I'll tell you what I can do with it: My lame neighbors in the rental house next door are too cheap to buy curtains, so we're treated to glaring light every night through my bedroom window, and our housemate upstairs is treated every morning to the twiggy, pasty not-very-attractive goth chick bouncing up and down on her pudgy, pasty, loser boyfriend in their bedroom in full view of his kitchen. Not something he really wants to accompany his coffee every day.
I figure one of these recording the view from *inside* my house (to maintain some semblance of legality) would be a nice deterrent. The window's not near a computer, so this wireless camera would be quite convenient. If they got off on the exposure... oy.
Maybe this is a dumb newbie question, but I should probably ask it before trying out this new 4.2 release. I recently attempted to install 4.1 on a 486 box for use as a router, and it completed the install routine ok. However, on first boot, it hangs at the boot loader. From the behavior, it seems as if the 4.1 boot loader is compiled for pentium and above and panics pretty fast. So much for my first experience with BSD.
Is this normal? Should this behavior change with 4.2? Can I use the 4.2 cd to do a simple install on a 486, or do I have to (a) roll my own from source or (b) install an older rev and upgrade from there?
What has flex done for you/your company? Why do you (or don't you) prefer flex to a fixed schedule?
Quite simply, flextime has allowed my employer to employ me. A year ago, I was working as an independent consultant. My wife and I have a small child. With the flexibility of my consultancy, we were able to work out home childcare with another couple, so that one of the four of us was at home each day. Not only is that important to us, but it also saves us a lot of money for daycare.
My current employer, by offering a good benefit package with family healthcare, flexible working hours, and good technology to work with, was able to bring me in, even though they were offering a decidedly average full-time salary (which is substantially less than I could have made on contract). Why? Because doing interesting work without crimping my family is an appealing option that overrides the choice between good money vs. great money.
Without flexible working hours? No way. I would have turned down the offer in a heartbeat. I'm by no means a big hoo-hah in my field, but I have enough experience that I can reasonably shape the conditions of my employment. Were I younger or single, of course, I might go for a high-travel or fixed-hour job. But I think the correlation between more experienced, valuable workers and the requirement for job flexibility and good benefits is undeniable. Without them, most places (imho lots of now-defunct dotcoms, for example) tend to collect a workforce of greenhorns and gamblers.
I should "knuckle down"? Are you implying that I should seek to emulate knuckledraggers like Bush? Funny that you should praise Bush, a blowhard who's never done an honest day of work in his life and doesn't have two neurons to rub together. America has been rapidly improving just fine without his ilk.
Besides, Bush lost the popular vote, which means he's a lame duck president from day one. Some victory. Maybe after 8 years of prosperity through hard work, many forgot that "moral fiber" doesn't feed the kids or lead to productivity. It just increases the level of irrelevant crap we have to deal with.
That's why the Technocrat got my vote and the moron didn't.
I'm not sure there's real news yet: The SDMI proclamation and the Salon reporting is just a war of words at this point. What will be of real significance is when an SDMI format is selected, files becomes available, and can be played by commercially available devices. THEN it will be significant if there are cracks of the chosen SDMI format.
imho, I don't think that the people motivated to produce the best cracks (and to build gui crack tools, which are what would do the real damage to SDMI) are also motivated to share the results with the SDMI folks. The real news will be whether successful, reproducable cracks and crack tools become available immediately after the SDMI release.
Ain't no original thought in any of my suggestions, just a combination in this particular instance. (Isn't Thompson's suggestion pretty widely known?) In fact, I think someone alluded to a compiler hack earlier in the discussion. The point was that the viewed or stolen code might have been a cover for something else, and that there are a lot of insidious something-else's.
Code, code, code. Who gives a rat's ass about their hideous source code? Not me. If I were in the cracker's shoes (funny that, I'm white and look at my footgear often), I would carefully evaluate what actions would give the most bang for my hacking buck:
Medium bang/buck option: Look at source for a mainstream product: I might figure out how to exploit errors and conditions I wouldn't otherwise find, if I could dig through the sea of crap code.
Big bang/buck but risky option: Modify the source for a mainstream product: I might be able to slide hooks or tools into a large population, but I run the risk of discovery when code is dif'ed for QA and component testing. Kind of inelegant, if you ask me.
Huge bang/buck option: Modify the code repository or insert hacked compilers at MS that add hooks or tools into libraries or other code at compile time: Then I can infiltrate a huge user base through multiple future MS products with little or no risk of discovery; i.e. no code review will show the hacks, because they never exist in the source. (Imagine if the compiler used to compile Visual C++ was hacked.) Then create unrelated accounts, copy some unrelated code and intentionally leave tracks as a cover.
Hmm. If I were going to the trouble of entering the lair of the great software satan, I'd surely want more than to look at spagetti code from some hyped-up codeslave just out of college. I'd want to get some mileage out of it, and what better way than to do something with continuing returns? Better to salt the fields than just burn them, eh?
