Whenever anyone complains about television the horror is always violence. When they start censorship however the target is always sex.
This is probably because they know that many people's problem with sex on the television is not getting enough of it.
Re:What's it good for if your friends don't have o
on
Update From Cray World
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We? What are you talking about? Who here has even had any input into the purchasing of a super-computer?
I have, I have built them, bought them, designed them.
In many cases you are right, supercomputers are bought not on the technical merits but on the 'cool to have' corporate ego trip budget.
Twelve months ago there would no doubt have been a queue of dot coms eager to find something slightly less mindless than a superbowl ad to spend money on, today I think not.
Supercomputers are like Formula one racing cars, expensive to buy, expensive to run and can only be used to advantage by a very small number of people.
These days I would guess that 95% of the people who can use a supercomputer to advantage well enough to justify the sticker price are working in much more profitable and stock option rich fields.
I used to be active in the parallel processor field. I helped build some iron that analyzes 6Tb/sec for a particle physics experiment.
On the supercomputer front the game has changed radically since the original Crays. The Cray 1 was a SIMD machine, one instruction stream controlling multiple processors. That architecture works well for a limited number of problems, the problem is that most problems turn out to have bits of vector code interspersed with decision code. If you have 10% of your code that cannot be parallelized then even an infinite number of processors can only go 10 times faster than a single processor.
The attraction of vector boxes was that there was no need to recode the FORTRAN application, the compiler could detect the parts of the code that could be parallelized and optimize the code. The problem is that there are limits to what the automatic parallelization can do.
The upshot is that there tends to be little advantage in more than 8 or 16 processors in a vector box. Meanwhile a standard Pentium IV has multiple independent processing pipelines - I forget the number (4 maybe). So the gap between the cray box and the mainstream may not be amazing.
At this stage most of the problems in science can be attacked using MIMD architectures. These range from the SETI style very loose coupling over the internet to closer coupling such as the SMP machines.
The actual speed of the cluster is pretty much irrelevant, I can build a SETI style parallel computer using off the shelf hardware for less than $1000 per processor. But that only allows me to handle problems that can be broken down into lots of independent sub-problems trivial parallelism.
What CRAY appear to be doing is building a machine that has closer coupling between the processors. There are certainly problems for which this approach is the solution. I doubt that the number of such problems is commercially viable however. The problem is that many of the traditional super computer problems are now dealt with using loosely coupled clusters. 100MHz ethernet is probably adequate for many problems. Other traditiona; 'supercomputer' problems are now attacked with desktop servers. I remember doing work with astrophysicists who used to wait for time on expensive mainframes, these days a cheap Linux box meets their needs.
Even 'defense' (read corporate welfare dept) applications are no longer automaticaly super computer class. Sure they may do a lot of processing, but these days it is likely to be optimization type work which in turn tends to break down into a series of independent simulation runs.
Er. Read the article. The server requests a MD5 sum of a randomly chosen 16-byte area
Well first the output of MD5 is 16 bytes so there is a possibility, probability even that the article is simply wrong.
More importantly however this could simply be another trap set up by AOL. Sure they might begin by asking for 16 bytes - which is pretty much the shortest message that makes sense to compress. However whoever designed the protocol probably put in the option of hashing a randomly chosen segment of the file.
Another option they may have gone for is to allow the server to send a random challenge to be added in to the digest.
The only way to defeat this effectively is to have the aim.exe available.
Disclaimer, I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice
The legality of controlling an interface through the aim.exe copyright is questionable however as others have noted in the thread. AOL certainly appear to be flagrantly violating the FCC order to support interoperability.
There is also a doctrine called 'copyright abuse'. The idea is that it should not be possible to use one form of intellectual property to achieve an end intended by another. The form of IP set up for protecting inventions is patent law. Attempting to use copyright law to protect an invention can result in the courts saying that it is OK to infringe the copyright to the extent necessary to duplicate the invention.
Put another way copyright protects the expression of an idea, not the idea itself. AOL is attempting to protect the idea, hence copyright abuse.
I guess AOL might have an argument under DMCA if they claimed that the AOl IM scheme was a copyright protection scheme, to do so however they would have to convince the court that AOL owned the copyright in the messages sent ove IM. I doubt that this would fly irregardless of whatever statements exist in the terms of service. Copyrights cannot be assigned through clickwrap.
OK so what is to stop some nut putting up a site complaining about the Supreme court Florida decision?
If they allow this rulling to stand Renquist, Thomas and Scalia can expect to see Web sites that target them in the same manner, home addresses, car license plates, home telephone numbers, movement details etc.
