charismatic, but not really good-looking members. They were made up out of whole cloth. Pete, Peter, Mickey, and Davey were the winners of an audition. They were just barely good enough to get a TV show as part of their promotion package.
Let's contrast and compare with O-town, yet another group that was manufactured by the Hollywood machine. They *started* with a TV show *about* the audtions, because the record industry now understands that video is an important part of the 'image'.
Remember, it has *always* been about the perception of pop music stars, be it 'Sound' or 'Image', and *never* about their musical talents.
If it was about talent, there never would have been Disco.
I had a buddy who went to work for C&G a little while back. After a few months, he left that job and then went to work for a Newspaper.
A little bit ago, I heard that Cassidy and Greene was discontinuing Soundjam, which was really quite an incredible (closed source, alas) audio player for Mac. They're now working on iTunes, or something similiar.
When I played with the Winamp 3 alpha, I couldn't help but think how closely it resembled Soundjam in terms of features and skinnability. About the only feature it was missing that Soundjam had was a built in CDRipper/Encoder. I dunno. Is that in the new beta? NS seems to have replaced that with it's rather overdone playlist database.
There's you Tivo-like Playlist, Taco.
At any rate, I found the Winamp Alphas to be quite processor intensive, even on a P3 500 and a Duron 800, especially with the more data-intensive features like the playlist database or the animated skins running.
An entire database in an audio player? Thanks, but I'm going to err on the side of sleekness. This may be a neat feature, but I never play my MP3's in any other way than drag and drop. I drag and drop a particular track I wanna hear, or drag a whole folder and then hit 'shuffle'. I'm certain others will find it useful, but for me, it's unecessary bloat.
After I had it pointed out to me, I realized that my Apex DVD player made an excellent MP3 CD stereo component. The only downside is that the TV has to be turned on to use any of the menus.
I just happened to have it installed instead of GPG, but I will probably make the switch now that it's being discontinued.
1. Private Data... There's a lot of stuff that I do and say through email that is perfectly kosher, but is none of my company's or coworker's business, like emailing my wife whilst at work. I know for a fact that there are nosy people in my networking department, but 2048 bit D-H encryption makes this Somebody Else's Problem (tm) even thought I am forced to use Exchange at work.
2. Insecure Mail Servers... By the same token, I am forced to keep sensitive data on an Exchange server. It doesn't take a genius to see that any given company's Directory/Mail/Personal Info server is going to be one of a malicious cracker's first targets, if he or she is interested in doing anything other than 0vvnZ'ing the website. When the time comes... and it will... I will be able to say... 'No, my sensitive data was NOT compromised, because it was securely Encrypted.
3. Personal Liability. I'm a freely spoken individual. Some people don't appreciate it. If I say something in an email that could possibly be used against me later by the owner of a mail server, it goes in encrypted. By the same token, any personal files on my work PC belong to me, and not my company. Without my passphrase, they can't do shit with them.
4. Geek factor. It is oh, so cool to be able to 'sign' an email, and advertise your public key. Mine is:
http://www.furinkan.net/key.txt
Good point. What I said above was true in 1994. You can be certain that Tricon Global still has strong ties to PepsiCo, probably including several members on both boards of directors.
It depends on the pie, of course. Pepperoni is more expensive than hamburger, etc...
Most of the pies we made (in 1994) cost between 15-50 cents to make after bulk food cost.