Hate to say this, but this is exactly I like the Windows OS. While I'm completely familiar and happy with command-line work, I dislike *nix simply because to get a desktop system running to my standards of happiness, I have to look all around the web to find the right apps to install. And not just applications like media players or graphics software, but even (what I consider) low-level stuff like the windowing system, the fonts (for crissake!), the pre-emptive kernel patch so it doesn't lock important operations, the right drivers for all the hardware, etc. ad. infinitem.
It's like DOS all over again. Gotta install the right drivers for the hardware, then manually configure it, then install my Windows system, then install Adobe Font Manager, etc., etc. This is a big reason Windows 95 was so popular -- it finally offered a cohesive system that did all this stuff for you. Admittedly, it took them a few iterations to get it right, but at least they were striving for it. I know KDE and Gnome are doing their part, but until a lot of this stuff becomes a kernel priority, it will lead to different standards and more confusion among end-users.
Sorry for my ignorance, but why hide the code? If a true linux fanatic wants to spread the good word, so to speak, why bother with the whole encryption routine and fake JMP's? Why not just make the hack completely transparent so anyone can do it?
I wish even half of the people on this site posted as well as this. Really, really nice explanation; thanks for taking the time to explain it to us laymen.
If someone can fit a GUI'd, multitasking OS in such a small amount of physical memory, why does Windows have to take up so much, or even Linux for that matter? I realize that programming in assembly is a bitch over C++, but surely Microsoft, with it's paid developers, could accomplish something streamlined like this.
I wish Gates would hold off on innovation for a couple of years to produce such a beast. I, for one, would gladly pay for an Assembly-optimized, thoroughly bug-fixed version of Windows.
To sumarize the story, I borrow from my trusty 1981 copy of The Doctor Who Programme Guide:
In a remote space station called Think Tank, a scientist called Skagra steals the minds of his colleagues, and escapes. Meanwhile, the Doctor and Romana visit present-day [ed. - well, 1979] Cambridge to see Professor Chronotis, a retired Time Lord living incognito as a don. He wants them to take a book, The Ancient Laws of Gallifrey, back to the planet of the Time Lords. Unfortunately it has accidentally been taken away by a post-graduate student, Chris Parsons. He and a colleague, Clare Keightley, are mystified by the book, which is made of no earthly substance. Skagra arrives on Earth in search of the book because it will give him directions to the Time Lord prison planet of Shada, where he believes Salyavin, the most powerful Time Lord [ed. - well, except Rassilon], is imprisoned. Skagra needs access to Salyavin to learn from him the secret of projecting a print of his own mind into every sentient being in the Universe, a technique which will guarantee the success of his plan for galactic domination. The Doctor retrieves the book but Skagra sends his mind-sapping Sphere after the Doctor. On a bicycle chase through the streets of Cambridge the Doctor looses the book, which is found by Skagra. Skagra heads for Shada in the TARDIS, having captured Romana to operate it. The Doctor takes Skagra's own spaceship and with K9 and Chris Parsons goes to Think Tank in search of Skagra and Romana. He encounters the monstrous crystalline Krargs, Skagra's servants. It transpires that Chronotis's rooms in Cambrdige are the inside of his own TARDIS, which he uses to rescue the Doctor from the Krargs. Against the Professor's wishes and with the aim of rescuing Romana the Doctor follows Skagra to Shada, where Skagra has freed the ciminals, including a Dalek, a Cyberman and a Zygon -- but Salyavin is not there. Professor Chronotis turns out to be Salyavin. The Doctor wins a mind battle with Skagra and imprisons him in his own spaceship. Returning to Earth, the Doctor leaves the Professor in Cambridge, promising to keep his identity a secret.
I almost hope this doesn't get modded up too high, because Salon might get wise to this and find a way to disable it. But you can get yourself a free daypass by doing the following:
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Miller's Crossing is a simply beautiful movie. It's got some hilarious lines, and wonderful 30's-style gangster banter:
Eddie Dane: Where's Leo? Leo's tug: If I tell you, how do I know you won't kill me? Eddie Dane: Because if you told me and I killed you and you were lying I wouldn't get to kill you *then*. Where's Leo? Leo's tug: He's moving around. He's getting his mob together tomorrow night. Whisky Nick's. Eddie Dane: You sure? Leo's tug: Check it. It's gold. Eddie Dane: You know what, yegg? I believe you.