It looks pretty nice. It's compact, centralizes a bunch of features I'd like to have in a single device (addr book, dialer, sms, phone), but I see no answer to an (imho) obvious question: Can I call my ISP for network connectivity? Screw CDPD, I'd be thrilled to have plain old PPP dialup for other network apps. And I could even pop the sucker into a folding keyboard (doesn't Targus OEM the one for handspring?) and have wireless network connectivity, reasonable flexibility in the apps I use, and reasonably fast input. Look'a me; I'm foaming at the mouth.
Bzzzt. TNEF is used to encapsulate quite a few things, such as rich text formatting. In this manner, it competes directly with open standards (such as HTML) for formatting/layout of text and embedded/referenced objects within a message. Read the Exchange spec, or ask someone whose NDA has expired.
Sure, you can configure the client to send ascii or html, but this should be the default behavior, not the use of a half-baked encapsulation format for proprietary garbage that provides no better functionality than existing standards (even at the time when TNEF was first proposed in the Capone/touchdown spec). This is classic Microsoft "do less with more" that serves to enhance their market share, and not the client experience. It'll be in fashion to beat up on them for this behavior as long as they deserve it.
It sounds like the designer in question was emulating Frank Lloyd Wright's attitude without his skill. FLW did thorough planning in many of his designs, right down to the furniture, plants, and textiles. Some of his house designs basically need his furniture to be functional. But he was good at striking a balance between the technical requirements (function, lighting, security) and the human requirements (comfort, accessibility, etc).
If you're only good at one end of the spectrum (as seems the case with the technical requirement-driven undersized desk/noisy environment example), you ought not be in the business of designing total environments -- especially not trying to come up with an ideal environment for a large number of people with differing functions, habits, and needs. Why is FLW so famous? Because it's really hard to get the environmental design balance right. And even his best designs don't fit everyone -- some people find his office spaces to be ugly and unlivable.
The upshot is that the definition of my ideal workspace is probably useless to anyone else. A more reasonable approach to designing a successful workplace, IMHO, would be to meet the technical requirements at a common level, while not expecting to meet human requirements at a similar common level. That appears to make some designers' brains hurt, offending their sense of consistency. Get the hell over it.
smart armor for the road?
on
Techno Jacket
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· Score: 3
Hmm. A few days ago, an inattentive boob pulled out from a side street in front of me, totaling my motorcycle and sending me to the hospital. It would have been quite nice if my gear contained impact sensors and sent a message to my wife that there had been an incident, and whether to pick me up at the hospital or morgue based on lifesigns.
Given that I'm serious about integrating a bike-mounted GPS unit, radar detector, trip computer, and a small x86 system with a solid-state disk (for music, nav, communication) with display (mounted on the sleeve or upper thigh for visibility while riding) and other i/o (speaker/mic in helmet, minimal handlebar-based button input), it doesn't seem all that farfetched to add a couple of serial inputs such as impact, IR-based heartbeat, temp, and position. If you're wearing a big honkin' darth-vader-lookin' suit anyway (search for Aerostich or Cortech suits if you're unfamiliar with these) -- why not go to town with it?
Jumping through the music industry's hoops is the music industry's idea if what is the legal, ethical, and "right" thing to do. Not mine. Sorry that wasn't clear. If/. kept a longer history of comments, you'd see comments similar to yours.
(And I should have thought twice before clicking on 'submit' -- Shimoon did mention adding value, but the threadbare mention says a lot about how trivial the industry thinks of the issue, and deserved a bit more flaming, but that's water under the bridge.)
There's an implicit assumption on Shamoon's part that people, given an option, will naturally tend towards the legal, ethical, "right" thing to do, which is to jump through the music management industry's hoops and use controlled distribution, management, and playback mechanisms. I call bullshit on that. People will do what is easiest, and find a way to rationalize their behavior in whatever manner they please. The only exception to this is to provide real value to the consumer, creating an incentive to play by the industry rules.
Face it -- SDMI provides no benefit to the consumer. It's sort of like the "PCS" technology marketing in the cellular telephone market. At introduction, the audio quality of the digital cellphones was worse and the signal weaker than good analog phones. The marketing of "digital" phones was dismal because it offered the customer no real benefit. However, the cellphone companies that could push 3-5 digital calls per cellsite radio instead of one analog call had a real incentive to make the service attractive, and started adding customer value (like messaging, call management, etc) and marketing the package as "PCS" as distinct from "digital." PCS has been successful, because there's value in it for the customer.
Same goes for SDMI. Until there's some value in it for the customer, such as offering music subscriptions or access to digital liner notes, artwork, etc, SDMI is dead as a doornail. And even then, it'll be relatively trivial to bypass it by conversion to open formats. If Shamoon's strategies are the best that SDMI has to offer, then SDMI is in real trouble.
