I see a lot of posts about how Napster shouldn't have become capitalist, blah blah Gnutella blah. But there's something to consider: how would Napster be able to pay for their bandwith/computers to keep their centralized network going if they didn't become a company? I know they don't actually serve the files, but I'm sure that Napster has to have a ton of bandwith, otherwise the program wouldn't work and no one would use it. So don't go bashing them because Napster's a company. However, I'm not saying that they shouldn't help other people or not-just pointing out something no one else has mentioned.
What's this being transferred as? It's gotta be compressed somehow-is the sound just MP3 quality? And the "full-screen" video-what is the actual size? I'm sure it's just a 320x200 or something that can be expanded. Is this MPEG-2, or ASF, or what? A lot of questions left unanswered...
In the scene where X is introducing everyone..."Scott Summers, also known as Cyclops," I was hoping for a "Jean Grey, also known as Jean Grey." Would have been worth a laugh.
There's not really a good fuel source to switch to yet. Electric cars are fine, until you realize that you pollute more generating the electricity. Ethanol's great, but even if all the corn in the U.S. was put towards ethanol, it would only satisfy 4% of the demand for gas. Yeah, that's right. 4%. Hydrogen fuel cells-I love them , but they're not viable yet. The acid in them is extremely corrosive-I'd hate to see an accident where the acid spills. You can't turn them off either-kind of pointless to have a fuel cell running 24 hours a day. Also , hydrogen can't exactly be found on the ground in the pure form. You can have electrolysis of water, but then you're back to the power plants. Only the algae that produces hydrogen is really viable, but that's quite a ways down the road where everyone has an algae pond on top of their house. I think we need to get over electric cars, and focus on hydrogen fuel cells-it's our only shot.
Man, I bet it's tough to figure out what the FBI is using. A packet sniffer that saves everything, and then they probably do a "grep bomb *" or something like that. I think it's time to switch away from cleartext email-everyone should start using pgp.
I especially like the justification of "Well, we get X amount of money per hour due to the web. Since we were down for 3 hours, we lost 3X money." Who's to say they lost anything? I'll bet as soon as the site goes back up, they make almost all of the money they would have made in the first place-the few hours after the server is back up probably gets them twice the average revenue. The people still are going to buy the stuff they want, it's not like the demand just disappeared.
I've been reading this guy's whole list of papers on script kiddies. My favorite excerpt has to be (paraphrased) "Day 3: Later on D1ck teaches J4n3 how to mount a drive" This is actually kind of sad-people with no clue about computers can still take them out and think that it makes them "elite" and powerful. What garbage.
I had two lines installed in my house-one voice, one data. Turned out i could get 50k connections on the voice, but if I used the data, I could get around 2k. Literally. Called them up, they said it wasn't their fault, and I should have them switch the numbers of the lines for 250 bucks. Bunch of bastards.
I go to UofI, and we just had to switch to an encrypted program to do our online registering-all well and good. Yet at the same time no provisions had been made to use ssh-everyone used telnet and ftp and sent their passwords in cleartext. I could run packet sniffers and capture passwords with no problem at all-it was pretty pathetic at how bad our security was. The problem isn't the university, though-it's the people who use the internet with no idea what's happening. People I knew were still struggling with telnet at the end of the year, and had no idea how to use FTP. Pretty sad state of affairs. Universities need to educate everyone when they come in on the proper usage of the internet, which almost no one knows if they haven't been around computers a lot.
Who even cares if it runs a tad bit slower than P3 systems? Almost no one actually uses the power their computer gives them who doesn't do compiling or stuff like that. I'm doing CAD at work on a Pentium w/ 32 megs of RAM, and doing just fine. Business execs (the ones who need laptops) don't do much more than type papers. Why do they care if their computers are a tad slower than high-end chips?
I don't really think the RIAA can expect to ban linking on the web. It's such a stretch in a lawsuit that it makes me wonder what their real purpose is. Do they hope to pass through some law in Congress that outlaws the mp3 format? Even if they did, other countries could do whatever they please. America doesn't own the internet, although we try to convince ourselves we do.
This is different-you can't just wait out the ads on AOL like you can on cable. Plus, you're paying per minute. If Cable TV had you pay per minute, no one would use it.
I've seen a bunch of posts saying you can't profit from parodies. But what about cartoons that are parodies? Aren't the cartoonists getting paid to draw those? Saturday Night Live and Mad TV parody things all the time-yet they make money, otherwise they wouldn't be on TV. So what's to say a website can't get money? Also, who's to say that PEatingTA is a parody of PEthicalTA? An acronym shouldn't be allowed to be trademarked-there's only so many possible acronyms out there.