But for my money, I still think their best, and similarly most underappreciated movie is Barton Fink. Really the perfect movie. Ridiculously long tracking shots -- the cinemetography is by Roger Deakons and top-notch. You might remember some of his other credits (Shawshank Redemption, Sid and Nancy, Fargo, Lebowski, Hudsucker, Beautiful Mind, etc.)
I remember watching the film quite stoned one time and for the first time realized that the entire movie is based off a famous piece of literature. Like O' Brother, which is very obviously based on the Odyssey (says so in the credits), Barton Fink is a much more subtle, surreal version of Dante's Inferno. There are a couple of references to Hell, like when Chet first appears at the bellhop counter, the phrase on the hotel stationary: "A day or a lifetime," and when they're in the elevator and he says the floor number "six" 3 times.
It's taken numerous watchings to even begin to unwrap the complexity of this movie. Watch it at night when it's very quiet, and turn the volume up loud to hear the muffled voices echoing through the pipes. Remember this when Barton finally gets the girl and we see the long tracking shot go from Barton to the bed, into the bathroom and down the kitchen sink, his own voice then echoing through the pipes.
Both of these classics will be released on DVD on May 20 of this year.
Back in '98 I was working at a company that did tech support for Red Hat installations. We got a call once from a very distraught employee who had decided to implement an OS change (from Windows to Linux) on the day before a big meeting with some clients. He was irate that he couldn't get it to work and couldn't load his Powerpoint presentations. After spending more than a couple of hours talking him through a complete installation, he became to agitated and threatened to bomb our building, telling the poor tech support guy "I know where you guys work". The next day we had the police and bomb squad all over the place, but apparently he was all talk.
Today we could have just called him a terrorist and had his ass on a platter. Oh well. Anyway, a specialist like this would have really been nice.
I hope MandrakeSoft stays alive, simply because they seem to be the only major distro that "get's it" in the Linux community. They have consistently been pushing to make Linux easier to install and use, without browbeating newcomers into a "it must be bad if it's easy" mentality. I applaud them for it.
I would paraphrase this to make it my own, but the original pretty much explains it the best. From the Straight Dope:
What Michael Jackson bought for $47.5 million in 1985 was the publishing rights to 159 or 251 Beatles songs, depending on who's counting. To maybe oversimplify a complicated business, publishing rights are basically the sheet music rights. When Paul McCartney wanted to print the lyrics to "Eleanor Rigby" and other Beatles classics in the program for his 1989 world tour, he discovered he'd have to pay a fee to Michael Jackson. The owner of the publishing rights (hereinafter the publisher) also gets a royalty when someone plays a Beatles song on a jukebox or the radio or does a cover version of a Fab Four tune. Particularly in the case of elevator music, to which, let's be frank, a lot of Beatles tunes are well suited, this can earn the publisher some serious cash.
But there are a couple things the publisher can't do. The first is to mess with, or license the use of, Beatles recordings. Michael Jackson agreed to license the words and music of "Revolution" to Nike for a 1987 shoe commercial, but he had to persuade Capitol Records, owner of the tune's North American recording rights, to allow use of the actual record. Most likely he'd have to do the same to overdub said record with his own voice, although he might get away with including a snippet in a musical collage, something even John Lennon did that has now become impossible to control.
Another thing the publisher can't do (in the U.S. at least) is prevent somebody from recording a cover version of a song the publisher owns. Usually the would-be cover artist and the publisher work out a deal on royalties. However, if negotiations fail, U.S. law allows the cover artist to make and market the recording anyway provided he pays a stipulated (and fairly stiff) royalty to the publisher.
The point is, being a publisher doesn't give you all that much control over the songs you own; mainly it gives you the right to the profits they earn. You don't even get to keep all of that; typically you have to give 50% to each song's composer(s), one reason not to feel too sorry for Paul McCartney and the estate of John Lennon. Another reason is that McCartney, despite having gotten skunked out of his own songs, contrived to buy the rights to 3,000 others, including the Buddy Holly catalog, and reportedly is worth $600 million. Not that he's happy, of course. Paul's mad at Michael Jackson not merely because he lost control of the Beatles library but also because Jackson won't discuss giving McCartney a higher composer's royalty for the old tunes.
The last reason not to feel sorry for Paul is that if he got skunked it's his own fault. In the 60s, to avoid confiscatory British taxes, he and Lennon turned their publishing rights over to newly-organized Northern Songs, a publicly-held company in which they owned sizable but apparently not controlling blocks of stock. In 1969 music mogul Lew Grade launched a takeover bid for Northern Songs in which he offered seven times the stock's original offering price. Lennon and McCartney, feuding as usual, were unable to organize an effective defense and the company was sold out from under them. This made them even more fabulously wealthy than they already were, since their stock was now worth seven times as much. However, they were still pissed on account of, you know, the principle of the thing. The Teeming Millions can surely sympathize.
