RTOFA (Read The Other Friggin' Article), Seagate LLC is indeed based in the US:
"Seagate Technology, the Scotts Valley-based hard disk drive manufacturer..."
While it doesn't explicitly say that Scotts Valley is in the US, I don't recall there being any town in Japan called Scotts Valley. However, there was reference to a town called Beaver Falls in the brilliant Prince of Space (thank you, MST3K), so who knows what other Anglocized towns there.
Despite all the sturm und drang over DRM'ed concert releases being the next big thing on the horizon, at least one band ignored the DRM bandwagon. Barenaked Ladies used the resources of their promoter Nettwerk (and not through their record company) to release MP3s of each concert during the first leg of their tour this year. You can download any of the bunch direct from their web site, for $13.99. What complicated, strings-attached scheme do they use to transfer the music? That's right, a friggin' ZIP file. Pay your money, pull down your concert, enjoy the MP3s. I'm proud to say I bought two of their shows, one I personally attended, and a second just because I heard other fans rave about the particular show. Trust us, RIAA, and we'll keep you wealthy with products like this. Don't treat us like friggin' thieves.
So-called "plain english" in law is generally anything but "plain". It's subject to interpretation, which the courts are then required to examine and rule on the legality and constitutionality of said interpretation.
IANAL, of course, nor do I really agree with the concept behind the decision. Towns and cities that fill in service gaps by building and maintaining infrastructure (like power plants and transmission lines) shouldn't be precluded from offering other services that take advantage of that investment. Cities run public transportation on the roads they also run. Should that be allowed to be called illegal by a state commission or law? After all, commissioners (and legislators) can be cajoled by private donations into giving a leg-up to a private transportation company that wants to make a buck by filling in for the illegal city-run bus line.
In the end, this Supreme Court decision is reasonable, because the federal government shouldn't be able to tell a state that decisions its PUC makes are legal or illegal - that's basic states rights. Doesn't mean PUCs are doing the right thing though.
Think of the $614mil as a mosquito bite. Get enough of em together, and eventually, you're scratching like crazy to deal with the itchiness of the bites. And there's always a chance that one of those bites will cause malaria or West Nile (equivilent to the market freak-out that subsequent fines could cause).
"A pinch creates a similar electromagnetic pulse, but without the fuss of mass destruction and death. So instead of Hiroshima, you'd be getting the seventeenth century."
Ok, I just wanted to post a quote from one of my favorite TV screen saver movies. Still, it's somewhat on-topic.
Heh AC, you were lucky not to be running some of their initial codecs. They came out with a codec for high latency clients (like mine, >50ms RTTs between client on the east coast and gateway on the west coast) about a year ago, and it's been excellent. And we did train up two IT folks on the product, watching it go from working-but-occasionally-crap-sound to working-with-generally-good-sound.
As one might expect, the press release is a bunch of marketing crap, utterly lacking in tech specs. Still, it leaves me wondering how this software will compare to Cisco's Windows-based Softphone. At my company, we tried it out on our laptops, while also using their hardware 7960G. The hardware phone was consistently superior, as the SoftPhone took huge resources to run (you could barely run other apps with it up and dialing). I still use the hardware phone from home today, in conjunction with a company-managed IP telephony gateway, calling folks over a VPN as well as calling others nationwide. Call quality is pretty solid, although only after a lot of mystery codec installation by our IT admin. I also use Vonage at home, and it's clearly better than both Cisco solutions (although it also uses a Cisco ATA 186 analog-to-VoIP adapter).
But much of the remainder of the support on this issue have come from people using the advantages of touch-screen voting to sell "electronic voting", acting as if the touch-screens are inseperable from the idea of storing votes for tabulation on fragile, black-box electronic media, and banking on public confusion about All Things Computer to assume people won't notice this. [emphasis mine]
It's not confusion - it's ignorance. The plebes that make up our electorate think computer = Microsoft Windows. They don't think of the thousands of different specialized computers that are used in everyday life.
The proponents of touch-screen voting are trying to capitalize on the most successful computing paradigm of the last 20 years: the point-and-click GUI. People trust that if you point-and-click, the program runs (the "click" being analogous to a toaster or TV power button - you click it, it works). If you drag-and-drop, the file is copied (or moved or run or deleted, depending on where you dropped it). People know how it should work, so they trust that it does work. That implicit trust is where it goes wrong, as we've discussed innumerable times ("Hidden bits can't be trusted").
