"... or drum into the public somehow that "MHz has nothing to do with performance..."
Its a slow process, but with both Apple and AMD trying hard to educate consumers, in time, a new "benchmark" of a computer system's speed will be used... its just a matter of time, in my opinion.
Not to mention that eventually, as Intel's processors change architecturally (e.g. Itanium, McKinley), they themselves will have to educate consumers that an 800MHz Itanium processor can be faster than a 2.4GHz Pentium 4 (I'm not sure under what circumstances, having no direct experience with either processor, but certainly there is some benefit to Itanium, right?!?:)).
If you look at Itanium at 800MHz and compare it to say a G4 (or G5 when it debuts) running at 1GHz, or one of AMD's Hammers running at who knows what speed, what will this say about the "MHz Myth"??
unless the compiler/branch prediction is really, really good I suppose
I think this is kind of the point... the complexity/intelligence of branch prediction that is achievable in hardware (while quite amazing in and of itself, when you get right down to it), pales in comparison with what can be done by Transmeta's code-morphing *software*...
As with anything, though, their are various opinions on this - is it better to do certain tasks in software or in hardware... only time will tell, now that we have systems that take advantage of each of these approaches.
Just a quick FYI - apps aren't *written* for the Crusoe architecture... the only *app* per-se, that's written for it is Transmeta's code-morphing engine, which morphs the 32-bit x86 instructions into VLIW instructions for the Crusoe chip. Of course, the morphing engine could also handle 64-bit Itanium instructions, 32-bit PPC instructions, 64-bit UltraSparc III instructions, etc. Just a matter of Transmeta devoting resources to write their morphing engine for the particular instructions (and ensuring an adequate level of optimization is achievable). I imagine the code-morphing code is written in a relatively low-level language (assembler or something close to it)... or, its compiled from C and then optimized by hand by some very skilled engineers. In either case, the 256-bit-ness of the processor will only affect this code, not any other code.
Precisely... I can't imagine that we'd be exceeding the capacity of broadband provider's backbone connections if we eliminated all the illegal downloading being done.
And I'm not talking about pr0n, either... for the most part, that's perfectly legal. And that industry was thriving before broadband became popular! Stop downloading the MP3z, primarily (ISOz are bad, too, but that practice doesn't seem to have caught on *quite* as much.. yet).
Be my guest, download all the legitimate *indie* MP3s you want... I can't imagine that that would saturate your provider's pipe, though...
Without a doubt you're correct. For the average Joe, works at the office 9-5, leaves work at work and has a life, dial-up should be fine for most purposes and a little patience will got a long way with the larger downloads:).
I started needing broadband w/ Linux... its constantly being updated and I was constantly downloading new software or system updates or new ISOs, trying out different distros, whatever.
Then, I started working from home and needing to have a speedy connection to my Rackspace servers. Now, I VPN to various locations and broadband is essential to my livelihood. Essential enough that when searching for a house to move into, "location, location, location" became "location, location, broadband"...
I have Charter as well (Madison, WI) and I recall talking to a technician a while back who told me about new tiers being rolled out eventually (this was back when @Home was folding and Charter created "Charter Pipeline"). I haven't heard of the new tiers actually being released in our area yet, but I'm pretty sure I'm paying $50/mo. and I'm still capped at 128K upstream, unfortunately. $50/mo. is fine by me, I'd just like to have more upstream bandwidth for that money... I'd also like to see the 3Mbps downstream I had with @Home, but that's another matter...
See, that's the thing... they aren't pricing themselves out of the market because the DEMAND for broadband won't diminish without an alternative and these monopolies that are springing up (or mergers, if you will) are making it so that there aren't many alternatives... at least not widely available. I'm not sure why broadband isn't treated like phone access, long distance service, etc. The competition in that sector seems to be healthy and provides for relatively fair pricing, same with mobile phone service. If a few large providers are going to be allowed to exist, broadband should become a public utility and be regulated as such. Right?!?
Finally, a more intelligent post to Slashdot... its been a while.
The key thing that I agree with is that by and large, people don't conceive of Intellectual Property as actual property... likely, they don't conceive of intellectual property at all... seeing only the 'actual property' of the media.
You have a new business model that would equal their current revenue streams?
Please - have at it, I haven't heard any proposals yet that hold water. Art isn't really like software, as in The Cathedral and the Bazarre... there's no support to be had or to be charged for, right?
Cable is designed for one-way traffic to begin with. When people started wanting data over cable, a beast called "return path signal" was introduced. This is how the upstream connection works. Old cable equipment doesn't *easily* let this signal get back to the equipment that needs to receive it, from the cable modem in your house. It doesn't actively do anything to *block* it, per se, but it doesn't make it easy. Sometimes, this can be overcome with a return-path amplifier (as in my case), but sometimes, there just won't be enough signal either way. The downstream signal will *always* be stronger, because that's what the cable system was designed for to begin with.