A company called AC Propulsion built an all-electric car that can outrun a 'vette, and just about any other production car out there. 0-60 in 4.1 seconds. The 30mph-50mph range is done in 1.4 seconds. The acceleration curve is linear, which also helps since there are no 'blips' during gear changes. This is one seriously cool car. Of course, if you're going 100 mph continuously, you'll probably only get 50 miles out of it. But it is an absolutely beautiful design.
If you continue your analogy with the related article, you'll see how capitalism ends up creating a tightly centralized elite (top-rated posters) that controls the capital (conversation). Through whatever means possible (cash is king, karma is gold) the top people usually have the benefit of either getting in early, or ignoring common morality for their own self-interest. I refer you to our friends at Tyco, Enron, WorldCom, Ford, etc.
Phish is already offering such a service. They even offer MP3 ($9.95 per concert) or SHN (non-lossy) file formats ($12.95 per concert). They are slowly compiling an archive of downloadable media for all their concert recordings, as well. How ya' like dem apples?
What in the hell good is it to have fiber running to your door when nobody's doing anything with it!? Here in Boston's North End, we've had to deal with this crap since 1998, when they lavished us with fiber, exhaulting its benefits over traditional copper.
Now, 5 years later (5 goddamned years!), with this whole "internet" thing in full swing, and I still can't get high-speed internet access. Sorry, doesn't work without good-ol' fashioned copper cables, even if I am just a few hundred feet from the CO. FUCK.
And naturally, our one-and-only monopoly on cable, AT&T, isn't offering it's much-touted Broadband package, either. If I see one more advertisement for AT&T Broadband I'm gonna throw down, I swear it. How can they advertise a service that's not even available to me? Isn't that false advertising?/me takes a pill
Complete and utter bullshit. OCR with results of 97%? Sure, if the text is consistent, all in the same direction, with basic fonts, and non-contrasting backgrounds.
Bascially, everything that the "Enter the word/Image" protection does not use. There are a hundred different ways to alter the text to prevent anything but human reasoning to read (decode). The beauty of these systems is that the transformations are computed upon request, which means you have no way of knowing what to expect. You might get backwards letters, or letters that are rotated, or words that are upside-down, with each letter as a different, crazy font (i.e., NOT Times Roman or Courier).
Sites like PayPal, Yahoo Mail, Ticketmaster and the like are using this system because so far there is no way around it. A computerized system that requires human authentication like this is an absolutely beautiful challenge to the hacking community. I honestly doubt you have a working solution.
If you did, you would be very, VERY rich, and would be too busy cavorting with naked Playmates on your desert island than to write this kind of crap on Slashdot.
I have been thinking about using an iPod for storage of files that aren't music-related. Specifically, I'd love to be able to use it as a hard drive to dump extra images that I take from my digital camera when I'm on the road. Unfortunately, most hardware solutions to this (including the iPod) involve using the external unit as a slave -- that is, I can only SEND data to it, I can't initiage a GET.
This means that the only way to dump data from my camera (which has both USB and FireWire) is to connect it to a laptop -- cumbersome and overkill, I think. Now that Linux has been ported to the iPod, would it be possible to use it in this way?
Thank you for throwing "us dogs" at/. a bone, instead of trying to sweep it under the rug like everyone else appears to be doing. "Well, it's not our business, so stop asking," they say. Well, it's on the front page, so a little insight like the links you posted definately illuminate things a bit.
Now I can understand why the CORE developers don't want to have us dogs snooping on their list. Because it's obvious that Matt was getting extremely frustrated and when he decided to install a kludge to prevent himself from losing hours to recompile time, he was shot down for it. Or offered the magnanimous option of "fixing it himself."
If my air bag went off every time I went driving, and I couldn't figure out why and neither could Mazda, but I found a way to at least prevent it from going off (but not fixing the real problem), should Mazda prevent me from buying a car again? Yeah, it's a Straw Man. It's an analogy. Get over it.
Of course, I doubt the average techie is a 21-year old, large breasted, small waist'ed, long-legged Hoover of a sex-addict, so perhaps this isn't the best content to distribute.
Would somebody with some technical know-how please, pretty please with Laetitia Casta on top, please set up some kind of broadband wireless for Boston's North End. Right now we got nuthin'!