The anti-aboritionists behind the site were clearly intending to incite murder, it was a hit list of their opponents. Gathering and making available that type of material has on numerous occasions been considered conspiracy to murder.
It would most likely have to have been "reduced to practice" (more or less implemented) before Walid's patent was granted.
It is a pity that the US PTO does not apply that standard to the issue of patents.
I suspect that an application will be made for the patent to be re-reviewed. This is a costly process but nowhere near as costly as an actual case.
At that stage faced with the threat of loosing the patent altogether and the threat of an alternative scheme being adopted the overwhelmingly likely option is that Walid will fold their hand and opt for the standard license.
f they can prove that they where working on this system before July 21 1999
Incorrect, under the US patent fraud system the inventor is essentially assumed to have invented the device a year earlier than the filing date.
Remember that the purpose of the USPTO is to grant spurious monopolies to fraudsters who can then extort huge sums from corporations and give whacking great campagin bribes to members of Congress.
Congress will not reform the patent system as long as they are being purchased by the patent barons.
I wonder... will standards bodies like IETF have to start making participants sign "no compete" clauses, NDA's, or the like in order to prevent fiascos like this from happening?
We have a notice on proprietary technology that is given to every registrant at an IETF meeting.
It is pretty broad and states that anything you say on the floor is a public statement and that in making a proposal to the IETF you are agreeing to their IP policy
Because of this policy I have a whole rack of hoops I have to jump through each time I make a proposal simply to avoid giving away patentable technology without realising it. While I would happily see the US PTO blown to smithereens with every copy of all the patents inside it (including mine) the insidious thing about the patent game is that you are forced to play it if your competitors do.
In that way it is very much like the Y2K consultancy fraud. First order of business for a Y2K bandit that had secured a new victim was to write letters to every supplier demanding to know if they were Y2K compliant. Other management infections such as ISO 9000 spread through the same vector.
Actually the patent may help the situation since the main issue in the group is making a choice between the solutions on offer. A lot of folk have been hoping that something would force the issue. This may be it.
Not only will the patent be worthless if it is not chosen for the standard, the code already written will as well.
I have for a long time wanted to reply to one of these vexatious patent situations by filling perjury charges against the inventors. However there do seem to be civil grounds for apply for the patent to be invalidated.
The case in point is Micron technologies (vs. some bad guy I can't remember) and has to do with the specification of the PCI bus. The patent was invalidated for abuse of intellectual property. The patented invention was offered to an open standards group that required notice to be made of any IP claims, no notice was made.
The IETF requires every attendee to read a piece of paper that gives (IMHO) actual notice of this policy. I don't know if Walid attended an IETF but constructive notice has surely been achieved.
The other grounds to attack a patent are obviousness and prior art. There are prior encodings for several languages in ascii form - particularly Chineese and Japaneese from many years before. Base64 is a generic 6 bit encoding scheme. Encoding UNICODE in 5 bit ascii is obvious to me. It is a direct application of known technology to well defined requirements and constraints. Given time a direct on target DNS prior art can probably be found, we were discussing the issue back in 1990.
Getting a patent past the US PTO means very little. Unless you have $2 million to defend the claims and a very strong claim the patent is worthless.
As for the issue of whether it is adequate for the World Wide Web to meet only the needs of English speakers in the US, if the IETF started to act on that premise it would inevitably lead to standards diverging. There is a genuine demand for multilingual DNS, the fact that some people don't see the need is irrelevant, they are not the constituency to be served.
Klensen's directory idea has been arround at least 15 years. It would inevitably take at least 10 years to be anywhere near a position to challenge DNS. Equally the idea of using another of the DNS name spaces is somewhat whacky, OK so DNS can serve out names for HEISOD and CHAOS networks, my email client only queries in the Internet name space.
If anything, you should stop whining and bow down to the gods responsible for the Internet, your PC (invented in the U.S.), and the rest of the things that we did to create the Internet.
Sure, provided you yanks want to bow down to us Brits first for:
Inventing the computer in the first place (Babbage, Turing, the Manchester Mark 1)
Inventing the World Wide Web.
The Internet is not Arpanet, it is an idea of how to create a very big network by subsuming other networks. The people behind the Internet could not give a toss for your narrow minded nationalist bigotry.
The real dispute here is about the survival of the record labels as distribution intermediaries.
For the record labels to survive music must continue to be distributed in physical media. Otherwise there will be a conflict as the record labels and broadcast media compete against each other since the broadcast media believe that the non-physical distribution chain belongs to them.