I disagree with the notion that free-exchange technologies themselves screw the artist. It's like a gun -- it's a blunt technology that vastly amplifies the behavior of the user. Some people want to screw the fat music management companies. Some people find joy in ripping off the artist. I WANT to pay the artist. It's that pesky ethics thing again.
On the surface, what it missing is some form of micropayment that isn't yet technically feasible. Perhaps an EFT routing number stored in the MP3 tag information along with the artist name and song title, so that if I like the tune, I can send a buck directly to that artist's account. Maybe some other nifty low-overhead method.
But here's the catch -- it has to be voluntary. The reality that the music industry is unwilling to face is that the genie is out of the bottle. MP3 is a high-enough quality format for most listeners, so there's very little incentive for the listener to switch to an encrypted or otherwise limited format. SDMI is stillborn, and other copyright-control methods haven't even pierced the consumer sphere of awareness. Any near-future encryption and control technology will be quickly decoded and rendered irrelevant.
What will save the indie artist is a culture of contribution and support. A culture of control and enforcement doesn't just play into the existing music industry's hands, it IS them, it creates a NEED for them. On the other hand, a culture of support takes away the thrill of 'screwing the man' from music piracy, and promotes indie artists by sending the message "If you want to hear more of this, send a buck for this song to 325077763:765364:4." You have to focus on the culture surrounding the business before the business model will change, and have people WANT to pay.
Why is this a surprise? When the Athlon first came out, the first motherboard to become widely available was the FIC SD11. FIC rushed the SD11 product to market, and screwed up the voltage regulator design. This design error caused a periodic spontaneous reboot -- not a lot of good press for AMD, even though the fault was not with the processor.
FIC identified and fixed the problem, and replaced the defective motherboards. I'm sure the same will happen with Gateway's systems, although I have to take issue with an earlier poster's implication that Gateway customers are seeking a premium quality product. Gateway is pretty clearly a middle-o-the-road system supplier, both in terms of price and quality. This would not be the first time the Gateway has crossed the line from their usual design scrimping into shoddy components or QA. (Not that I'm knocking Gateway; I think their products are usually a good value for the price.)
The notion of privity in this article is a curious one. If the GPL's infectious nature is found untenable under the argument concerning lack of privity, what effect does this have on other software licenses? Does this mean that if I find an open box of Win2K or Office2K, I am free to read the CD and load DLLs and other components into my product as long as I wasn't privy to the original purchaser's agreement to the shrinkwrap EULA or install the software and agree to the installer EULA? Maybe a copy of Visual Cafe from a used software store and a developer make a better example.
Woah. Seems to me that there are a lot of closed software interests that would prefer not to face such an argument, even if it ultimately doesn't hold up.
Two problems relating to the SD11, both now resolved:
1. The mtrr handling error was fixed by upgrading the kernel.
2. The system would spontaneously reboot every 20-40min, less if under load. I ended up swapping out the power supply, memory, and several cards before a FIC rep told me that there were power management problems on early revs of the SD11 (mine was "0253" -- 028x on were ok if memory serves me right). FIC tech support were up-front and professional, and issued an RMA directly, not thru the retailer. While the problem was irritating, the replacement quick. The system's been running flawlessly since then (7-8 months).
"...a good drill, several hundred feet of cable and I had an Internet-ready house."
Yep. I'm in my second house, fully "internet-ready" even tho it's a 1919 woodframe monolith. When remodeling the bathroom (walls & ceiling out), we took the opportunity to run several strands of cat5 from the basement to the second floor, install segmentable hubs, and provide ethernet jacks at most of the phone jacks. It was even easier in my old house (a quaint 1909 shoebox), where the panel upgrade to 200a was the perfect opportunity to put in isolated system power, hi-grade power filtering, and ethernet everywhere. It really ain't that hard.
Here's a tip: Go to Home Despot/Eagle/Lowe's or whatever well-stocked DIY store you can find, and buy the 5-foot long drillbit in the electrical section. It seems goofy, but it's a fantastic thing for retrofit wiring. Take it into your basement, and use it to drill up thru the 1st floor into the wall. If there is no opening in the wall (switchplate), use the 5-foot extension bit to keep drilling until you hit the 2nd floor/attic. Now you need a second person to hold the drill in place, with the bit poking up two floors above you. Go upstairs and grab a hold of the end of the bit (in the attic or thru an access/outlet hole). Notice that the bit has a small hole in the blade. Thread the wire thru the hole, and use the bit to pull the wire back down to the basement. Drill, pull. Drill, pull. Repeat as needed, pulling each wire back to a central point in the basement. A few rj45 crimps and staples later, add a hub or two connected to your dsl/cable/isdn/pots device, and you are the proud owner of an internet-ready house.
That one silly piece of metal with a hole in it makes the job tremendously easier. And besides, (a) it's an excuse to buy new tools [drillbit $20us, extension $15us, rj45 crimper $35us], and (b) it's oh-so-much classier if you provide networking in a house that isn't made out of.325" sheetrock and outgassing toxic crap for the next 10 years.