Now, I'm no cable expert, so don't flame me, please. This is just what I've picked up from the various technicians that have come through my place, telling me that the splitters used in my apt. complex are OLD and don't let a certain signal range through cleanly, as they should. As I said before, a return path amp fixed me right up. But, I don't live out in the boondocks, so for me, it was mainly getting the signal strong enough so that it got past the various splitters installed in my building - once it hit the node, it was golden from there on out.
Read the other posts on this story - nobody's gotten ethernet + ppp to work via a Linux box, so in that case, no, a Linux boxen wouldn't work for this guy. The best (and simplest) I've heard so far has been getting a cable modem that handles the POTS modem itself, so that the router (be it consumer ware or a Linux boxen) can connect to the cable modem (only) and not have to worry about where the packets are coming from and where they're going!
I was just looking at a solution to protect an XP box from doing anything I didn't know about (inbound and outbound) and came across ZoneAlarm, apparently a very capable protection system for Windows. They have a free version as well as a 'Pro' version. Checkout www.zonealarm.com.
Let's get one really, really big thing straight here: Art is not information. Any individual does not have a right to own a Picasso. A reproduction of a Picasso? Sure! See the parallel? You may own a reproduction of Britney Spear's latest album, but under no circumstances are you entitled to any ownership of said album. The fact that the reproduction is an exact duplicate of said album doesn't change anything in the logistics.
In no way do I enjoy being placed on the side of the ??AA. Artists have a right to receive compensation for their work. If this compensation is removed, they will cease to do their work for it is quite simply not possible to only do art, not get paid for it, and survive in today's world. This goes for artists of every kind: actors, painters, singers, song-writers, etc. Regardless if the artist's work is appearing at your local college auditorium or if its at Best Buy, the social contract that our society has entered in to is the same.
And as for copyrighted content entering into the public domain after a time, I agree, this should happen. When it should happen, I don't know... there are very good arguments presented on both sides. When copyrighted work enters into the public domain, not only does nobody receive royalties from it anymore (which is all that most slashdotters seem to be concerned with), but any protection of said work is removed... so, copyrighted works can be used in contexts that are insensitive and reprehensible to the copyright holder, his/her family, or his/her estate. That is not cool. And, that was not envisioned by Locke, nor by Jefferson when they framed their views on this subject. The world was a very, very different place at that time. The world had some universally accepted precepts of decency. We no longer do. Subjecting creators of art to this is not only unfair, it can also be insulting and financially damaging.
I don't think its fair to say that cyrus doesn't use the Maildir format... it certainly does, it just uses a few more files to optimize access, nothing wrong with that - nothing in the basic Maildir format is changed, as I use SqWebMail to access my Maildir folders remotely, when I can't connect to my server via SIMAP.
Anyway, the fact that the format allows for this type of extension is a Good Thing(tm), right?
I have in excess of 46K email messages in my account alone, not to mention everyone elses accounts on my company's mail server. We use cyrus IMAP and qmail, both of which use the Maildir format mailboxes... every client I've used (Mozilla, Communicator, Outlook/OL Express, Mail.app on OS X, Eudora, and Papi-Mail on PalmOS) seem to have absolutely no problem with this setup. Most MUAs are intelligent enough not to download all your headers every time you connect, so unless you're getting 1000+ new emails everytime you open a particular folder, you're generally not going to need to read all those headers every time.
The server that runs this is a measly 600MHz PIII w/ 128MB RAM running RedHat 6.2 w/ a 20GB hard drive. I haven't gotten even close to running out of inodes, to my knowledge, and my server never goes down (really, the only times its gone down is when power has been cut to it and this has only happened twice in the past 1.8 yrs... long live Rackspace).
Maildir is specifically designed to handle mailboxes with large numbers of emails in them, contrary to other formats such as mbox. The problem with any sort of DB approach is the waste of space, even if you compress. A basic course in file structures will teach you a wealth of knowledge in this regard.
Imagine this: you have a table that stores everything you need to know about an email. You have a few distinct fields for commonly accessed headers (subject, from, to, cc, etc.) each of which would need to be 'text' blobs, since you cannot limit their size (you've seen the emails that have to/cc fields that are miles long, right?) - well, 'text' fields are notoriously poorly optimized in database engines and quite difficult to search (you can create an index on a part of a text field, but that might not be enough, right?). Next you have the message body which would also need to be a text field since you don't limit it's length, either.