No DSL (sorry, that fancy fiber cable that replaced your old telephone lines doesn't work with copper-based DSL), no Cable modem (sorry, we here at AT&T are working hard to solve your problems, but have to roll back the date of AT&T Broadband to your area because we've overextended ourselves), and no 802.11b (sorry, no line of sight at all).
It looks like this new standard could be just what this area needs, if someone would just do it. There are tons of people in this area that would subscribe if given the opportunity.
And anyway, individual technology advances faster than all-in-one gadgets. While it would be neat-o to have something out of Get Smart, I'd probably end up supplementing my PDA with other, markedly better individual products, like a separate digital camera or a smaller MP3 player for when I just want to work out and not have a big honking PDA with a zoom lens attached to me.
Many people on P2P networks like Kazaa help by keeping the bogus material on their systems and simply renaming the description from "Star Wars Episode II" to "!!NOT!! Star Wars Episode II". Whenever I see multiple sources for a title, I always check out the other source descriptions just to see if someone's done this nice community service.
It takes a little bit more hard drive space, but the nice thing is it only takes ONE person to do this for everyone to be notified. Except, I suppose the RIAA could always upload a legitamate version of a song, then mislabel it to "NOT (whatever)".
Well, at least you can preview partially downloaded files to check.
Actually, I think so. Sure, it may only be a side effect, but I think it will happen, and I think that it is actually in the West's long-term strategic interest to do so.
When has democracy ever been in our strategic interests? In Nicaragua? With Mossadegh in Iran? With Allende in Chile? With Arbenz in Guatemala?
The whole Middle East is full of disenfranchised people held in line by a combination of propaganda blaming infidels (the carrot) and secret police (the stick). It's a powder keg waiting to go off.
The 3rd world in general could be described as such. Let's go invade all those countires filled with mean leaders. Hey, I know, we could start with North Korea. They have admitted to developing nuclear weapons.
A truly democratic regime in the region will bleed off a lot of the pressure.
A truly democratic regime in the region wouldn't last more than a week. When will we learn that you can't force democracy on people? They have to want it, and be willing to fight and die for it themselves in order for it to have any validity.
So, let's see what you're saying here, Dubya is bad because he's ignoring the economy, and Dubya is bad because he's trying to see off a far worse economic threat. Which is it to be?
The problem is that President Bush isn't creating the kinds of jobs that will be sustainable after the war is over. It would be more fiscally responsible of him if he took even half of what is being spent on the military occupation of other countries and put it towards his own.
Personally, I'd rather see the money spent on a way to make the West independent of the Middle East for energy (like fusion research)
No argument from me here.
I read in the Washington Post that the top 5% of earners pay 41% of the total Federal tax collected annually. That's an awful lot.
Ehem. The top 1% of earners receive as much income after taxes as the bottom 40% -- roughly 100 million people. (Center on Budget and Policy Priorities).
I think those folks have been carrying more than their fair share of the tax burden for a long time. BTW, those on $30k/year or less effectively pay no Federal tax at all.
Poor things. Just so you know, the top.01% of Americans (that is, the top 13,000 families) have seen their income increase from.7% to 3% of the total income taken in by the U.S. And over the past 30 years, the average salary (adjusted for inflation) rose from $32,522 to $35,864, while the average compensation for the top 100 C.E.O.'s went from $1.3 million to $37.5 million. I don't think they're hurting too much. As someone who's made $35,000/year for several years, I can tell you firsthand that I most certainly do pay Federal taxes. Almost 1/3rd of my paycheck.
Though this is supposed to be a "funny" post, what you're suggesting is exactly the problem. The back button functions perfectly fine. It's the forward button that needs work.
Programmers simply need to rethink the history of page clicks as a tree instead of a stack. Navigation back on a tree always takes you to a root. It is at that point when the user should have the option of selecting different branches that have occured. For example:
1. Start at Yahoo 2. Read a news article 3. Go back to main page 4. Go to Slashdot
Now, at this point, if you hit the BACK button, it should take you to Yahoo. When there, however, the FORWARD button should offer you the choice of jumping to the article you read, or going to slashdot. That would solve the problem nicely. Except, if you do a lot of browsing, that dynamic tree could get awfully big in memory.
Slashdot Mirror
Hate to say this, but this is exactly I like the Windows OS. While I'm completely familiar and happy with command-line work, I dislike *nix simply because to get a desktop system running to my standards of happiness, I have to look all around the web to find the right apps to install. And not just applications like media players or graphics software, but even (what I consider) low-level stuff like the windowing system, the fonts (for crissake!), the pre-emptive kernel patch so it doesn't lock important operations, the right drivers for all the hardware, etc. ad. infinitem.