The point is well taken, but it's also pretty extreme. I'm just saying that bloatware follows more easily when there are copious resources to waste. When there's not enough memory to do the job properly, bad hacks become the norm. But in the middle, there is a sweet spot where there's enough resources (memory, speed, UI) to do the job properly, but not so much that the system is too big (physically, as in the case of the palm) or overpowered for the task at hand. Balance is a good thing!
Another area where elegant coding still matters *a lot* is on handheld computers and devices such as cellphones and net appliances. Palm is doing well because they started fresh on a new platform, and the platform (nice form factor and sw, but limited memory and cpu) encourages compact, elegant code. Whatever you think of the various Win32 platform interfaces, it's pretty clear that the UI on WinCE devices is a limiting factor, and the underlying Win32 legacy does not encourage compact or particularly efficient coding.
Can you imagine what a Palm device could do with the power they're throwing at WinCE these days? 32mb Ram? 150MHz? Of course, the downside of Palm's current advantage is that they're becoming complacent and slow. I'd love to see Palm/Handspring maintain their business focus on that sweet spot where the form & function is more than adequate, but doesn't encourage programmers to take the attitude of "aw, hell, we've got cpu to burn!" But I fear they will not. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Yet another company flounders about, trying to bludgeon people into submission by hitting them with a sack of lawyers. Are Sweden and Canada within US court jurisdiction? Exposing what a tool does can't possibly be illegal (but exposing how it does it, or providing a tool to defeat it might be, if the hero/perps are within US jurisdiction.) How utterly silly. If Mattel had just shut up and wiped the egg off their faces, they would see little or no real damage to their revinue stream. Instead, they make a big deal out of it, make a futile attempt to squelch the exposure, and end up with a situation where several orders of magnitude more people download the code, tell their friends about it, and generally make it publicly known that Cyberpatrol and their ilk are ineffective at best, and an affront to American civil liberties -- potentially tanking the revinue stream. How is it that such a big organization can't muster the collective brain cells and foresight to see beyond the tip of their corporate nose?
As a side note, do the authors *want* the code mirrored, or just distributed directly? I'll have to look again, but I didn't see a license in the code. Obviously the code and essay make it clear that it's a protest on principle, but it'd be nice to know the desired propogation.
J
not much to worry about
on
A New DeCSS
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· Score: 2
There are two reasons why such bottom-feeders should not be a major worry:
(1) Eliminating a specific class or instance of code or data is virtaully impossible because of the tendency of the internet (I speak of the net as including the human end-nodes) to route around censorship using the highly-respected "Whack-A-Mole" distribution model. And of course, overt limitations on the availability of information exponentially increases the interest in and demand for it.
(2) Any company making a business out of seeking and stamping out illicit data/code on the web must implicitly understand that if their actions are sucessful enough to become even a deterrent, then they will put themselves out of business. None would openly admit to this, but unless these are nonprofit or volunteer organizations their purpose is to make money. Thus their financial model requires enough success -- but not too much -- to provide a sustainable revinue stream.
I think the actions taken by the company in this case are intrusive and generally reprehensible, but there are some interesting issues here:
"Business speech is not subject to the same protections as political speech," said John Roberts, a Minneapolis attorney who specializes in cyberlaw.
The statement is true, but obtuse. You can say or print some pretty evil, nasty things in a political context, and not be sued for slander, libel, or defamation of character. But the issue here is whether business speech is differently protected from common speech. IANAL, but the comparison to political speech seems irrelevant.
"You can't say whatever you want about a company."
Again, it's true, in the strictest sense. You can say or print things that are slanderous and libelous, and most likely you'll get sued. Is this different from saying similar things about your neighbor or co-worker? I don't think so. How does this relate to the search and seizure of private email? If private, personal email was used to broadcast a message (i.e. multiple copies sent to a broad range of recipients) and that message can be shown to be legally actionable, then maybe they do have a leg to stand on. It's not private email anymore. However, the implication of Roberts' statement is that companies enjoy some sort of special protection or extension of slander/libel definitions. Such an implication is just silly, unless you take into account that Northwest Air has enough money to form a protective barrier against critical speech based on litigiousness.
JV's words are only surprising from the vantage of those who thought there was honesty left in Hollywood. We should not be so naive. What he's said is completely in line with the role he's supposed to play, which has nothing at all to do with the merits of their case or the truth of the matter. What matters to the MPAA et al is a business objective, and any means to that end is apparently OK -- including lying under oath (misrepresenting playback technology as a means to duplicate content) and bullying foreign governments into search/seizure acts using baseless claims of potential criminal acts.