Now, since the space for these fields (which don't *ever* change) is not optimized in the slightest, you might think that compressing them is a good idea, right? Well, what if an email is deleted - then you start looking at fragmented space in your database table which would need to be compacted periodically (much as mbox/.mbx files do today, if I recall).
All in all, storing each message to its own file is not really *that* bad... optimize the file subsystem beneath it, maybe allow for compression/encryption or that sort of thing, but otherwise, the folks that put together Maildir have certainly done a decent job!
I'm not entirely sure how saying I have higher ethics than the morons stealing music somehow translates into being closer to God, but considering I'm not religious, I'll have to politely say no, I don't believe that makes me closer to God.
As for all your arguments about precedence, that's great, thanks for the education, I don't disagree with you. Hell, I never said that I agree with what the RIAA/MPAA is trying to do here, I don't - I'm pissed off about it. BUT... and this is a big, big BUT - they aren't doing this "just because" they want to screw our rights as CONSUMERS over. They're doing this to protect THEIR rights as OWNERS of the material that is being sold.
All the comments from the folks that think I'm in league with the RIAA/MPAA or something are sorely off the mark - all I'm trying to say is that the blame for what the RIAA/MPAA is doing lays very, very squarely on all the music pirates out there, making CD copies for friends from MP3s that were downloaded, downloading music that hasn't been paid for by the recipient, and plain out copying CDs.
We wouldn't be here now if it weren't for YOU. Now, am I saying that I'm a better person than those that have transgressed in this way? No, not at all. With respect to music piracy, though, yeah - I think I've been handling that whole bit quite a bit more responsibly.
And as for the "free market" economy BS - you forget, you're not purchasing a wrench here, you're purchasing creativity (though in some cases, with the current crap thats being produced, that could certainly be argued). This isn't something that's negotiable. If the process that brings an artist's creative inspiration and talented execution into your living room is too expensive for you, TO DAMN BAD.
The process that goes into making a Ferrari, executing the designs and producing the vehicle, and anything else that's involved makes the end product rather pricey, doesn't it? Well - apparently there are people out there willing to pay for it... AND, it can't just be downloaded from the Internet or cloned by another manufacturer w/o recourse. The recourse would land the clone manufacturer in court... period. Of course, because a few individuals have thought up a clever scheme to be able to share intellectual property w/o any central authority to take to court, they think that's end game.
Its NOT! The content creators will do whatever they can to control their content (remember, THEY own it, WE do not... we purchase a right to enjoy the content which until recently was able to be shifted into various formats). If YOU want to purchase the latest Madonna song, go for it - its pretty expensive. BUT, once you have, you can give it to anyone you want... at that point, I imagine Madonna and the record label that sold you the rights to Madonna's song could care less - they've got the money, end of story.
Somehow, people think that because some ONE person purchased a song, that now its open season to be shared? Get real! If you can't afford the music, don't buy it... since when has stealing EVER been an option? You can't afford a plasma screen, but you can't steal one either, darn! When has "too expensive" ever translated into stealing for the general public?
Agreed... and at $750, you could get a new 600MHz iMac for about $49 more... I think they run $799 now ($699 if you can swing an educational discount). That iMac will certainly run a lot faster than the 96, and not just because of the 100MHz processor bump... my own 400MHz iMac DV would probably be faster, and I've sold a few extra iMacs I had for about $600 on eBay... the memory bus is faster than the '96s, it has firewire, which I don't think the '96 has w/o add-ons, etc. etc.
Not that I'm knockin' upgrade cards... there are good uses for 'em, too... I myself still have a 6290 layin' about, no upgrade card, but I boot it up on occasion to test certain things:)
You'd be amazed and what they will do if they're given the power that this article indicates they'll get soon. Do you *really* think they care more about the cost of an ADC than they care that their copyrighted materials are protected?
C'mon, folks... what did you *think* one of the largest industries in the nation was going to do when they saw everyone crapping on their copyrights? You thought "there are so many people doing it, they'll NEVER be able to stop us"... bwahahahahaha. Right?!? Yeah, thanks a lot to you piss ant morons that thought Napster, Morpheus, KaZaA, Limewire, OpenNap, etc., etc. were the coolest thing since sliced bread... "this isn't stealing, they OWE me... " or, "hell if *I'm* going to pay for music I don't even like *that* much"...
It doesn't matter if the recording industry was making more money during the height of Napster. The point is, people were stealing, copying and basically doing things that have been illegal for a long, long time and all the while, they thought nothing was going to come of it... tell your friends, hey, check this out - free music. "What? You PAID for that CD? I got it for free... without even having to leave my dorm room!"