It's like DOS all over again. Gotta install the right drivers for the hardware, then manually configure it, then install my Windows system, then install Adobe Font Manager, etc., etc. This is a big reason Windows 95 was so popular -- it finally offered a cohesive system that did all this stuff for you. Admittedly, it took them a few iterations to get it right, but at least they were striving for it. I know KDE and Gnome are doing their part, but until a lot of this stuff becomes a kernel priority, it will lead to different standards and more confusion among end-users.
Sorry for my ignorance, but why hide the code? If a true linux fanatic wants to spread the good word, so to speak, why bother with the whole encryption routine and fake JMP's? Why not just make the hack completely transparent so anyone can do it?
I wish even half of the people on this site posted as well as this. Really, really nice explanation; thanks for taking the time to explain it to us laymen.
If someone can fit a GUI'd, multitasking OS in such a small amount of physical memory, why does Windows have to take up so much, or even Linux for that matter? I realize that programming in assembly is a bitch over C++, but surely Microsoft, with it's paid developers, could accomplish something streamlined like this.
I wish Gates would hold off on innovation for a couple of years to produce such a beast. I, for one, would gladly pay for an Assembly-optimized, thoroughly bug-fixed version of Windows.
To sumarize the story, I borrow from my trusty 1981 copy of The Doctor Who Programme Guide:
In a remote space station called Think Tank, a scientist called Skagra steals the minds of his colleagues, and escapes. Meanwhile, the Doctor and Romana visit present-day [ed. - well, 1979] Cambridge to see Professor Chronotis, a retired Time Lord living incognito as a don. He wants them to take a book, The Ancient Laws of Gallifrey, back to the planet of the Time Lords. Unfortunately it has accidentally been taken away by a post-graduate student, Chris Parsons. He and a colleague, Clare Keightley, are mystified by the book, which is made of no earthly substance. Skagra arrives on Earth in search of the book because it will give him directions to the Time Lord prison planet of Shada, where he believes Salyavin, the most powerful Time Lord [ed. - well, except Rassilon], is imprisoned. Skagra needs access to Salyavin to learn from him the secret of projecting a print of his own mind into every sentient being in the Universe, a technique which will guarantee the success of his plan for galactic domination. The Doctor retrieves the book but Skagra sends his mind-sapping Sphere after the Doctor. On a bicycle chase through the streets of Cambridge the Doctor looses the book, which is found by Skagra. Skagra heads for Shada in the TARDIS, having captured Romana to operate it. The Doctor takes Skagra's own spaceship and with K9 and Chris Parsons goes to Think Tank in search of Skagra and Romana. He encounters the monstrous crystalline Krargs, Skagra's servants. It transpires that Chronotis's rooms in Cambrdige are the inside of his own TARDIS, which he uses to rescue the Doctor from the Krargs. Against the Professor's wishes and with the aim of rescuing Romana the Doctor follows Skagra to Shada, where Skagra has freed the ciminals, including a Dalek, a Cyberman and a Zygon -- but Salyavin is not there. Professor Chronotis turns out to be Salyavin. The Doctor wins a mind battle with Skagra and imprisons him in his own spaceship. Returning to Earth, the Doctor leaves the Professor in Cambridge, promising to keep his identity a secret.
I almost hope this doesn't get modded up too high, because Salon might get wise to this and find a way to disable it. But you can get yourself a free daypass by doing the following:
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You're welcome.
Seals, as in something that prevents leaks. Wing, as in the shuttle's wing.
Not flying aquatic finned-feet mammals that balance red balls on their noses and make funny "Orr Orr!" noises.
Miller's Crossing is a simply beautiful movie. It's got some hilarious lines, and wonderful 30's-style gangster banter:
Eddie Dane: Where's Leo?
Leo's tug: If I tell you, how do I know you won't kill me?
Eddie Dane: Because if you told me and I killed you and you were lying I wouldn't get to kill you *then*. Where's Leo?
Leo's tug: He's moving around. He's getting his mob together tomorrow night. Whisky Nick's.
Eddie Dane: You sure?
Leo's tug: Check it. It's gold.
Eddie Dane: You know what, yegg? I believe you.