JV is saying the appropriate thing at the appropriate time to help those means. Nevermind that his words are a disgustingly twisted abrogation of the truth, that he's deliberately confusing the issue of DVD encryption hacking for playback versus pirating (which has no need for decryption). Valenti and his MPAA cohorts know that they are lying. It's just another Hollywood role. The role he's playing is one solely calculated to confuse the issue, redefine the common understanding of the decryption tools away from the real technolegal situation, and deceive people into believing a thriving business is somehow the victim of the open source movement. It's a classic well-funded, well-executed snowjob. One can only hope that there's enough brainpower and willpower in the judicial system to survive it.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll tell you what I can do with it: My lame neighbors in the rental house next door are too cheap to buy curtains, so we're treated to glaring light every night through my bedroom window, and our housemate upstairs is treated every morning to the twiggy, pasty not-very-attractive goth chick bouncing up and down on her pudgy, pasty, loser boyfriend in their bedroom in full view of his kitchen. Not something he really wants to accompany his coffee every day.
I figure one of these recording the view from *inside* my house (to maintain some semblance of legality) would be a nice deterrent. The window's not near a computer, so this wireless camera would be quite convenient. If they got off on the exposure... oy.
Maybe this is a dumb newbie question, but I should probably ask it before trying out this new 4.2 release. I recently attempted to install 4.1 on a 486 box for use as a router, and it completed the install routine ok. However, on first boot, it hangs at the boot loader. From the behavior, it seems as if the 4.1 boot loader is compiled for pentium and above and panics pretty fast. So much for my first experience with BSD.
Is this normal? Should this behavior change with 4.2? Can I use the 4.2 cd to do a simple install on a 486, or do I have to (a) roll my own from source or (b) install an older rev and upgrade from there?
J
What has flex done for you/your company? Why do you (or don't you) prefer flex to a fixed schedule?
Quite simply, flextime has allowed my employer to employ me. A year ago, I was working as an independent consultant. My wife and I have a small child. With the flexibility of my consultancy, we were able to work out home childcare with another couple, so that one of the four of us was at home each day. Not only is that important to us, but it also saves us a lot of money for daycare.
My current employer, by offering a good benefit package with family healthcare, flexible working hours, and good technology to work with, was able to bring me in, even though they were offering a decidedly average full-time salary (which is substantially less than I could have made on contract). Why? Because doing interesting work without crimping my family is an appealing option that overrides the choice between good money vs. great money.
Without flexible working hours? No way. I would have turned down the offer in a heartbeat. I'm by no means a big hoo-hah in my field, but I have enough experience that I can reasonably shape the conditions of my employment. Were I younger or single, of course, I might go for a high-travel or fixed-hour job. But I think the correlation between more experienced, valuable workers and the requirement for job flexibility and good benefits is undeniable. Without them, most places (imho lots of now-defunct dotcoms, for example) tend to collect a workforce of greenhorns and gamblers.
J
(Fine, I'll take the bait.)
I should "knuckle down"? Are you implying that I should seek to emulate knuckledraggers like Bush? Funny that you should praise Bush, a blowhard who's never done an honest day of work in his life and doesn't have two neurons to rub together. America has been rapidly improving just fine without his ilk.
Besides, Bush lost the popular vote, which means he's a lame duck president from day one. Some victory. Maybe after 8 years of prosperity through hard work, many forgot that "moral fiber" doesn't feed the kids or lead to productivity. It just increases the level of irrelevant crap we have to deal with.
That's why the Technocrat got my vote and the moron didn't.
I'm not sure there's real news yet: The SDMI proclamation and the Salon reporting is just a war of words at this point. What will be of real significance is when an SDMI format is selected, files becomes available, and can be played by commercially available devices. THEN it will be significant if there are cracks of the chosen SDMI format.
imho, I don't think that the people motivated to produce the best cracks (and to build gui crack tools, which are what would do the real damage to SDMI) are also motivated to share the results with the SDMI folks. The real news will be whether successful, reproducable cracks and crack tools become available immediately after the SDMI release.
Ain't no original thought in any of my suggestions, just a combination in this particular instance. (Isn't Thompson's suggestion pretty widely known?) In fact, I think someone alluded to a compiler hack earlier in the discussion. The point was that the viewed or stolen code might have been a cover for something else, and that there are a lot of insidious something-else's.
J
Code, code, code. Who gives a rat's ass about their hideous source code? Not me. If I were in the cracker's shoes (funny that, I'm white and look at my footgear often), I would carefully evaluate what actions would give the most bang for my hacking buck:
Hmm. If I were going to the trouble of entering the lair of the great software satan, I'd surely want more than to look at spagetti code from some hyped-up codeslave just out of college. I'd want to get some mileage out of it, and what better way than to do something with continuing returns? Better to salt the fields than just burn them, eh?
It looks pretty nice. It's compact, centralizes a bunch of features I'd like to have in a single device (addr book, dialer, sms, phone), but I see no answer to an (imho) obvious question: Can I call my ISP for network connectivity? Screw CDPD, I'd be thrilled to have plain old PPP dialup for other network apps. And I could even pop the sucker into a folding keyboard (doesn't Targus OEM the one for handspring?) and have wireless network connectivity, reasonable flexibility in the apps I use, and reasonably fast input. Look'a me; I'm foaming at the mouth.