What is happening is that the balance of power is tipping sigificantly back in favor of the artists and their managers.
Napster is like one of the pieces of France that battles were fought over in the first world war. Ultimately it does not really matter which side captures the village in question, it is the cost that the battle exacts on the participants.
I believe that the RIAA is fighting a futile battle, not because they will lose the battle but because they have already lost the war.
As Jon Stewart said on the Daily show, Napster is in violation of the recording industry patent on screwing artists out of their royalties.
The opt in filter is not going to fly. The DMCA makes it quite clear that the copyright owner has to raise the objection.
Back when the discussion was all about the Betamax case folk were pretending that the DMCA did not exist and the supreme court's 30 year old ruling was the only relevant law. So it is ironic that we are now looking for the DMCA safe harbor.
I don't think we can take the claims of either side seriusly. Napster is clearly flat out lying when they say they can't make the filter work better. The RIAA are clearly not doing all they can to help Napster make the filter work.
I don't think the RIAA lawyers are particularly competent tactically. They are trying to kill Napster with a preliminary injunction, this is not going to fly because the Appeals court want to make sure that the case is open long enough for them to make their own pronouncements on what is likely to be a landmark copyright decision. Instead of asking for the 'shutdown' notice in the first place they should have asked for the filtering.
This was tried before in Germany about a year ago. The experiment was an abysmal failure after an unacceptably high number of the disks were returned by customers.
Quite a few audio CD players depend upon the directory information being right to enable their own error correction. The German CDs did not work in Car CD players in particular.
CDs are a low margin commodity, if the return rates are unacceptable on a CD the stores cannot afford to stock it. Amazon in particular can't afford to process returns.
The 'copy protection' appears to work by exploiting the error response of CDROM drives. Like most computer equipment they halt on error rather than trying to continue. This is an irritating behavior in any case.
The pressure on hardware manufacturers to make drives and drivers that don't halt on error will render the copy protection irrelevant in the long run.
if you own stock in an indexing search engine, you should dump it now,
Agreed, but only because it is a high cost business whose revenues are nowhere near what people hoped for.
We had distributed peer-2-peer directories back in 1993, that is what harvest did. The results were not good, anything that requires effort on the part of the Web site providers tends to be hard to get off the ground. Ultimately the central index model turned out to work after all if you threw hardware at it. It still does.
If you want to look up a business on the web then a paid directory is actually likely to be a bit more useful than a non paid one since the companies that have the cash to buy space are more likely to have a bigger stock.
I no longer use Yahoo and Lycos for much however because the information in their index is so outdated and baddly organized. I get the feeling that most of the data is several years out of date.
Google works and appears to have established itself as a premium brand. It may only index a part of the web but the relevance feedback means that it is indexing the right part...
I would have thought that it was obviously an example of the type of viewpoint that the US media do not express but which can be raised on the net.
Anyone who turns on a cable news talk show these days still has a 50:50 chance of seeing a Clinton hate fest. Like get over it guys, he isn't even in office.
Now some folk may be interested in that stuff but for the appologists of the traditional media to claim that the net is encouraging a monoculture of views is somewhat ridiculous.
What this comes down to is that the traditional media have been on a yellow journalism binge ever since the OJ Simpson trial. The traditional media are set up for reporting on one news story that lasts for eight months or more at a time and allows for endless ramifications. The only place real political issues get dicsussed in the US is on the Net.
Hence the allegations in the report are not only wrong, it is the traditional media that are the threat to diversity of thought and the net that is the solution.
I believe that the RIAA and Napster were made for each other. I have no time for the whiny complaints of a multimillion dollar VC startup (now controlled by Bertelsman) whose business plan is to make money distributing other people's copyright.
If folk must trade Warez then they could at least save the rest of us the holier than thou "we are doing the artists the biggest favor" line.
Napster is no longer the threat to the RIAA, and not just because the filter means that it is no longer any use. With Napster the unit of exchange is the track. With an MP3 player built round a large hard drive the unit of exchange is suddenly the CD collection.
I have one of the Acrchos devices and have so far ripped about 40 CDs for my own use. However there is nothing to stop me from copying my CD collection onto the Jukebox and then going round to a neighbor and copying them onto his hard drive.
What is more this mode of exchange is probably 'fair use' since it is genuinely peer to peer and does not involve Napster corporation acting as middleman contributing to the infringement.
Jukebox copying does not have the same geographic reach as Napster. But the number of tracks exchanged at a time is dramatically higher.