But for my money, I still think their best, and similarly most underappreciated movie is Barton Fink. Really the perfect movie. Ridiculously long tracking shots -- the cinemetography is by Roger Deakons and top-notch. You might remember some of his other credits (Shawshank Redemption, Sid and Nancy, Fargo, Lebowski, Hudsucker, Beautiful Mind, etc.)
I remember watching the film quite stoned one time and for the first time realized that the entire movie is based off a famous piece of literature. Like O' Brother, which is very obviously based on the Odyssey (says so in the credits), Barton Fink is a much more subtle, surreal version of Dante's Inferno. There are a couple of references to Hell, like when Chet first appears at the bellhop counter, the phrase on the hotel stationary: "A day or a lifetime," and when they're in the elevator and he says the floor number "six" 3 times.
It's taken numerous watchings to even begin to unwrap the complexity of this movie. Watch it at night when it's very quiet, and turn the volume up loud to hear the muffled voices echoing through the pipes. Remember this when Barton finally gets the girl and we see the long tracking shot go from Barton to the bed, into the bathroom and down the kitchen sink, his own voice then echoing through the pipes.
Both of these classics will be released on DVD on May 20 of this year.
. If Macs had the equivalent processing power of PC's, FCP would be a no-brainer for those deciding between the two packages.
Conversely, if PC's had a DV program as good as FCPro, Mac users would be jumping ship faster than Titanic refugees.
Back in '98 I was working at a company that did tech support for Red Hat installations. We got a call once from a very distraught employee who had decided to implement an OS change (from Windows to Linux) on the day before a big meeting with some clients. He was irate that he couldn't get it to work and couldn't load his Powerpoint presentations. After spending more than a couple of hours talking him through a complete installation, he became to agitated and threatened to bomb our building, telling the poor tech support guy "I know where you guys work". The next day we had the police and bomb squad all over the place, but apparently he was all talk.
Today we could have just called him a terrorist and had his ass on a platter. Oh well. Anyway, a specialist like this would have really been nice.
I hope MandrakeSoft stays alive, simply because they seem to be the only major distro that "get's it" in the Linux community. They have consistently been pushing to make Linux easier to install and use, without browbeating newcomers into a "it must be bad if it's easy" mentality. I applaud them for it.
I would paraphrase this to make it my own, but the original pretty much explains it the best. From the Straight Dope:
What Michael Jackson bought for $47.5 million in 1985 was the publishing rights to 159 or 251 Beatles songs, depending on who's counting. To maybe oversimplify a complicated business, publishing rights are basically the sheet music rights. When Paul McCartney wanted to print the lyrics to "Eleanor Rigby" and other Beatles classics in the program for his 1989 world tour, he discovered he'd have to pay a fee to Michael Jackson. The owner of the publishing rights (hereinafter the publisher) also gets a royalty when someone plays a Beatles song on a jukebox or the radio or does a cover version of a Fab Four tune. Particularly in the case of elevator music, to which, let's be frank, a lot of Beatles tunes are well suited, this can earn the publisher some serious cash.
But there are a couple things the publisher can't do. The first is to mess with, or license the use of, Beatles recordings. Michael Jackson agreed to license the words and music of "Revolution" to Nike for a 1987 shoe commercial, but he had to persuade Capitol Records, owner of the tune's North American recording rights, to allow use of the actual record. Most likely he'd have to do the same to overdub said record with his own voice, although he might get away with including a snippet in a musical collage, something even John Lennon did that has now become impossible to control.
Another thing the publisher can't do (in the U.S. at least) is prevent somebody from recording a cover version of a song the publisher owns. Usually the would-be cover artist and the publisher work out a deal on royalties. However, if negotiations fail, U.S. law allows the cover artist to make and market the recording anyway provided he pays a stipulated (and fairly stiff) royalty to the publisher.
The point is, being a publisher doesn't give you all that much control over the songs you own; mainly it gives you the right to the profits they earn. You don't even get to keep all of that; typically you have to give 50% to each song's composer(s), one reason not to feel too sorry for Paul McCartney and the estate of John Lennon. Another reason is that McCartney, despite having gotten skunked out of his own songs, contrived to buy the rights to 3,000 others, including the Buddy Holly catalog, and reportedly is worth $600 million. Not that he's happy, of course. Paul's mad at Michael Jackson not merely because he lost control of the Beatles library but also because Jackson won't discuss giving McCartney a higher composer's royalty for the old tunes.