Btw, I do like the idea of dumbing down Scantrons you propose. The point is to have an accountable paper trail, and that does it quite nicely.
There's no handy preferences/tools menu option to set this in Mozilla, but it's still pretty easy to enable in Windows (tested on Win2K, Moz 1.4.1):
- Browse to the URL "about:config" (no quotes, of course) - Under the filter entry at the top of the page, enter "mailnews.message_display.d". This will give you a single config entry, "mailnews.message_display.disable_remote_image" - Double click this config entry, and change the value from false to true - Close and restart Mozilla, open an email that previously had an image, and voila, it won't display. Note that this only works for remotely-served images. Other HTML elements (tables, forms, text) will still be served, it appears. Still, this'll take care of those annoying hidden gifs in spam mail, as well as the enormous HOT WET TEENS NOW images in pr0n spam.
...is known as the Gateway Connected DVD Player. It's the exact same system as the Oritron, right down to the (Windows-only:( ) streaming server. It's currently retailing for $199, and includes a Gateway-branded 802.11b card (I think it's a rebranded D-Link card, judging by the antenna casing). Given Gateway's superior rep for service, I felt a little more comfortable buying this unit over the ones from GoVideo and Oritron.
Pros: Audio and video playing works exactly as advertised (even low-bit MP3s sound great), transcoded video works nicely, wireless works with WEP (although you have to enter the key in 24-bit hex through the remote).
Cons: Library support highly lacking (can't shuffle playlists, only plays alphabetically through an album), plays some DivX files as audio-only (haven't figured that one yet), aforementioned lack of OGG/AAC/QT support.
And why buy it? Can I build a PC with quality audio for $199? Nope.
Seriously, Be proved that you can't compete with Microsoft with an OS on commodity hardware. Not when Microsoft can kill you before you ever get started just by making a phone call.
To be clear, I'm not disagreeing with this statement that MS is the 800 lb. gorilla through which all x86 OS competition must pass. However, to be fair, Be was working with from the absolute bottom. They had nothing but a slick OS, and few application developers beyond their own people. That, coupled with MS's illegal OEM tactics, is what killed Be.
On the other hand, Apple has a lengthy history of producing quality hardware and software. They've held a varying-sized niche in personal computing, and I'd love to see them take it to the next level. With a BSD core, we know x86 portability is considerably easier now that it's ever been. I bought an IPod, and I'm buying iTunes through Windows. I'd rather be giving all my money to Apple, but I can't see myself spending the premium for their hardware.
I certainly understand the history of x86 cloning and developments. The reality is that people wanted home computers, they wanted them relatively cheaply, and they wanted to be able to share apps with friends. Windows 3.1, for all its flaws, gave them this. Win95 made it prettier. Win98 made it (slightly) more stable. Win2K made it much more stable. WinXP dumbed it down so that MS could capture even the biggest dopes (although really, I don't think it's been very successful capturing new users, just retaxing old ones).
Up to XP, Windows (and most of its apps and multimedia) was easy to copy, and ran on cheap hardware. Longhorn sounds like they're eliminating half of what made Windows so popular, its portability. I'd love to see Apple challenge them on the cheap hardware front.
Points all well taken regarding MS' attempts at ubiquity, but notice that they aren't dominating in any of their other markets.
I've heard this a million times, and I've disagreed with it a million times. I'm a hobbyist, and want to build my own system rather than pay the premium for a retail system. I'd also like to avoid the scourge that is Microsoft. I've run Linux on the desktop, and while it's decent, it's nowhere near as slick and seamless as Macs. I'd love to run it, but I can't build my own Mac. So, it's rock and hard place. Microsoft seems to have done ok financially, despite giving up the inherent revenue stream of proprietary hardware. I'll wait patiently til it happens, but it's what I'd love to see.