If the United States continues to increase imported talent, you could end up with a significant chunk of the top 5% of the wage earners being poltiically disenfranchised.
That is unlikely since the main franchise these days is through the pocket book and not the ballot box.
However the current administration is clearly not listening to the high tech top earners, it is listening to old money plutocrats.
Warren Buffet, Gates and Co have good reason to want tax cuts to be given to the middle and working class rather than directly to the ultra-rich. More money in consumers hands means the economy grows faster, means my share portfolio grows.
The six percent tax cut on offer from Bush would at best reduce my taxes by a few thousand. On the other hand the drop in the NASDAQ since he was selected has cost me several millions. And the cretin thinks he is doing me a favor?
As Denis Miller said 'I didn't expect him to narrow the chasm between the rich and the poor this way'.
If it would return us to 4% growth and the NASDAQ to 4000 it would be just fine by me if Clinton was made President again and allowed to run the country out of his choice of Heffner's Playboy Mansion or the Chicken Ranch in Nevada.
The premise of the original article is that the Web is allowing people to choose forums that only air the views they agree with. Obviously the author has not listened to Rush Limbaugh or watched Fox News. Many people look for a biased media that reflects only their own views and have done so since the earliest days of newspapers.
Of course people choose to avoid certain arguments. This does not necessarily mean that they only want to hear what they agree with.
The arguments I don't want to hear are SPAM, certain trolls and certain boring idealogues. I simply don't want to hear from the type of people who claim to have an absolute solution to all the worlds problems based on the works of Karl Marx, Lenin, Ayn Rand, the second ammendment, Milton Freedman or the Bible. Nor do I want to hear from either side of the abortion debate.
It is not that I am uninterested in the issues raised. I just don't care for circular argument, whether from the right or the left. Fortunately since the fall of the USSR we have had a few years freedom from lefftie megabores. Unfortunately these types are regrouping with a bunch of nebulous complaints they call 'globalism'. Meanwhile right wing idealogue bores are running the country.
Ulitmately there are always people who try to rise to the top of any movement by being the most extreeme advocate of ideological purity. It is very easy to get notice by being extreeme. It is not the positions that people vote to exclude, it is the people.
Slashdot does have a built in bias, but it is not overwhelming. The quickest way to increase Karma is to attack Microsoft, the only negative points I have ever got are from defending MSFT. I don't think that in general moderation is on the side taken.
The same cannot be said for the traditional media. During the last election Chris Mathews said of Al Gore's proposal to have weekly Presidential debates 'he just wants to discuss boring stuff like issues he doesn't want to discuss politics'. In other words the media don't want to discuss who will govern, they want to discuss whether the imbecile or the liar should be elected - the frame of reference they wanted to discuss.
The other curious feature of US media is the insistence of Journalists that all communications must be mediated by them. We don't see politicians debating issues like happens in every other country, we see journalists actring as proxies for politicians.
Given the abbysmal service of the traditional media the net can do no worse.
Read the winning team's report at http://www3.shore.net/~kht/text/cacm/cacm.htm. It's pretty neat, considering it was written over a decade ago.
Take a look at the list of 'students', Stephen Wolfram, Kurt Thearling and a bunch of others. This was after Wolfram was pretty well known.
I don't see that the paper is that dramatically amazing. It is much harder to anticipate stuff than design it, what the paper is more notable for is the lack of Negroponte like idiocies - self stocking fridges, wearable computers and other stuff we will never need, want or care about.
Someone has to write the meta-RPG in which you run a RPG company, choose product lines, arrange gang bangs etc.
Of course in typical geek fashion the loosers who write the game could probably succeed if they put a tenth the effort that they put into the game into setting up gang bangs. It is better to travel hopefully than to arrive.
The games industry tends to be faddish, they come and go. These days even Pokemon is showing signs it has run its course.
The toy business is pretty cut throat and margins are pretty lousy. Consider the number of people you need to write and sell an RPG manual compared to a 'dummies guide' or the like, then think how many copies you are likely to sell.
I suspect that an open source RPG scene could be constructed. After all most of the fun of RPG is invented by the players anyway. The key would be to find some way to use the net to collaborate and to find someone who could keep the whole project together - making sure that the relative strengths of trolls, goblins and dragons was sensible.
It would also be a good plan for folk to work out some way of using a computer to do the druge work of managing the rules.
I think it would be eminently doable by someone with enough Perl hacking abilities and time.