The last reason not to feel sorry for Paul is that if he got skunked it's his own fault. In the 60s, to avoid confiscatory British taxes, he and Lennon turned their publishing rights over to newly-organized Northern Songs, a publicly-held company in which they owned sizable but apparently not controlling blocks of stock. In 1969 music mogul Lew Grade launched a takeover bid for Northern Songs in which he offered seven times the stock's original offering price. Lennon and McCartney, feuding as usual, were unable to organize an effective defense and the company was sold out from under them. This made them even more fabulously wealthy than they already were, since their stock was now worth seven times as much. However, they were still pissed on account of, you know, the principle of the thing. The Teeming Millions can surely sympathize.
A company called AC Propulsion built an all-electric car that can outrun a 'vette, and just about any other production car out there. 0-60 in 4.1 seconds. The 30mph-50mph range is done in 1.4 seconds. The acceleration curve is linear, which also helps since there are no 'blips' during gear changes. This is one seriously cool car. Of course, if you're going 100 mph continuously, you'll probably only get 50 miles out of it. But it is an absolutely beautiful design.
If you continue your analogy with the related article, you'll see how capitalism ends up creating a tightly centralized elite (top-rated posters) that controls the capital (conversation). Through whatever means possible (cash is king, karma is gold) the top people usually have the benefit of either getting in early, or ignoring common morality for their own self-interest. I refer you to our friends at Tyco, Enron, WorldCom, Ford, etc.
Phish is already offering such a service. They even offer MP3 ($9.95 per concert) or SHN (non-lossy) file formats ($12.95 per concert). They are slowly compiling an archive of downloadable media for all their concert recordings, as well. How ya' like dem apples?
What in the hell good is it to have fiber running to your door when nobody's doing anything with it!? Here in Boston's North End, we've had to deal with this crap since 1998, when they lavished us with fiber, exhaulting its benefits over traditional copper.
/me takes a pill
Now, 5 years later (5 goddamned years!), with this whole "internet" thing in full swing, and I still can't get high-speed internet access. Sorry, doesn't work without good-ol' fashioned copper cables, even if I am just a few hundred feet from the CO. FUCK.
And naturally, our one-and-only monopoly on cable, AT&T, isn't offering it's much-touted Broadband package, either. If I see one more advertisement for AT&T Broadband I'm gonna throw down, I swear it. How can they advertise a service that's not even available to me? Isn't that false advertising?
Complete and utter bullshit. OCR with results of 97%? Sure, if the text is consistent, all in the same direction, with basic fonts, and non-contrasting backgrounds.
Bascially, everything that the "Enter the word/Image" protection does not use. There are a hundred different ways to alter the text to prevent anything but human reasoning to read (decode). The beauty of these systems is that the transformations are computed upon request, which means you have no way of knowing what to expect. You might get backwards letters, or letters that are rotated, or words that are upside-down, with each letter as a different, crazy font (i.e., NOT Times Roman or Courier).
Sites like PayPal, Yahoo Mail, Ticketmaster and the like are using this system because so far there is no way around it. A computerized system that requires human authentication like this is an absolutely beautiful challenge to the hacking community. I honestly doubt you have a working solution.
If you did, you would be very, VERY rich, and would be too busy cavorting with naked Playmates on your desert island than to write this kind of crap on Slashdot.
I have been thinking about using an iPod for storage of files that aren't music-related. Specifically, I'd love to be able to use it as a hard drive to dump extra images that I take from my digital camera when I'm on the road. Unfortunately, most hardware solutions to this (including the iPod) involve using the external unit as a slave -- that is, I can only SEND data to it, I can't initiage a GET.
This means that the only way to dump data from my camera (which has both USB and FireWire) is to connect it to a laptop -- cumbersome and overkill, I think. Now that Linux has been ported to the iPod, would it be possible to use it in this way?
Thank you for throwing "us dogs" at /. a bone, instead of trying to sweep it under the rug like everyone else appears to be doing. "Well, it's not our business, so stop asking," they say. Well, it's on the front page, so a little insight like the links you posted definately illuminate things a bit.
Now I can understand why the CORE developers don't want to have us dogs snooping on their list. Because it's obvious that Matt was getting extremely frustrated and when he decided to install a kludge to prevent himself from losing hours to recompile time, he was shot down for it. Or offered the magnanimous option of "fixing it himself."
If my air bag went off every time I went driving, and I couldn't figure out why and neither could Mazda, but I found a way to at least prevent it from going off (but not fixing the real problem), should Mazda prevent me from buying a car again? Yeah, it's a Straw Man. It's an analogy. Get over it.
That was my idea, too!