I was listening to NPR last week, and they said that the Supreme Court is churning out a lot of decisions, like they do at the end of every term. By the time all of the paperwork even gets to the Supreme Court, it's very likely that they'll be in recess. And although I'd like to blame Microsoft for this delay, I don't really think they could have orchestrated the decisions so that there could be another delay.
I was under the impression that AOL had opened the protocol up earlier to let clones like GAIM enact with the protocol. Wasn't this what prompted the whole Microsoft-AOL battle, where AOL kept trying to lock MS out? However, I think this is the way it should be-this will enable people to use clones of AIM without fear of compatibility issues.
What's with companies not allowing you to work there if you've committed a felony? Isn't this some form of discrimination? I personally know people with felonies-some of the nicest people I know. One of them told the police her boyfriend wasn't around, and he was. She didn't know it was a felony, but lo and behold, it was. Now she can't get a job because of the whole "Check this box if you've been convincted of a felony" deal. Does committing a felony make you a bad person? I think not.
Asf's been around for quite a long time-I was downloading movies off of IRC at college back in August in asf format. I never was a fan, due to the poor quality, but people liked the size. The DivX scheme still has a few bugs-I played with it off and on and never really got it to work well. This isn't really that new-Divx has been out for at least 3 months that I know of.
I went and saw this last night after my friends told me it was almost as good as the Matrix-I was right to be skeptical. Sure, the rock climbing was interesting, barring a few laws of physics that would have killed Tom Cruise. But then the next hour and fifteen minutes (i looked at my watch frequently) was pretty damned boring. 1 mediocre car chase. Some cleavage. Oh boy. There was plenty of action in the last hour, but is anyone else as sick of slow-motion as I am? And I'm sorry, I don't think that doing flip-kicks are going to be that effective. This movie was far too predictable-not one mask being pulled off surprised me. My friend and I were able to predict everything about the whole tower scene, including the parachute and the injection, 20 minutes before it even happened. The movie had this problem-it billed itself as an action movie, but didn't have enough. The plot was too boring to be a spy movie. They tried to combine both and got a worse product than they would have had by doing either spy or action. I think the original was far better than this one: it actually had a team working together, instead of just Tom Cruise doing kicks. And it wasn't like the plot of the first one was hard to understand-I just think film critics must be morons if they couldn't understand it.
How can anyone consider Mac OS to be an "alternative" to Windows. I know I switched to linux because I got sick of it. Can someone sit at their computer and say "I'm sick of crashing. I'll just install MacOS." No. They have to go out and fork over a grand to get a Mac. MacOS cannot be considered an alternative until it supports multiple platforms. A better competition would be Linux vs. BSD, or BeOS, or OS/2, or anything else that can be installed on x86. This is like saying you want to install Windows 98 on a Sun SPARC...it just can't be done.
It seems like there's a napster post every day, and all it generates is a bunch of "Napster's for illegal trading." "Is not" "Is too" posts. Could we get this to be a topic , so that those of us who are sick of hearing about it can block it out? Thanks.
Actually, I just took a class in Nuclear Engineering, we concentrated a lot on the public's fear of nuclear facilities. The public is completely ill-informed when it comes to anything nuclear. People fear that waste will get spread around-the waste is stored in steel containers that can survive a train hitting them plus being doused in jet fuel and lit on fire (I saw a film of it.) Everyone always talks about Three Mile Island happening again: The radiation released to the public from TMI was less than the radiation the public got from their houses on that day. I think the government needs to develop a program to educate people on exactly how safe nuclear power is-France is 80% powered by it, but we haven't built a plant in 10 years because the public is ignorant.
But will this emulator allow them to play burnt Sony Playstation games? If so,I could see a lot of people buying it so they don't have to go through the hassle of installing mod chips.
Actually, I know some kids that made a game where you would input your build, weight, and other factors, and then drive around while drinking. Your steering got worse, as did your vision, and you ended up hitting people. It was really quite funny, and was actually well-designed: they ended up showing it at the Engineering Open House.
And what about all the people who legimitately own CDs of Metallica? They're allowed to have the mp3s; just because they have them shared on Napster doesn't mean they're violating copyright laws.
Slashdot Mirror
I see a lot of posts about how Napster shouldn't have become capitalist, blah blah Gnutella blah. But there's something to consider: how would Napster be able to pay for their bandwith/computers to keep their centralized network going if they didn't become a company? I know they don't actually serve the files, but I'm sure that Napster has to have a ton of bandwith, otherwise the program wouldn't work and no one would use it. So don't go bashing them because Napster's a company. However, I'm not saying that they shouldn't help other people or not-just pointing out something no one else has mentioned.