NO! The main problem in this sad landscape of crappy administration is that no one bothers patching any of their systems because they:
Quite so, which is why the lamers don't need to be any more sophisticated.
If more people stripped down the servers before they deployed them there would be fewer incidents. When I deploy a hardened system I remove ftpd from the inetd file and delete the executable off the system, same for sendmail, finger, nfs etc.
A lot of security problems could also be eliminated by better O/S and programming language design. On the VAX system any attempt to overwrite the stack caused an exception. Array bounds checking was arround and standard in the 1960s. Today we have to put up with buffer overrun errors. It should not be necessary to take the performance hit of Java just to get array bounds checking (and yes I know the markethead claim that there is no hit if you code right - it is maketting bollocks)
UNIX could do with a complete clean up job. There is far too much complexity and left over dross from years ago hanging arround.
The information will be usefull to security protocol designers such as myself I guess. But sysadmins surely need something more automated and targetted.
Ad hoc descriptions of vulnerabilities only get so far however. Most of the time the average lamer is trying techniques that were reported on Bugtraq years before and were patched and CERT advised months ago.
Slashdot Mirror
This is probably because they know that many people's problem with sex on the television is not getting enough of it.
I have, I have built them, bought them, designed them.
In many cases you are right, supercomputers are bought not on the technical merits but on the 'cool to have' corporate ego trip budget.
Twelve months ago there would no doubt have been a queue of dot coms eager to find something slightly less mindless than a superbowl ad to spend money on, today I think not.
Supercomputers are like Formula one racing cars, expensive to buy, expensive to run and can only be used to advantage by a very small number of people.
These days I would guess that 95% of the people who can use a supercomputer to advantage well enough to justify the sticker price are working in much more profitable and stock option rich fields.
On the supercomputer front the game has changed radically since the original Crays. The Cray 1 was a SIMD machine, one instruction stream controlling multiple processors. That architecture works well for a limited number of problems, the problem is that most problems turn out to have bits of vector code interspersed with decision code. If you have 10% of your code that cannot be parallelized then even an infinite number of processors can only go 10 times faster than a single processor.
The attraction of vector boxes was that there was no need to recode the FORTRAN application, the compiler could detect the parts of the code that could be parallelized and optimize the code. The problem is that there are limits to what the automatic parallelization can do.
The upshot is that there tends to be little advantage in more than 8 or 16 processors in a vector box. Meanwhile a standard Pentium IV has multiple independent processing pipelines - I forget the number (4 maybe). So the gap between the cray box and the mainstream may not be amazing.
At this stage most of the problems in science can be attacked using MIMD architectures. These range from the SETI style very loose coupling over the internet to closer coupling such as the SMP machines.
The actual speed of the cluster is pretty much irrelevant, I can build a SETI style parallel computer using off the shelf hardware for less than $1000 per processor. But that only allows me to handle problems that can be broken down into lots of independent sub-problems trivial parallelism.
What CRAY appear to be doing is building a machine that has closer coupling between the processors. There are certainly problems for which this approach is the solution. I doubt that the number of such problems is commercially viable however. The problem is that many of the traditional super computer problems are now dealt with using loosely coupled clusters. 100MHz ethernet is probably adequate for many problems. Other traditiona; 'supercomputer' problems are now attacked with desktop servers. I remember doing work with astrophysicists who used to wait for time on expensive mainframes, these days a cheap Linux box meets their needs.
Even 'defense' (read corporate welfare dept) applications are no longer automaticaly super computer class. Sure they may do a lot of processing, but these days it is likely to be optimization type work which in turn tends to break down into a series of independent simulation runs.
Well first the output of MD5 is 16 bytes so there is a possibility, probability even that the article is simply wrong.
More importantly however this could simply be another trap set up by AOL. Sure they might begin by asking for 16 bytes - which is pretty much the shortest message that makes sense to compress. However whoever designed the protocol probably put in the option of hashing a randomly chosen segment of the file.
Another option they may have gone for is to allow the server to send a random challenge to be added in to the digest.
The only way to defeat this effectively is to have the aim.exe available.
Disclaimer, I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice
The legality of controlling an interface through the aim.exe copyright is questionable however as others have noted in the thread. AOL certainly appear to be flagrantly violating the FCC order to support interoperability.
There is also a doctrine called 'copyright abuse'. The idea is that it should not be possible to use one form of intellectual property to achieve an end intended by another. The form of IP set up for protecting inventions is patent law. Attempting to use copyright law to protect an invention can result in the courts saying that it is OK to infringe the copyright to the extent necessary to duplicate the invention.