Well, how 'bout it?
J
Bzzzt. TNEF is used to encapsulate quite a few things, such as rich text formatting. In this manner, it competes directly with open standards (such as HTML) for formatting/layout of text and embedded/referenced objects within a message. Read the Exchange spec, or ask someone whose NDA has expired.
Sure, you can configure the client to send ascii or html, but this should be the default behavior, not the use of a half-baked encapsulation format for proprietary garbage that provides no better functionality than existing standards (even at the time when TNEF was first proposed in the Capone/touchdown spec). This is classic Microsoft "do less with more" that serves to enhance their market share, and not the client experience. It'll be in fashion to beat up on them for this behavior as long as they deserve it.
And I will firewall Sony at my wallet.
'nuff said.
It sounds like the designer in question was emulating Frank Lloyd Wright's attitude without his skill. FLW did thorough planning in many of his designs, right down to the furniture, plants, and textiles. Some of his house designs basically need his furniture to be functional. But he was good at striking a balance between the technical requirements (function, lighting, security) and the human requirements (comfort, accessibility, etc).
If you're only good at one end of the spectrum (as seems the case with the technical requirement-driven undersized desk/noisy environment example), you ought not be in the business of designing total environments -- especially not trying to come up with an ideal environment for a large number of people with differing functions, habits, and needs. Why is FLW so famous? Because it's really hard to get the environmental design balance right. And even his best designs don't fit everyone -- some people find his office spaces to be ugly and unlivable.
The upshot is that the definition of my ideal workspace is probably useless to anyone else. A more reasonable approach to designing a successful workplace, IMHO, would be to meet the technical requirements at a common level, while not expecting to meet human requirements at a similar common level. That appears to make some designers' brains hurt, offending their sense of consistency. Get the hell over it.
Hmm. A few days ago, an inattentive boob pulled out from a side street in front of me, totaling my motorcycle and sending me to the hospital. It would have been quite nice if my gear contained impact sensors and sent a message to my wife that there had been an incident, and whether to pick me up at the hospital or morgue based on lifesigns.
Given that I'm serious about integrating a bike-mounted GPS unit, radar detector, trip computer, and a small x86 system with a solid-state disk (for music, nav, communication) with display (mounted on the sleeve or upper thigh for visibility while riding) and other i/o (speaker/mic in helmet, minimal handlebar-based button input), it doesn't seem all that farfetched to add a couple of serial inputs such as impact, IR-based heartbeat, temp, and position. If you're wearing a big honkin' darth-vader-lookin' suit anyway (search for Aerostich or Cortech suits if you're unfamiliar with these) -- why not go to town with it?
Jumping through the music industry's hoops is the music industry's idea if what is the legal, ethical, and "right" thing to do. Not mine. Sorry that wasn't clear. If /. kept a longer history of comments, you'd see comments similar to yours.
(And I should have thought twice before clicking on 'submit' -- Shimoon did mention adding value, but the threadbare mention says a lot about how trivial the industry thinks of the issue, and deserved a bit more flaming, but that's water under the bridge.)
There's an implicit assumption on Shamoon's part that people, given an option, will naturally tend towards the legal, ethical, "right" thing to do, which is to jump through the music management industry's hoops and use controlled distribution, management, and playback mechanisms. I call bullshit on that. People will do what is easiest, and find a way to rationalize their behavior in whatever manner they please. The only exception to this is to provide real value to the consumer, creating an incentive to play by the industry rules.
Face it -- SDMI provides no benefit to the consumer. It's sort of like the "PCS" technology marketing in the cellular telephone market. At introduction, the audio quality of the digital cellphones was worse and the signal weaker than good analog phones. The marketing of "digital" phones was dismal because it offered the customer no real benefit. However, the cellphone companies that could push 3-5 digital calls per cellsite radio instead of one analog call had a real incentive to make the service attractive, and started adding customer value (like messaging, call management, etc) and marketing the package as "PCS" as distinct from "digital." PCS has been successful, because there's value in it for the customer.
Same goes for SDMI. Until there's some value in it for the customer, such as offering music subscriptions or access to digital liner notes, artwork, etc, SDMI is dead as a doornail. And even then, it'll be relatively trivial to bypass it by conversion to open formats. If Shamoon's strategies are the best that SDMI has to offer, then SDMI is in real trouble.
I disagree with the notion that free-exchange technologies themselves screw the artist. It's like a gun -- it's a blunt technology that vastly amplifies the behavior of the user. Some people want to screw the fat music management companies. Some people find joy in ripping off the artist. I WANT to pay the artist. It's that pesky ethics thing again.
On the surface, what it missing is some form of micropayment that isn't yet technically feasible. Perhaps an EFT routing number stored in the MP3 tag information along with the artist name and song title, so that if I like the tune, I can send a buck directly to that artist's account. Maybe some other nifty low-overhead method.