Oh, and it has to come with "Duke Nukem Forever" preinstalled;)
With Longhorn and its rumors of DRM-crippled media, and non-network-centric applications 2+ years from a reality, this is a perfect time for Apple to produce an OS for x86. Users desire things that work, and are easily exchanged with others, intellectual property and piracy arguments be damned. It's why MS won the desktop and office apps to begin with - you could install their OS and office suite on other PCs without an issue. XP began to cripple that, and people clearly don't like the crippling, resorting to cracks as need be.
From the multimedia file perspective of iTunes' AAC vs. WMAs, Apple can take that ball and run with it. Rendezvous streaming allows for reasonable sharing, and iTunes allows for uncrippled CD burning (and reripping, for those who dig the MP3 thing). It's not unfettered, but it's bound to be better than what Longhorn brings us.
In short, Apple, please port OS X. Or OS XI, if that's what you decide to call it. I'll buy it at retail, and I've never directly bought an x86 OS (other than Red Hat, natch) in my life.
With the regionalization of Linux distros, SuSE has always been known as Europe's Linux (German company, strong EU language support inherent, etc.). I'm curious to see if the EU will try to flex its regulatory muscles rather than allow a US company to buy SuSE. Obviously, they can't cry anti-trust, but who knows what other regulations they could come up with.
That being said, why not contract the nice folks at MIT, Carnagie Mellon and Berkeley to do this particular job for Uncle Sam?
As has been made clear by their actions on numerous occasions, this administration favors conservative business concerns, period. Universities are typically bastions of liberal thought. So, uh, there's your answer.
Slashdot Mirror
RTOFA (Read The Other Friggin' Article), Seagate LLC is indeed based in the US:
"Seagate Technology, the Scotts Valley-based hard disk drive manufacturer..."
While it doesn't explicitly say that Scotts Valley is in the US, I don't recall there being any town in Japan called Scotts Valley. However, there was reference to a town called Beaver Falls in the brilliant Prince of Space (thank you, MST3K), so who knows what other Anglocized towns there.
That's a bold statement.
Hee hee.
Despite all the sturm und drang over DRM'ed concert releases being the next big thing on the horizon, at least one band ignored the DRM bandwagon. Barenaked Ladies used the resources of their promoter Nettwerk (and not through their record company) to release MP3s of each concert during the first leg of their tour this year. You can download any of the bunch direct from their web site, for $13.99. What complicated, strings-attached scheme do they use to transfer the music? That's right, a friggin' ZIP file. Pay your money, pull down your concert, enjoy the MP3s. I'm proud to say I bought two of their shows, one I personally attended, and a second just because I heard other fans rave about the particular show. Trust us, RIAA, and we'll keep you wealthy with products like this. Don't treat us like friggin' thieves.
So-called "plain english" in law is generally anything but "plain". It's subject to interpretation, which the courts are then required to examine and rule on the legality and constitutionality of said interpretation.
IANAL, of course, nor do I really agree with the concept behind the decision. Towns and cities that fill in service gaps by building and maintaining infrastructure (like power plants and transmission lines) shouldn't be precluded from offering other services that take advantage of that investment. Cities run public transportation on the roads they also run. Should that be allowed to be called illegal by a state commission or law? After all, commissioners (and legislators) can be cajoled by private donations into giving a leg-up to a private transportation company that wants to make a buck by filling in for the illegal city-run bus line.
In the end, this Supreme Court decision is reasonable, because the federal government shouldn't be able to tell a state that decisions its PUC makes are legal or illegal - that's basic states rights. Doesn't mean PUCs are doing the right thing though.
Think of the $614mil as a mosquito bite. Get enough of em together, and eventually, you're scratching like crazy to deal with the itchiness of the bites. And there's always a chance that one of those bites will cause malaria or West Nile (equivilent to the market freak-out that subsequent fines could cause).
Someone used a pinch. To quote Basher:
"A pinch creates a similar electromagnetic pulse, but without the fuss of mass destruction and death. So instead of Hiroshima, you'd be getting the seventeenth century."
Ok, I just wanted to post a quote from one of my favorite TV screen saver movies. Still, it's somewhat on-topic.
Digital Rights Managment Year in Review
/. invented its own hacked spelling. Fight the power!