Put another way copyright protects the expression of an idea, not the idea itself. AOL is attempting to protect the idea, hence copyright abuse.
I guess AOL might have an argument under DMCA if they claimed that the AOl IM scheme was a copyright protection scheme, to do so however they would have to convince the court that AOL owned the copyright in the messages sent ove IM. I doubt that this would fly irregardless of whatever statements exist in the terms of service. Copyrights cannot be assigned through clickwrap.
If they allow this rulling to stand Renquist, Thomas and Scalia can expect to see Web sites that target them in the same manner, home addresses, car license plates, home telephone numbers, movement details etc.
The anti-aboritionists behind the site were clearly intending to incite murder, it was a hit list of their opponents. Gathering and making available that type of material has on numerous occasions been considered conspiracy to murder.
It is a pity that the US PTO does not apply that standard to the issue of patents.
I suspect that an application will be made for the patent to be re-reviewed. This is a costly process but nowhere near as costly as an actual case.
At that stage faced with the threat of loosing the patent altogether and the threat of an alternative scheme being adopted the overwhelmingly likely option is that Walid will fold their hand and opt for the standard license.
Incorrect, under the US patent fraud system the inventor is essentially assumed to have invented the device a year earlier than the filing date.
Remember that the purpose of the USPTO is to grant spurious monopolies to fraudsters who can then extort huge sums from corporations and give whacking great campagin bribes to members of Congress.
Congress will not reform the patent system as long as they are being purchased by the patent barons.
We have a notice on proprietary technology that is given to every registrant at an IETF meeting.
It is pretty broad and states that anything you say on the floor is a public statement and that in making a proposal to the IETF you are agreeing to their IP policy
Because of this policy I have a whole rack of hoops I have to jump through each time I make a proposal simply to avoid giving away patentable technology without realising it. While I would happily see the US PTO blown to smithereens with every copy of all the patents inside it (including mine) the insidious thing about the patent game is that you are forced to play it if your competitors do.
In that way it is very much like the Y2K consultancy fraud. First order of business for a Y2K bandit that had secured a new victim was to write letters to every supplier demanding to know if they were Y2K compliant. Other management infections such as ISO 9000 spread through the same vector.
Not only will the patent be worthless if it is not chosen for the standard, the code already written will as well.
The case in point is Micron technologies (vs. some bad guy I can't remember) and has to do with the specification of the PCI bus. The patent was invalidated for abuse of intellectual property. The patented invention was offered to an open standards group that required notice to be made of any IP claims, no notice was made.
The IETF requires every attendee to read a piece of paper that gives (IMHO) actual notice of this policy. I don't know if Walid attended an IETF but constructive notice has surely been achieved.
The other grounds to attack a patent are obviousness and prior art. There are prior encodings for several languages in ascii form - particularly Chineese and Japaneese from many years before. Base64 is a generic 6 bit encoding scheme. Encoding UNICODE in 5 bit ascii is obvious to me. It is a direct application of known technology to well defined requirements and constraints. Given time a direct on target DNS prior art can probably be found, we were discussing the issue back in 1990.
Getting a patent past the US PTO means very little. Unless you have $2 million to defend the claims and a very strong claim the patent is worthless.
As for the issue of whether it is adequate for the World Wide Web to meet only the needs of English speakers in the US, if the IETF started to act on that premise it would inevitably lead to standards diverging. There is a genuine demand for multilingual DNS, the fact that some people don't see the need is irrelevant, they are not the constituency to be served.
Klensen's directory idea has been arround at least 15 years. It would inevitably take at least 10 years to be anywhere near a position to challenge DNS. Equally the idea of using another of the DNS name spaces is somewhat whacky, OK so DNS can serve out names for HEISOD and CHAOS networks, my email client only queries in the Internet name space.
Sure, provided you yanks want to bow down to us Brits first for:
Inventing the computer in the first place (Babbage, Turing, the Manchester Mark 1)
Inventing the World Wide Web.
The Internet is not Arpanet, it is an idea of how to create a very big network by subsuming other networks. The people behind the Internet could not give a toss for your narrow minded nationalist bigotry.
For the record labels to survive music must continue to be distributed in physical media. Otherwise there will be a conflict as the record labels and broadcast media compete against each other since the broadcast media believe that the non-physical distribution chain belongs to them.
What is happening is that the balance of power is tipping sigificantly back in favor of the artists and their managers.