But here's the catch -- it has to be voluntary. The reality that the music industry is unwilling to face is that the genie is out of the bottle. MP3 is a high-enough quality format for most listeners, so there's very little incentive for the listener to switch to an encrypted or otherwise limited format. SDMI is stillborn, and other copyright-control methods haven't even pierced the consumer sphere of awareness. Any near-future encryption and control technology will be quickly decoded and rendered irrelevant.
What will save the indie artist is a culture of contribution and support. A culture of control and enforcement doesn't just play into the existing music industry's hands, it IS them, it creates a NEED for them. On the other hand, a culture of support takes away the thrill of 'screwing the man' from music piracy, and promotes indie artists by sending the message "If you want to hear more of this, send a buck for this song to 325077763:765364:4." You have to focus on the culture surrounding the business before the business model will change, and have people WANT to pay.
Why is this a surprise? When the Athlon first came out, the first motherboard to become widely available was the FIC SD11. FIC rushed the SD11 product to market, and screwed up the voltage regulator design. This design error caused a periodic spontaneous reboot -- not a lot of good press for AMD, even though the fault was not with the processor.
FIC identified and fixed the problem, and replaced the defective motherboards. I'm sure the same will happen with Gateway's systems, although I have to take issue with an earlier poster's implication that Gateway customers are seeking a premium quality product. Gateway is pretty clearly a middle-o-the-road system supplier, both in terms of price and quality. This would not be the first time the Gateway has crossed the line from their usual design scrimping into shoddy components or QA. (Not that I'm knocking Gateway; I think their products are usually a good value for the price.)
The notion of privity in this article is a curious one. If the GPL's infectious nature is found untenable under the argument concerning lack of privity, what effect does this have on other software licenses? Does this mean that if I find an open box of Win2K or Office2K, I am free to read the CD and load DLLs and other components into my product as long as I wasn't privy to the original purchaser's agreement to the shrinkwrap EULA or install the software and agree to the installer EULA? Maybe a copy of Visual Cafe from a used software store and a developer make a better example.
Woah. Seems to me that there are a lot of closed software interests that would prefer not to face such an argument, even if it ultimately doesn't hold up.
my $0.02
Jon
Two problems relating to the SD11, both now resolved:
1. The mtrr handling error was fixed by upgrading the kernel.
2. The system would spontaneously reboot every 20-40min, less if under load. I ended up swapping out the power supply, memory, and several cards before a FIC rep told me that there were power management problems on early revs of the SD11 (mine was "0253" -- 028x on were ok if memory serves me right). FIC tech support were up-front and professional, and issued an RMA directly, not thru the retailer. While the problem was irritating, the replacement quick. The system's been running flawlessly since then (7-8 months).
"...a good drill, several hundred feet of cable and I had an Internet-ready house."
.325" sheetrock and outgassing toxic crap for the next 10 years.
Yep. I'm in my second house, fully "internet-ready" even tho it's a 1919 woodframe monolith. When remodeling the bathroom (walls & ceiling out), we took the opportunity to run several strands of cat5 from the basement to the second floor, install segmentable hubs, and provide ethernet jacks at most of the phone jacks. It was even easier in my old house (a quaint 1909 shoebox), where the panel upgrade to 200a was the perfect opportunity to put in isolated system power, hi-grade power filtering, and ethernet everywhere. It really ain't that hard.
Here's a tip: Go to Home Despot/Eagle/Lowe's or whatever well-stocked DIY store you can find, and buy the 5-foot long drillbit in the electrical section. It seems goofy, but it's a fantastic thing for retrofit wiring. Take it into your basement, and use it to drill up thru the 1st floor into the wall. If there is no opening in the wall (switchplate), use the 5-foot extension bit to keep drilling until you hit the 2nd floor/attic. Now you need a second person to hold the drill in place, with the bit poking up two floors above you. Go upstairs and grab a hold of the end of the bit (in the attic or thru an access/outlet hole). Notice that the bit has a small hole in the blade. Thread the wire thru the hole, and use the bit to pull the wire back down to the basement. Drill, pull. Drill, pull. Repeat as needed, pulling each wire back to a central point in the basement. A few rj45 crimps and staples later, add a hub or two connected to your dsl/cable/isdn/pots device, and you are the proud owner of an internet-ready house.
That one silly piece of metal with a hole in it makes the job tremendously easier. And besides, (a) it's an excuse to buy new tools [drillbit $20us, extension $15us, rj45 crimper $35us], and (b) it's oh-so-much classier if you provide networking in a house that isn't made out of
Jon
The point is well taken, but it's also pretty extreme. I'm just saying that bloatware follows more easily when there are copious resources to waste. When there's not enough memory to do the job properly, bad hacks become the norm. But in the middle, there is a sweet spot where there's enough resources (memory, speed, UI) to do the job properly, but not so much that the system is too big (physically, as in the case of the palm) or overpowered for the task at hand. Balance is a good thing!