If all people wanted to do was take CDs that they purchased and format-shift them to Ogg or MP3 or be able to purchase MP3s online so that they wouldn't have to buy an entire CD... do you think things would have gotten to this point as quickly? All the immature music pirates out there have brought this about... and from the folks that have enjoyed paying for our music and being able to format/time-shift it, we wholeheartedly thank you for bringing this kind of draconian control about.
Yesterday I was cynical, today I'm downright pissed off. Get it through your immature, thick skulls... not paying for something that costs money is stealing. Just because Linux is free doesn't mean everything else should be as well. If an artist wants to release their work for everyone to enjoy, for free, fine - so be it. But guess what, guys? That's the *artist's* choice to make NOT YOURS. And if the artist wants to sign up with a record label that YOU think is the bane of your existance and is dicking you over by charging $18 for the artist's album... guess what? That's STILL the *artist's* choice to make, NOT YOURS!
P2P is great as a technology, but all the geeks in the world screaming that it has legitimate uses won't keep measures like this from being rained down on us. And now that the genie is out of the bottle, you might as well sit back and enjoy things while you can, because pretty soon, things will start to suck. The fact of the matter is, when it comes to P2P, no matter what the legitimate uses are, the networks with the most traffic aren't using it for legitimate purposes, they're using it to infringe on copyright and they're using it to STEAL. Plain and simple. I'm not entirely sure how much simpler it can be put.
I'm only 24, but I have quite a bit more ethics and much more of a sense of responsibility when it comes to music piracy.
I recall when I was in high school and college, if I couldn't afford the newest CDs (which happened quite frequently) - I listened to the radio... commercials and all. I didn't get pissed off because the radio had commercials, either... this whole "lets have everything for free" bullshit is too much. Guess what? That's NOT capitalism... hell, that's not even "The Cathedral and the Bazaar"... that's some kind of utopian BS that hasn't ever and probably won't ever work. At least not in OUR life times.
My apologies for the tone of this, but I'm just as pissed about what the MPAA and RIAA are trying to do as the next geek.
You think PHP promotes itself? Why don't you ask the folks at Zend, the SPONSORS of your free software, if their promotion is free and if the development that makes PHP as wonderful as it is (I'm a PHP developer, too) is free as well.
I doubt it.
Oh, and MySQL AB, the company that writes the MySQL engine and provides support for it, ALSO spends money on marketing.
One last thing, the fact that you actually FOUND those sites on the 'Net means that someone's paying for the bandwidth used to get the information to your screen from across the continent or world. And probably paying a pretty penny if you didn't have to wait a long time to get what you were trying to get. Or, if you downloaded from a mirror, someone was nice enough to provide a server and bandwidth (which SOMEONE is paying for).
Did we forget that the world revolves around money, still?!? Maybe in 50 yrs it won't as much, but not here and now.
God, I'm awfully cynical today... no patience for folks that aren't seeing the big picture, I guess. My apologies to any that I've offended (or will offend in future posts today while I'm in this groove).
So, by that logic, if it isn't "brought to your attention" then it isn't something you want. Yet, after the record label's marketing brings something to your attention, that you wouldn't have heard of otherwise, and you buy it and LIKE IT... isn't that in direct contradiction to what you've said?!?
The record industry spends tons of money promoting artists that they think other people will enjoy listening to and by extension, will want to spend money on so that they (the recording industry) can make some money and the artist can make music instead of having to have a 9-5 job on the side.
I think what most people are upset about is that they're not one of the people making $40, $60, $150 an hour like all the people that work to bring a CD to market. Face it, you're the consumer. If you're *not* making that kind of money, the skill you're exercising is not valued in the same way as that of the people bringing that new album to best buy that are making the big $$ that drive the price of the CD up. If you *are* making those big $$, then you're either one of those people or you need to sit back and not complain because you can afford to pay $18 for a CD (incidentally, I can't remember the last time I paid $18 for an album at best buy, even a new release...)
The ones taking the risks are the ones making the money. If a label invests $100,000 in recording costs and all those extraneous costs I tried to list (not all-inclusive) and its record tanks, its lost money... the folks "doing the work" still get paid their salaries or contract labor fees regardless. So, why should THEY make boat loads of money if it isn't THEIR money that is being put on the line and risked for this new artist/new album or whatever? Think about it... economics, free enterprise, stock exchange... its all about risks, those that take large risks stand to lose a LOT and in the entertainment industry especially, actually DO lose a lot. But, on the flip side, when they win, they win big, bigger than practically any other industry, really.
I know all about recoupable expenses and I also know that if you want to recoup your expenses more quickly, you set the price of the product higher from the outset. That way, if a paricular album tanks, then you've at least recouped *some* costs and you aren't left with your pants around your ankles. On the other hand, if you took a risk on an artist and they end up being a huge hit, then your risk has paid off and you end up making a lot of money.