Apparently, someone has patented proper spelling of the word "management", so
Unfortunately, you might be shown a room that actually has a bath in it but no sign of a toilet ;)
Obviously, you have never been to the dorm or apartment of an American college student. Toilet? Sink? Tub? Hey, whatever you can hit.
Anyway I always thought that you Americans travelled with pistols and used those to communicate with non-english speakers.
That's only NRA members and star athletes, and even then, they yell first, shoot later.
Outstanding. This thing will finally make the common Ugly American practice of yelling actually useful:
*hold PDA to face* Ahem! "WHERE IS THE BATHROOM?!" *hold PDA to foreigner's ear*
Heh AC, you were lucky not to be running some of their initial codecs. They came out with a codec for high latency clients (like mine, >50ms RTTs between client on the east coast and gateway on the west coast) about a year ago, and it's been excellent. And we did train up two IT folks on the product, watching it go from working-but-occasionally-crap-sound to working-with-generally-good-sound.
As one might expect, the press release is a bunch of marketing crap, utterly lacking in tech specs. Still, it leaves me wondering how this software will compare to Cisco's Windows-based Softphone. At my company, we tried it out on our laptops, while also using their hardware 7960G. The hardware phone was consistently superior, as the SoftPhone took huge resources to run (you could barely run other apps with it up and dialing). I still use the hardware phone from home today, in conjunction with a company-managed IP telephony gateway, calling folks over a VPN as well as calling others nationwide. Call quality is pretty solid, although only after a lot of mystery codec installation by our IT admin. I also use Vonage at home, and it's clearly better than both Cisco solutions (although it also uses a Cisco ATA 186 analog-to-VoIP adapter).
My mistake. Here I was thinking such a preference would be in the Mail/News preferences section. Thanks much for the clarification.
But much of the remainder of the support on this issue have come from people using the advantages of touch-screen voting to sell "electronic voting", acting as if the touch-screens are inseperable from the idea of storing votes for tabulation on fragile, black-box electronic media, and banking on public confusion about All Things Computer to assume people won't notice this. [emphasis mine]
It's not confusion - it's ignorance. The plebes that make up our electorate think computer = Microsoft Windows. They don't think of the thousands of different specialized computers that are used in everyday life.
The proponents of touch-screen voting are trying to capitalize on the most successful computing paradigm of the last 20 years: the point-and-click GUI. People trust that if you point-and-click, the program runs (the "click" being analogous to a toaster or TV power button - you click it, it works). If you drag-and-drop, the file is copied (or moved or run or deleted, depending on where you dropped it). People know how it should work, so they trust that it does work. That implicit trust is where it goes wrong, as we've discussed innumerable times ("Hidden bits can't be trusted").
Btw, I do like the idea of dumbing down Scantrons you propose. The point is to have an accountable paper trail, and that does it quite nicely.
There's no handy preferences/tools menu option to set this in Mozilla, but it's still pretty easy to enable in Windows (tested on Win2K, Moz 1.4.1):
- Double click this config entry, and change the value from false to true
- Browse to the URL "about:config" (no quotes, of course)
- Under the filter entry at the top of the page, enter "mailnews.message_display.d". This will give you a single config entry, "mailnews.message_display.disable_remote_image"
- Close and restart Mozilla, open an email that previously had an image, and voila, it won't display. Note that this only works for remotely-served images. Other HTML elements (tables, forms, text) will still be served, it appears. Still, this'll take care of those annoying hidden gifs in spam mail, as well as the enormous HOT WET TEENS NOW images in pr0n spam.
On second thought, I kinda liked the pr0n...
"Please don't mod me down"?
This comment is not funny
Well, maybe it is
...is known as the Gateway Connected DVD Player. It's the exact same system as the Oritron, right down to the (Windows-only :( ) streaming server. It's currently retailing for $199, and includes a Gateway-branded 802.11b card (I think it's a rebranded D-Link card, judging by the antenna casing). Given Gateway's superior rep for service, I felt a little more comfortable buying this unit over the ones from GoVideo and Oritron.
Pros: Audio and video playing works exactly as advertised (even low-bit MP3s sound great), transcoded video works nicely, wireless works with WEP (although you have to enter the key in 24-bit hex through the remote).