Colin Winters
What's this being transferred as? It's gotta be compressed somehow-is the sound just MP3 quality? And the "full-screen" video-what is the actual size? I'm sure it's just a 320x200 or something that can be expanded. Is this MPEG-2, or ASF, or what? A lot of questions left unanswered...
Colin Winters
It works out to 56.89 days of playing MP3s. Wow.
Colin Winters
In the scene where X is introducing everyone..."Scott Summers, also known as Cyclops," I was hoping for a "Jean Grey, also known as Jean Grey." Would have been worth a laugh.
Colin Winters
There's not really a good fuel source to switch to yet. Electric cars are fine, until you realize that you pollute more generating the electricity. Ethanol's great, but even if all the corn in the U.S. was put towards ethanol, it would only satisfy 4% of the demand for gas. Yeah, that's right. 4%. Hydrogen fuel cells-I love them , but they're not viable yet. The acid in them is extremely corrosive-I'd hate to see an accident where the acid spills. You can't turn them off either-kind of pointless to have a fuel cell running 24 hours a day. Also , hydrogen can't exactly be found on the ground in the pure form. You can have electrolysis of water, but then you're back to the power plants. Only the algae that produces hydrogen is really viable, but that's quite a ways down the road where everyone has an algae pond on top of their house. I think we need to get over electric cars, and focus on hydrogen fuel cells-it's our only shot.
Colin Winters
Man, I bet it's tough to figure out what the FBI is using. A packet sniffer that saves everything, and then they probably do a "grep bomb *" or something like that. I think it's time to switch away from cleartext email-everyone should start using pgp.
Colin Winters
I especially like the justification of "Well, we get X amount of money per hour due to the web. Since we were down for 3 hours, we lost 3X money." Who's to say they lost anything? I'll bet as soon as the site goes back up, they make almost all of the money they would have made in the first place-the few hours after the server is back up probably gets them twice the average revenue. The people still are going to buy the stuff they want, it's not like the demand just disappeared.
Colin Winters
I've been reading this guy's whole list of papers on script kiddies. My favorite excerpt has to be (paraphrased) "Day 3: Later on D1ck teaches J4n3 how to mount a drive" This is actually kind of sad-people with no clue about computers can still take them out and think that it makes them "elite" and powerful. What garbage.
Colin Winters
I had two lines installed in my house-one voice, one data. Turned out i could get 50k connections on the voice, but if I used the data, I could get around 2k. Literally. Called them up, they said it wasn't their fault, and I should have them switch the numbers of the lines for 250 bucks. Bunch of bastards.
Colin Winters
I go to UofI, and we just had to switch to an encrypted program to do our online registering-all well and good. Yet at the same time no provisions had been made to use ssh-everyone used telnet and ftp and sent their passwords in cleartext. I could run packet sniffers and capture passwords with no problem at all-it was pretty pathetic at how bad our security was. The problem isn't the university, though-it's the people who use the internet with no idea what's happening. People I knew were still struggling with telnet at the end of the year, and had no idea how to use FTP. Pretty sad state of affairs. Universities need to educate everyone when they come in on the proper usage of the internet, which almost no one knows if they haven't been around computers a lot.
Colin Winters
Who even cares if it runs a tad bit slower than P3 systems? Almost no one actually uses the power their computer gives them who doesn't do compiling or stuff like that. I'm doing CAD at work on a Pentium w/ 32 megs of RAM, and doing just fine. Business execs (the ones who need laptops) don't do much more than type papers. Why do they care if their computers are a tad slower than high-end chips?
Colin Winters
I don't really think the RIAA can expect to ban linking on the web. It's such a stretch in a lawsuit that it makes me wonder what their real purpose is. Do they hope to pass through some law in Congress that outlaws the mp3 format? Even if they did, other countries could do whatever they please. America doesn't own the internet, although we try to convince ourselves we do.
Colin Winters
This is different-you can't just wait out the ads on AOL like you can on cable. Plus, you're paying per minute. If Cable TV had you pay per minute, no one would use it.
Colin Winters
I've seen a bunch of posts saying you can't profit from parodies. But what about cartoons that are parodies? Aren't the cartoonists getting paid to draw those? Saturday Night Live and Mad TV parody things all the time-yet they make money, otherwise they wouldn't be on TV. So what's to say a website can't get money? Also, who's to say that PEatingTA is a parody of PEthicalTA? An acronym shouldn't be allowed to be trademarked-there's only so many possible acronyms out there.