Does that mean all CDs should be a lot less so that record labels can't "strike it rich" when they discover an artist that's really hot?!? I don't think so - that's never going to fly because they won't ever take any risks if there isn't a good chance that they'll "RECOUP" their expenses.
At no point did I say that the record labels aren't making money hand over fist - sure, they are. But, it costs a ton of money to launch a new artist or even a new album for an existing artist. I also know that the artist doesn't necessarily get a lot of money when they're a huge hit, at least not right off. But, they wouldn't have BECOME a huge hit without the prior investment of the record labels, so that's an acceptable trade-off for most artists.
Your crash course in music industry economics is appreciated, but it doesn't change the fact that the cost of bringing that album to your local best buy is NOT $2.50 or some hack-neyed amount like that.
No, it doesn't. The recording labels out there aren't saying that it costs $18 to duplicate a CD (en masse), print jewel-case inserts and stuff everything into a package and shrink-wrap it so that you can't get into it.
Now, repeat after me: That's not what costs $18 per CD! What costs $18 per CD is the audio engineer that was paid to mix the tracks in the studio where the music was recorded; the rental time for that studio space and hi quality recording, mixing and sampling equipment; the designer that was paid to create the artwork you see on the jewel-case inserts and on the CD face; the copywriter that came up with what should be written on the inside sleeves of the jewel-case inserts; the production monkey that laid out the text + images in Quark for the jewel-case inserts. OK, so that all costs some money, right? Well, that's NOTHING compared with the cost of food, travel, housing that many recording labels provide their artists while they are recording. Some artists have VERY high demands for this... caviar, first class plane tickets, 5 star hotels, the works. That costs money. The promotion work that is done when the artist goes on tour - that costs money: TV spots, banner ads, Ticketmaster kick-backs, deposits for venues, etc., etc. The promotion work that is done when a new CD launches: getting the artist on talk shows, on MTV - speaking of MTV, getting the new video shot for MTV, VH1, etc., etc.
Guess what, folks?!? That ALL costs money, and lots of it. So much, in fact, that if a particular artist doesn't make it BIG most record labels lose their pants. Ever heard of a record label that doesn't have a big name artist signed? No? I'm not surprised... until a big artist is "discovered" a record label is nothing because it has NO MONEY.
There's a significant cost involved in promoting new music... now, should you have to pay for lots of bad artists to be able to release their music?!? Maybe not, but that's the breaks. You can't really weed out the good from the mediocre before you incur all those costs...
I'm quite tired of all these misinformed people thinking that they're paying an outrageous amount of money for a plastic disc with binary information encoded on it. WAKE UP! There's a lot more that goes on behind the scenes with the money that you're paying.
The link you sent uses a window.open from a javascript function that is called *as the link* - not from the 'onClick'... the window.open from 'onClick' is what is disabled, as this is "hidden" from the user... if its in the link (or a function called by the link), it is assumed that the user would *want* to be opening that window if they're clicking on the link.
Slashdot Mirror
Its a slow process, but with both Apple and AMD trying hard to educate consumers, in time, a new "benchmark" of a computer system's speed will be used ... its just a matter of time, in my opinion.
Not to mention that eventually, as Intel's processors change architecturally (e.g. Itanium, McKinley), they themselves will have to educate consumers that an 800MHz Itanium processor can be faster than a 2.4GHz Pentium 4 (I'm not sure under what circumstances, having no direct experience with either processor, but certainly there is some benefit to Itanium, right?!? :)).
If you look at Itanium at 800MHz and compare it to say a G4 (or G5 when it debuts) running at 1GHz, or one of AMD's Hammers running at who knows what speed, what will this say about the "MHz Myth"??
I think this is kind of the point ... the complexity/intelligence of branch prediction that is achievable in hardware (while quite amazing in and of itself, when you get right down to it), pales in comparison with what can be done by Transmeta's code-morphing *software* ...
As with anything, though, their are various opinions on this - is it better to do certain tasks in software or in hardware ... only time will tell, now that we have systems that take advantage of each of these approaches.
Just a quick FYI - apps aren't *written* for the Crusoe architecture ... the only *app* per-se, that's written for it is Transmeta's code-morphing engine, which morphs the 32-bit x86 instructions into VLIW instructions for the Crusoe chip. Of course, the morphing engine could also handle 64-bit Itanium instructions, 32-bit PPC instructions, 64-bit UltraSparc III instructions, etc. Just a matter of Transmeta devoting resources to write their morphing engine for the particular instructions (and ensuring an adequate level of optimization is achievable). I imagine the code-morphing code is written in a relatively low-level language (assembler or something close to it) ... or, its compiled from C and then optimized by hand by some very skilled engineers. In either case, the 256-bit-ness of the processor will only affect this code, not any other code.