Cons: Library support highly lacking (can't shuffle playlists, only plays alphabetically through an album), plays some DivX files as audio-only (haven't figured that one yet), aforementioned lack of OGG/AAC/QT support.
And why buy it? Can I build a PC with quality audio for $199? Nope.
I've gotta admit that's pretty interesting commentary, but I wish I understood why you chose to semi-randomly place certain words in bold font. ;)
Seriously, Be proved that you can't compete with Microsoft with an OS on commodity hardware. Not when Microsoft can kill you before you ever get started just by making a phone call.
To be clear, I'm not disagreeing with this statement that MS is the 800 lb. gorilla through which all x86 OS competition must pass. However, to be fair, Be was working with from the absolute bottom. They had nothing but a slick OS, and few application developers beyond their own people. That, coupled with MS's illegal OEM tactics, is what killed Be.
On the other hand, Apple has a lengthy history of producing quality hardware and software. They've held a varying-sized niche in personal computing, and I'd love to see them take it to the next level. With a BSD core, we know x86 portability is considerably easier now that it's ever been. I bought an IPod, and I'm buying iTunes through Windows. I'd rather be giving all my money to Apple, but I can't see myself spending the premium for their hardware.
I certainly understand the history of x86 cloning and developments. The reality is that people wanted home computers, they wanted them relatively cheaply, and they wanted to be able to share apps with friends. Windows 3.1, for all its flaws, gave them this. Win95 made it prettier. Win98 made it (slightly) more stable. Win2K made it much more stable. WinXP dumbed it down so that MS could capture even the biggest dopes (although really, I don't think it's been very successful capturing new users, just retaxing old ones).
Up to XP, Windows (and most of its apps and multimedia) was easy to copy, and ran on cheap hardware. Longhorn sounds like they're eliminating half of what made Windows so popular, its portability. I'd love to see Apple challenge them on the cheap hardware front.
Points all well taken regarding MS' attempts at ubiquity, but notice that they aren't dominating in any of their other markets.
I've heard this a million times, and I've disagreed with it a million times. I'm a hobbyist, and want to build my own system rather than pay the premium for a retail system. I'd also like to avoid the scourge that is Microsoft. I've run Linux on the desktop, and while it's decent, it's nowhere near as slick and seamless as Macs. I'd love to run it, but I can't build my own Mac. So, it's rock and hard place. Microsoft seems to have done ok financially, despite giving up the inherent revenue stream of proprietary hardware. I'll wait patiently til it happens, but it's what I'd love to see.
;)
Oh, and it has to come with "Duke Nukem Forever" preinstalled
With Longhorn and its rumors of DRM-crippled media, and non-network-centric applications 2+ years from a reality, this is a perfect time for Apple to produce an OS for x86. Users desire things that work, and are easily exchanged with others, intellectual property and piracy arguments be damned. It's why MS won the desktop and office apps to begin with - you could install their OS and office suite on other PCs without an issue. XP began to cripple that, and people clearly don't like the crippling, resorting to cracks as need be.
From the multimedia file perspective of iTunes' AAC vs. WMAs, Apple can take that ball and run with it. Rendezvous streaming allows for reasonable sharing, and iTunes allows for uncrippled CD burning (and reripping, for those who dig the MP3 thing). It's not unfettered, but it's bound to be better than what Longhorn brings us.
In short, Apple, please port OS X. Or OS XI, if that's what you decide to call it. I'll buy it at retail, and I've never directly bought an x86 OS (other than Red Hat, natch) in my life.
...the Puppetry of the Penis guys didn't think of this first.
"Is that supposed to be...Jabba?! Oh man *retch*"
Heh, surprised the headline for the article wasn't: Voting Machines Slashdot Election HQ
With the regionalization of Linux distros, SuSE has always been known as Europe's Linux (German company, strong EU language support inherent, etc.). I'm curious to see if the EU will try to flex its regulatory muscles rather than allow a US company to buy SuSE. Obviously, they can't cry anti-trust, but who knows what other regulations they could come up with.
That being said, why not contract the nice folks at MIT, Carnagie Mellon and Berkeley to do this particular job for Uncle Sam?
As has been made clear by their actions on numerous occasions, this administration favors conservative business concerns, period. Universities are typically bastions of liberal thought. So, uh, there's your answer.