Colin Winters
I was listening to NPR last week, and they said that the Supreme Court is churning out a lot of decisions, like they do at the end of every term. By the time all of the paperwork even gets to the Supreme Court, it's very likely that they'll be in recess. And although I'd like to blame Microsoft for this delay, I don't really think they could have orchestrated the decisions so that there could be another delay.
Colin Winters
I was under the impression that AOL had opened the protocol up earlier to let clones like GAIM enact with the protocol. Wasn't this what prompted the whole Microsoft-AOL battle, where AOL kept trying to lock MS out? However, I think this is the way it should be-this will enable people to use clones of AIM without fear of compatibility issues.
Colin Winters
What's with companies not allowing you to work there if you've committed a felony? Isn't this some form of discrimination? I personally know people with felonies-some of the nicest people I know. One of them told the police her boyfriend wasn't around, and he was. She didn't know it was a felony, but lo and behold, it was. Now she can't get a job because of the whole "Check this box if you've been convincted of a felony" deal. Does committing a felony make you a bad person? I think not.
Colin Winters
Asf's been around for quite a long time-I was downloading movies off of IRC at college back in August in asf format. I never was a fan, due to the poor quality, but people liked the size. The DivX scheme still has a few bugs-I played with it off and on and never really got it to work well. This isn't really that new-Divx has been out for at least 3 months that I know of.
Colin Winters
I went and saw this last night after my friends told me it was almost as good as the Matrix-I was right to be skeptical. Sure, the rock climbing was interesting, barring a few laws of physics that would have killed Tom Cruise. But then the next hour and fifteen minutes (i looked at my watch frequently) was pretty damned boring. 1 mediocre car chase. Some cleavage. Oh boy. There was plenty of action in the last hour, but is anyone else as sick of slow-motion as I am? And I'm sorry, I don't think that doing flip-kicks are going to be that effective. This movie was far too predictable-not one mask being pulled off surprised me. My friend and I were able to predict everything about the whole tower scene, including the parachute and the injection, 20 minutes before it even happened. The movie had this problem-it billed itself as an action movie, but didn't have enough. The plot was too boring to be a spy movie. They tried to combine both and got a worse product than they would have had by doing either spy or action. I think the original was far better than this one: it actually had a team working together, instead of just Tom Cruise doing kicks. And it wasn't like the plot of the first one was hard to understand-I just think film critics must be morons if they couldn't understand it.
Colin Winters
How can anyone consider Mac OS to be an "alternative" to Windows. I know I switched to linux because I got sick of it. Can someone sit at their computer and say "I'm sick of crashing. I'll just install MacOS." No. They have to go out and fork over a grand to get a Mac. MacOS cannot be considered an alternative until it supports multiple platforms. A better competition would be Linux vs. BSD, or BeOS, or OS/2, or anything else that can be installed on x86. This is like saying you want to install Windows 98 on a Sun SPARC...it just can't be done.
Colin Winters
It seems like there's a napster post every day, and all it generates is a bunch of "Napster's for illegal trading." "Is not" "Is too" posts. Could we get this to be a topic , so that those of us who are sick of hearing about it can block it out? Thanks.
Colin Winters
Actually, I just took a class in Nuclear Engineering, we concentrated a lot on the public's fear of nuclear facilities. The public is completely ill-informed when it comes to anything nuclear. People fear that waste will get spread around-the waste is stored in steel containers that can survive a train hitting them plus being doused in jet fuel and lit on fire (I saw a film of it.) Everyone always talks about Three Mile Island happening again: The radiation released to the public from TMI was less than the radiation the public got from their houses on that day. I think the government needs to develop a program to educate people on exactly how safe nuclear power is-France is 80% powered by it, but we haven't built a plant in 10 years because the public is ignorant.
Colin Winters
But will this emulator allow them to play burnt Sony Playstation games? If so,I could see a lot of people buying it so they don't have to go through the hassle of installing mod chips.
Colin Winters
Actually, I know some kids that made a game where you would input your build, weight, and other factors, and then drive around while drinking. Your steering got worse, as did your vision, and you ended up hitting people. It was really quite funny, and was actually well-designed: they ended up showing it at the Engineering Open House.
Colin Winters
And what about all the people who legimitately own CDs of Metallica? They're allowed to have the mp3s; just because they have them shared on Napster doesn't mean they're violating copyright laws.
Colin Winters