Or download the ISOs ...
Precisely ... I can't imagine that we'd be exceeding the capacity of broadband provider's backbone connections if we eliminated all the illegal downloading being done.
... for the most part, that's perfectly legal. And that industry was thriving before broadband became popular! Stop downloading the MP3z, primarily (ISOz are bad, too, but that practice doesn't seem to have caught on *quite* as much .. yet).
... I can't imagine that that would saturate your provider's pipe, though ...
And I'm not talking about pr0n, either
Be my guest, download all the legitimate *indie* MP3s you want
$0.02
Without a doubt you're correct. For the average Joe, works at the office 9-5, leaves work at work and has a life, dial-up should be fine for most purposes and a little patience will got a long way with the larger downloads :).
... its constantly being updated and I was constantly downloading new software or system updates or new ISOs, trying out different distros, whatever.
...
I started needing broadband w/ Linux
Then, I started working from home and needing to have a speedy connection to my Rackspace servers. Now, I VPN to various locations and broadband is essential to my livelihood. Essential enough that when searching for a house to move into, "location, location, location" became "location, location, broadband"
I have Charter as well (Madison, WI) and I recall talking to a technician a while back who told me about new tiers being rolled out eventually (this was back when @Home was folding and Charter created "Charter Pipeline"). I haven't heard of the new tiers actually being released in our area yet, but I'm pretty sure I'm paying $50/mo. and I'm still capped at 128K upstream, unfortunately. $50/mo. is fine by me, I'd just like to have more upstream bandwidth for that money ... I'd also like to see the 3Mbps downstream I had with @Home, but that's another matter ...
See, that's the thing ... they aren't pricing themselves out of the market because the DEMAND for broadband won't diminish without an alternative and these monopolies that are springing up (or mergers, if you will) are making it so that there aren't many alternatives ... at least not widely available. I'm not sure why broadband isn't treated like phone access, long distance service, etc. The competition in that sector seems to be healthy and provides for relatively fair pricing, same with mobile phone service. If a few large providers are going to be allowed to exist, broadband should become a public utility and be regulated as such. Right?!?
Finally, a more intelligent post to Slashdot ... its been a while.
... likely, they don't conceive of intellectual property at all ... seeing only the 'actual property' of the media.
The key thing that I agree with is that by and large, people don't conceive of Intellectual Property as actual property
You have a new business model that would equal their current revenue streams?
Please - have at it, I haven't heard any proposals yet that hold water. Art isn't really like software, as in The Cathedral and the Bazarre ... there's no support to be had or to be charged for, right?
Cable is designed for one-way traffic to begin with. When people started wanting data over cable, a beast called "return path signal" was introduced. This is how the upstream connection works. Old cable equipment doesn't *easily* let this signal get back to the equipment that needs to receive it, from the cable modem in your house. It doesn't actively do anything to *block* it, per se, but it doesn't make it easy. Sometimes, this can be overcome with a return-path amplifier (as in my case), but sometimes, there just won't be enough signal either way. The downstream signal will *always* be stronger, because that's what the cable system was designed for to begin with. Now, I'm no cable expert, so don't flame me, please. This is just what I've picked up from the various technicians that have come through my place, telling me that the splitters used in my apt. complex are OLD and don't let a certain signal range through cleanly, as they should. As I said before, a return path amp fixed me right up. But, I don't live out in the boondocks, so for me, it was mainly getting the signal strong enough so that it got past the various splitters installed in my building - once it hit the node, it was golden from there on out.
Read the other posts on this story - nobody's gotten ethernet + ppp to work via a Linux box, so in that case, no, a Linux boxen wouldn't work for this guy. The best (and simplest) I've heard so far has been getting a cable modem that handles the POTS modem itself, so that the router (be it consumer ware or a Linux boxen) can connect to the cable modem (only) and not have to worry about where the packets are coming from and where they're going!
I was just looking at a solution to protect an XP box from doing anything I didn't know about (inbound and outbound) and came across ZoneAlarm, apparently a very capable protection system for Windows. They have a free version as well as a 'Pro' version. Checkout www.zonealarm.com.
Let's get one really, really big thing straight here: Art is not information. Any individual does not have a right to own a Picasso. A reproduction of a Picasso? Sure! See the parallel? You may own a reproduction of Britney Spear's latest album, but under no circumstances are you entitled to any ownership of said album. The fact that the reproduction is an exact duplicate of said album doesn't change anything in the logistics.