Napster is like one of the pieces of France that battles were fought over in the first world war. Ultimately it does not really matter which side captures the village in question, it is the cost that the battle exacts on the participants.
I believe that the RIAA is fighting a futile battle, not because they will lose the battle but because they have already lost the war.
The opt in filter is not going to fly. The DMCA makes it quite clear that the copyright owner has to raise the objection.
Back when the discussion was all about the Betamax case folk were pretending that the DMCA did not exist and the supreme court's 30 year old ruling was the only relevant law. So it is ironic that we are now looking for the DMCA safe harbor.
I don't think we can take the claims of either side seriusly. Napster is clearly flat out lying when they say they can't make the filter work better. The RIAA are clearly not doing all they can to help Napster make the filter work.
I don't think the RIAA lawyers are particularly competent tactically. They are trying to kill Napster with a preliminary injunction, this is not going to fly because the Appeals court want to make sure that the case is open long enough for them to make their own pronouncements on what is likely to be a landmark copyright decision. Instead of asking for the 'shutdown' notice in the first place they should have asked for the filtering.
Quite a few audio CD players depend upon the directory information being right to enable their own error correction. The German CDs did not work in Car CD players in particular.
CDs are a low margin commodity, if the return rates are unacceptable on a CD the stores cannot afford to stock it. Amazon in particular can't afford to process returns.
The 'copy protection' appears to work by exploiting the error response of CDROM drives. Like most computer equipment they halt on error rather than trying to continue. This is an irritating behavior in any case.
The pressure on hardware manufacturers to make drives and drivers that don't halt on error will render the copy protection irrelevant in the long run.
Agreed, but only because it is a high cost business whose revenues are nowhere near what people hoped for.
We had distributed peer-2-peer directories back in 1993, that is what harvest did. The results were not good, anything that requires effort on the part of the Web site providers tends to be hard to get off the ground. Ultimately the central index model turned out to work after all if you threw hardware at it. It still does.
If you want to look up a business on the web then a paid directory is actually likely to be a bit more useful than a non paid one since the companies that have the cash to buy space are more likely to have a bigger stock.
I no longer use Yahoo and Lycos for much however because the information in their index is so outdated and baddly organized. I get the feeling that most of the data is several years out of date.
Google works and appears to have established itself as a premium brand. It may only index a part of the web but the relevance feedback means that it is indexing the right part...
Anyone who turns on a cable news talk show these days still has a 50:50 chance of seeing a Clinton hate fest. Like get over it guys, he isn't even in office.
Now some folk may be interested in that stuff but for the appologists of the traditional media to claim that the net is encouraging a monoculture of views is somewhat ridiculous.
What this comes down to is that the traditional media have been on a yellow journalism binge ever since the OJ Simpson trial. The traditional media are set up for reporting on one news story that lasts for eight months or more at a time and allows for endless ramifications. The only place real political issues get dicsussed in the US is on the Net.
Hence the allegations in the report are not only wrong, it is the traditional media that are the threat to diversity of thought and the net that is the solution.
If folk must trade Warez then they could at least save the rest of us the holier than thou "we are doing the artists the biggest favor" line.
Napster is no longer the threat to the RIAA, and not just because the filter means that it is no longer any use. With Napster the unit of exchange is the track. With an MP3 player built round a large hard drive the unit of exchange is suddenly the CD collection.
I have one of the Acrchos devices and have so far ripped about 40 CDs for my own use. However there is nothing to stop me from copying my CD collection onto the Jukebox and then going round to a neighbor and copying them onto his hard drive.
What is more this mode of exchange is probably 'fair use' since it is genuinely peer to peer and does not involve Napster corporation acting as middleman contributing to the infringement.
Jukebox copying does not have the same geographic reach as Napster. But the number of tracks exchanged at a time is dramatically higher.
That is unlikely since the main franchise these days is through the pocket book and not the ballot box.
However the current administration is clearly not listening to the high tech top earners, it is listening to old money plutocrats.
Warren Buffet, Gates and Co have good reason to want tax cuts to be given to the middle and working class rather than directly to the ultra-rich. More money in consumers hands means the economy grows faster, means my share portfolio grows.
The six percent tax cut on offer from Bush would at best reduce my taxes by a few thousand. On the other hand the drop in the NASDAQ since he was selected has cost me several millions. And the cretin thinks he is doing me a favor?
As Denis Miller said 'I didn't expect him to narrow the chasm between the rich and the poor this way'.
If it would return us to 4% growth and the NASDAQ to 4000 it would be just fine by me if Clinton was made President again and allowed to run the country out of his choice of Heffner's Playboy Mansion or the Chicken Ranch in Nevada.