Another area where elegant coding still matters *a lot* is on handheld computers and devices such as cellphones and net appliances. Palm is doing well because they started fresh on a new platform, and the platform (nice form factor and sw, but limited memory and cpu) encourages compact, elegant code. Whatever you think of the various Win32 platform interfaces, it's pretty clear that the UI on WinCE devices is a limiting factor, and the underlying Win32 legacy does not encourage compact or particularly efficient coding.
Can you imagine what a Palm device could do with the power they're throwing at WinCE these days? 32mb Ram? 150MHz? Of course, the downside of Palm's current advantage is that they're becoming complacent and slow. I'd love to see Palm/Handspring maintain their business focus on that sweet spot where the form & function is more than adequate, but doesn't encourage programmers to take the attitude of "aw, hell, we've got cpu to burn!" But I fear they will not. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Jon
Yet another company flounders about, trying to bludgeon people into submission by hitting them with a sack of lawyers. Are Sweden and Canada within US court jurisdiction? Exposing what a tool does can't possibly be illegal (but exposing how it does it, or providing a tool to defeat it might be, if the hero/perps are within US jurisdiction.) How utterly silly. If Mattel had just shut up and wiped the egg off their faces, they would see little or no real damage to their revinue stream. Instead, they make a big deal out of it, make a futile attempt to squelch the exposure, and end up with a situation where several orders of magnitude more people download the code, tell their friends about it, and generally make it publicly known that Cyberpatrol and their ilk are ineffective at best, and an affront to American civil liberties -- potentially tanking the revinue stream. How is it that such a big organization can't muster the collective brain cells and foresight to see beyond the tip of their corporate nose?
As a side note, do the authors *want* the code mirrored, or just distributed directly? I'll have to look again, but I didn't see a license in the code. Obviously the code and essay make it clear that it's a protest on principle, but it'd be nice to know the desired propogation.
J
There are two reasons why such bottom-feeders should not be a major worry:
(1) Eliminating a specific class or instance of code or data is virtaully impossible because of the tendency of the internet (I speak of the net as including the human end-nodes) to route around censorship using the highly-respected "Whack-A-Mole" distribution model. And of course, overt limitations on the availability of information exponentially increases the interest in and demand for it.
(2) Any company making a business out of seeking and stamping out illicit data/code on the web must implicitly understand that if their actions are sucessful enough to become even a deterrent, then they will put themselves out of business. None would openly admit to this, but unless these are nonprofit or volunteer organizations their purpose is to make money. Thus their financial model requires enough success -- but not too much -- to provide a sustainable revinue stream.
J
I think the actions taken by the company in this case are intrusive and generally reprehensible, but there are some interesting issues here:
"Business speech is not subject to the same protections as political speech," said John Roberts, a Minneapolis attorney who specializes in cyberlaw.
The statement is true, but obtuse. You can say or print some pretty evil, nasty things in a political context, and not be sued for slander, libel, or defamation of character. But the issue here is whether business speech is differently protected from common speech. IANAL, but the comparison to political speech seems irrelevant.
"You can't say whatever you want about a company."
Again, it's true, in the strictest sense. You can say or print things that are slanderous and libelous, and most likely you'll get sued. Is this different from saying similar things about your neighbor or co-worker? I don't think so. How does this relate to the search and seizure of private email? If private, personal email was used to broadcast a message (i.e. multiple copies sent to a broad range of recipients) and that message can be shown to be legally actionable, then maybe they do have a leg to stand on. It's not private email anymore. However, the implication of Roberts' statement is that companies enjoy some sort of special protection or extension of slander/libel definitions. Such an implication is just silly, unless you take into account that Northwest Air has enough money to form a protective barrier against critical speech based on litigiousness.
JV's words are only surprising from the vantage of those who thought there was honesty left in Hollywood. We should not be so naive. What he's said is completely in line with the role he's supposed to play, which has nothing at all to do with the merits of their case or the truth of the matter. What matters to the MPAA et al is a business objective, and any means to that end is apparently OK -- including lying under oath (misrepresenting playback technology as a means to duplicate content) and bullying foreign governments into search/seizure acts using baseless claims of potential criminal acts.
JV is saying the appropriate thing at the appropriate time to help those means. Nevermind that his words are a disgustingly twisted abrogation of the truth, that he's deliberately confusing the issue of DVD encryption hacking for playback versus pirating (which has no need for decryption). Valenti and his MPAA cohorts know that they are lying. It's just another Hollywood role. The role he's playing is one solely calculated to confuse the issue, redefine the common understanding of the decryption tools away from the real technolegal situation, and deceive people into believing a thriving business is somehow the victim of the open source movement. It's a classic well-funded, well-executed snowjob. One can only hope that there's enough brainpower and willpower in the judicial system to survive it.
Jon