In no way do I enjoy being placed on the side of the ??AA. Artists have a right to receive compensation for their work. If this compensation is removed, they will cease to do their work for it is quite simply not possible to only do art, not get paid for it, and survive in today's world. This goes for artists of every kind: actors, painters, singers, song-writers, etc. Regardless if the artist's work is appearing at your local college auditorium or if its at Best Buy, the social contract that our society has entered in to is the same.
And as for copyrighted content entering into the public domain after a time, I agree, this should happen. When it should happen, I don't know ... there are very good arguments presented on both sides. When copyrighted work enters into the public domain, not only does nobody receive royalties from it anymore (which is all that most slashdotters seem to be concerned with), but any protection of said work is removed ... so, copyrighted works can be used in contexts that are insensitive and reprehensible to the copyright holder, his/her family, or his/her estate. That is not cool. And, that was not envisioned by Locke, nor by Jefferson when they framed their views on this subject. The world was a very, very different place at that time. The world had some universally accepted precepts of decency. We no longer do. Subjecting creators of art to this is not only unfair, it can also be insulting and financially damaging.
I don't think its fair to say that cyrus doesn't use the Maildir format ... it certainly does, it just uses a few more files to optimize access, nothing wrong with that - nothing in the basic Maildir format is changed, as I use SqWebMail to access my Maildir folders remotely, when I can't connect to my server via SIMAP.
Anyway, the fact that the format allows for this type of extension is a Good Thing(tm), right?
I have in excess of 46K email messages in my account alone, not to mention everyone elses accounts on my company's mail server. We use cyrus IMAP and qmail, both of which use the Maildir format mailboxes ... every client I've used (Mozilla, Communicator, Outlook/OL Express, Mail.app on OS X, Eudora, and Papi-Mail on PalmOS) seem to have absolutely no problem with this setup. Most MUAs are intelligent enough not to download all your headers every time you connect, so unless you're getting 1000+ new emails everytime you open a particular folder, you're generally not going to need to read all those headers every time.
... long live Rackspace).
... optimize the file subsystem beneath it, maybe allow for compression/encryption or that sort of thing, but otherwise, the folks that put together Maildir have certainly done a decent job!
The server that runs this is a measly 600MHz PIII w/ 128MB RAM running RedHat 6.2 w/ a 20GB hard drive. I haven't gotten even close to running out of inodes, to my knowledge, and my server never goes down (really, the only times its gone down is when power has been cut to it and this has only happened twice in the past 1.8 yrs
Maildir is specifically designed to handle mailboxes with large numbers of emails in them, contrary to other formats such as mbox. The problem with any sort of DB approach is the waste of space, even if you compress. A basic course in file structures will teach you a wealth of knowledge in this regard.
Imagine this: you have a table that stores everything you need to know about an email. You have a few distinct fields for commonly accessed headers (subject, from, to, cc, etc.) each of which would need to be 'text' blobs, since you cannot limit their size (you've seen the emails that have to/cc fields that are miles long, right?) - well, 'text' fields are notoriously poorly optimized in database engines and quite difficult to search (you can create an index on a part of a text field, but that might not be enough, right?). Next you have the message body which would also need to be a text field since you don't limit it's length, either.
Now, since the space for these fields (which don't *ever* change) is not optimized in the slightest, you might think that compressing them is a good idea, right? Well, what if an email is deleted - then you start looking at fragmented space in your database table which would need to be compacted periodically (much as mbox/.mbx files do today, if I recall).
All in all, storing each message to its own file is not really *that* bad
I'm not entirely sure how saying I have higher ethics than the morons stealing music somehow translates into being closer to God, but considering I'm not religious, I'll have to politely say no, I don't believe that makes me closer to God.
... and this is a big, big BUT - they aren't doing this "just because" they want to screw our rights as CONSUMERS over. They're doing this to protect THEIR rights as OWNERS of the material that is being sold.
... AND, it can't just be downloaded from the Internet or cloned by another manufacturer w/o recourse. The recourse would land the clone manufacturer in court ... period. Of course, because a few individuals have thought up a clever scheme to be able to share intellectual property w/o any central authority to take to court, they think that's end game.
... we purchase a right to enjoy the content which until recently was able to be shifted into various formats). If YOU want to purchase the latest Madonna song, go for it - its pretty expensive. BUT, once you have, you can give it to anyone you want ... at that point, I imagine Madonna and the record label that sold you the rights to Madonna's song could care less - they've got the money, end of story.
... since when has stealing EVER been an option? You can't afford a plasma screen, but you can't steal one either, darn! When has "too expensive" ever translated into stealing for the general public?