Of course, I doubt the average techie is a 21-year old, large breasted, small waist'ed, long-legged Hoover of a sex-addict, so perhaps this isn't the best content to distribute.
Would somebody with some technical know-how please, pretty please with Laetitia Casta on top, please set up some kind of broadband wireless for Boston's North End. Right now we got nuthin'!
No DSL (sorry, that fancy fiber cable that replaced your old telephone lines doesn't work with copper-based DSL), no Cable modem (sorry, we here at AT&T are working hard to solve your problems, but have to roll back the date of AT&T Broadband to your area because we've overextended ourselves), and no 802.11b (sorry, no line of sight at all).
It looks like this new standard could be just what this area needs, if someone would just do it. There are tons of people in this area that would subscribe if given the opportunity.
Yeah, how about a kitchen sink?
And anyway, individual technology advances faster than all-in-one gadgets. While it would be neat-o to have something out of Get Smart, I'd probably end up supplementing my PDA with other, markedly better individual products, like a separate digital camera or a smaller MP3 player for when I just want to work out and not have a big honking PDA with a zoom lens attached to me.
Many people on P2P networks like Kazaa help by keeping the bogus material on their systems and simply renaming the description from "Star Wars Episode II" to "!!NOT!! Star Wars Episode II". Whenever I see multiple sources for a title, I always check out the other source descriptions just to see if someone's done this nice community service.
It takes a little bit more hard drive space, but the nice thing is it only takes ONE person to do this for everyone to be notified. Except, I suppose the RIAA could always upload a legitamate version of a song, then mislabel it to "NOT (whatever)".
Well, at least you can preview partially downloaded files to check.
Actually, I think so. Sure, it may only be a side effect, but I think it will happen, and I think that it is actually in the West's long-term strategic interest to do so.
.01% of Americans (that is, the top 13,000 families) have seen their income increase from .7% to 3% of the total income taken in by the U.S. And over the past 30 years, the average salary (adjusted for inflation) rose from $32,522 to $35,864, while the average compensation for the top 100 C.E.O.'s went from $1.3 million to $37.5 million. I don't think they're hurting too much. As someone who's made $35,000/year for several years, I can tell you firsthand that I most certainly do pay Federal taxes. Almost 1/3rd of my paycheck.
When has democracy ever been in our strategic interests? In Nicaragua? With Mossadegh in Iran? With Allende in Chile? With Arbenz in Guatemala?
The whole Middle East is full of disenfranchised people held in line by a combination of propaganda blaming infidels (the carrot) and secret police (the stick). It's a powder keg waiting to go off.
The 3rd world in general could be described as such. Let's go invade all those countires filled with mean leaders. Hey, I know, we could start with North Korea. They have admitted to developing nuclear weapons.
A truly democratic regime in the region will bleed off a lot of the pressure.
A truly democratic regime in the region wouldn't last more than a week. When will we learn that you can't force democracy on people? They have to want it, and be willing to fight and die for it themselves in order for it to have any validity.
So, let's see what you're saying here, Dubya is bad because he's ignoring the economy, and Dubya is bad because he's trying to see off a far worse economic threat. Which is it to be?
The problem is that President Bush isn't creating the kinds of jobs that will be sustainable after the war is over. It would be more fiscally responsible of him if he took even half of what is being spent on the military occupation of other countries and put it towards his own.
Personally, I'd rather see the money spent on a way to make the West independent of the Middle East for energy (like fusion research)
No argument from me here.
I read in the Washington Post that the top 5% of earners pay 41% of the total Federal tax collected annually. That's an awful lot.
Ehem. The top 1% of earners receive as much income after taxes as the bottom 40% -- roughly 100 million people. (Center on Budget and Policy Priorities).
I think those folks have been carrying more than their fair share of the tax burden for a long time. BTW, those on $30k/year or less effectively pay no Federal tax at all.
Poor things. Just so you know, the top
Though this is supposed to be a "funny" post, what you're suggesting is exactly the problem. The back button functions perfectly fine. It's the forward button that needs work.
Programmers simply need to rethink the history of page clicks as a tree instead of a stack. Navigation back on a tree always takes you to a root. It is at that point when the user should have the option of selecting different branches that have occured. For example:
1. Start at Yahoo
2. Read a news article
3. Go back to main page
4. Go to Slashdot
Now, at this point, if you hit the BACK button, it should take you to Yahoo. When there, however, the FORWARD button should offer you the choice of jumping to the article you read, or going to slashdot. That would solve the problem nicely. Except, if you do a lot of browsing, that dynamic tree could get awfully big in memory.