Of course people choose to avoid certain arguments. This does not necessarily mean that they only want to hear what they agree with.
The arguments I don't want to hear are SPAM, certain trolls and certain boring idealogues. I simply don't want to hear from the type of people who claim to have an absolute solution to all the worlds problems based on the works of Karl Marx, Lenin, Ayn Rand, the second ammendment, Milton Freedman or the Bible. Nor do I want to hear from either side of the abortion debate.
It is not that I am uninterested in the issues raised. I just don't care for circular argument, whether from the right or the left. Fortunately since the fall of the USSR we have had a few years freedom from lefftie megabores. Unfortunately these types are regrouping with a bunch of nebulous complaints they call 'globalism'. Meanwhile right wing idealogue bores are running the country.
Ulitmately there are always people who try to rise to the top of any movement by being the most extreeme advocate of ideological purity. It is very easy to get notice by being extreeme. It is not the positions that people vote to exclude, it is the people.
Slashdot does have a built in bias, but it is not overwhelming. The quickest way to increase Karma is to attack Microsoft, the only negative points I have ever got are from defending MSFT. I don't think that in general moderation is on the side taken.
The same cannot be said for the traditional media. During the last election Chris Mathews said of Al Gore's proposal to have weekly Presidential debates 'he just wants to discuss boring stuff like issues he doesn't want to discuss politics'. In other words the media don't want to discuss who will govern, they want to discuss whether the imbecile or the liar should be elected - the frame of reference they wanted to discuss.
The other curious feature of US media is the insistence of Journalists that all communications must be mediated by them. We don't see politicians debating issues like happens in every other country, we see journalists actring as proxies for politicians.
Given the abbysmal service of the traditional media the net can do no worse.
The C-Chip blanks the screen at any display of the christian coalition
The L-chip replaces Microsoft adverts with Linux ads
The M-Chip swirches the channel to CNBC each time Maria Bartiromo appears on the floor of the NYSE.
The O-Chip does nothing
The S-Chip censors anything to do with the Spice girls
The W-Chip turns to another channel whenever the Florida Fraudster shows up
The X-Chip causes subtitles to be displayed explaining why the plots of the X-files are based on junk science.
That's enough chips - Ed.
After getting publicity for their reluctant decision to charge we will be reading a week later about their decision not to charge.
Take a look at the list of 'students', Stephen Wolfram, Kurt Thearling and a bunch of others. This was after Wolfram was pretty well known.
I don't see that the paper is that dramatically amazing. It is much harder to anticipate stuff than design it, what the paper is more notable for is the lack of Negroponte like idiocies - self stocking fridges, wearable computers and other stuff we will never need, want or care about.
Of course in typical geek fashion the loosers who write the game could probably succeed if they put a tenth the effort that they put into the game into setting up gang bangs. It is better to travel hopefully than to arrive.
The games industry tends to be faddish, they come and go. These days even Pokemon is showing signs it has run its course.
The toy business is pretty cut throat and margins are pretty lousy. Consider the number of people you need to write and sell an RPG manual compared to a 'dummies guide' or the like, then think how many copies you are likely to sell.
I suspect that an open source RPG scene could be constructed. After all most of the fun of RPG is invented by the players anyway. The key would be to find some way to use the net to collaborate and to find someone who could keep the whole project together - making sure that the relative strengths of trolls, goblins and dragons was sensible.
It would also be a good plan for folk to work out some way of using a computer to do the druge work of managing the rules.
I think it would be eminently doable by someone with enough Perl hacking abilities and time.
Quite so, which is why the lamers don't need to be any more sophisticated.
If more people stripped down the servers before they deployed them there would be fewer incidents. When I deploy a hardened system I remove ftpd from the inetd file and delete the executable off the system, same for sendmail, finger, nfs etc.
A lot of security problems could also be eliminated by better O/S and programming language design. On the VAX system any attempt to overwrite the stack caused an exception. Array bounds checking was arround and standard in the 1960s. Today we have to put up with buffer overrun errors. It should not be necessary to take the performance hit of Java just to get array bounds checking (and yes I know the markethead claim that there is no hit if you code right - it is maketting bollocks)
UNIX could do with a complete clean up job. There is far too much complexity and left over dross from years ago hanging arround.
Ad hoc descriptions of vulnerabilities only get so far however. Most of the time the average lamer is trying techniques that were reported on Bugtraq years before and were patched and CERT advised months ago.