As for all your arguments about precedence, that's great, thanks for the education, I don't disagree with you. Hell, I never said that I agree with what the RIAA/MPAA is trying to do here, I don't - I'm pissed off about it. BUT
All the comments from the folks that think I'm in league with the RIAA/MPAA or something are sorely off the mark - all I'm trying to say is that the blame for what the RIAA/MPAA is doing lays very, very squarely on all the music pirates out there, making CD copies for friends from MP3s that were downloaded, downloading music that hasn't been paid for by the recipient, and plain out copying CDs.
We wouldn't be here now if it weren't for YOU. Now, am I saying that I'm a better person than those that have transgressed in this way? No, not at all. With respect to music piracy, though, yeah - I think I've been handling that whole bit quite a bit more responsibly.
And as for the "free market" economy BS - you forget, you're not purchasing a wrench here, you're purchasing creativity (though in some cases, with the current crap thats being produced, that could certainly be argued). This isn't something that's negotiable. If the process that brings an artist's creative inspiration and talented execution into your living room is too expensive for you, TO DAMN BAD.
The process that goes into making a Ferrari, executing the designs and producing the vehicle, and anything else that's involved makes the end product rather pricey, doesn't it? Well - apparently there are people out there willing to pay for it
Its NOT! The content creators will do whatever they can to control their content (remember, THEY own it, WE do not
Somehow, people think that because some ONE person purchased a song, that now its open season to be shared? Get real! If you can't afford the music, don't buy it
Agreed ... and at $750, you could get a new 600MHz iMac for about $49 more ... I think they run $799 now ($699 if you can swing an educational discount). That iMac will certainly run a lot faster than the 96, and not just because of the 100MHz processor bump ... my own 400MHz iMac DV would probably be faster, and I've sold a few extra iMacs I had for about $600 on eBay ... the memory bus is faster than the '96s, it has firewire, which I don't think the '96 has w/o add-ons, etc. etc.
... there are good uses for 'em, too ... I myself still have a 6290 layin' about, no upgrade card, but I boot it up on occasion to test certain things :)
Not that I'm knockin' upgrade cards
You'd be amazed and what they will do if they're given the power that this article indicates they'll get soon. Do you *really* think they care more about the cost of an ADC than they care that their copyrighted materials are protected?
... what did you *think* one of the largest industries in the nation was going to do when they saw everyone crapping on their copyrights? You thought "there are so many people doing it, they'll NEVER be able to stop us" ... bwahahahahaha. Right?!? Yeah, thanks a lot to you piss ant morons that thought Napster, Morpheus, KaZaA, Limewire, OpenNap, etc., etc. were the coolest thing since sliced bread ... "this isn't stealing, they OWE me ... " or, "hell if *I'm* going to pay for music I don't even like *that* much" ...
... tell your friends, hey, check this out - free music. "What? You PAID for that CD? I got it for free ... without even having to leave my dorm room!"
... do you think things would have gotten to this point as quickly? All the immature music pirates out there have brought this about ... and from the folks that have enjoyed paying for our music and being able to format/time-shift it, we wholeheartedly thank you for bringing this kind of draconian control about.
... not paying for something that costs money is stealing. Just because Linux is free doesn't mean everything else should be as well. If an artist wants to release their work for everyone to enjoy, for free, fine - so be it. But guess what, guys? That's the *artist's* choice to make NOT YOURS. And if the artist wants to sign up with a record label that YOU think is the bane of your existance and is dicking you over by charging $18 for the artist's album ... guess what? That's STILL the *artist's* choice to make, NOT YOURS!
... commercials and all. I didn't get pissed off because the radio had commercials, either ... this whole "lets have everything for free" bullshit is too much. Guess what? That's NOT capitalism ... hell, that's not even "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" ... that's some kind of utopian BS that hasn't ever and probably won't ever work. At least not in OUR life times.
C'mon, folks
It doesn't matter if the recording industry was making more money during the height of Napster. The point is, people were stealing, copying and basically doing things that have been illegal for a long, long time and all the while, they thought nothing was going to come of it
If all people wanted to do was take CDs that they purchased and format-shift them to Ogg or MP3 or be able to purchase MP3s online so that they wouldn't have to buy an entire CD
Yesterday I was cynical, today I'm downright pissed off. Get it through your immature, thick skulls
P2P is great as a technology, but all the geeks in the world screaming that it has legitimate uses won't keep measures like this from being rained down on us. And now that the genie is out of the bottle, you might as well sit back and enjoy things while you can, because pretty soon, things will start to suck. The fact of the matter is, when it comes to P2P, no matter what the legitimate uses are, the networks with the most traffic aren't using it for legitimate purposes, they're using it to infringe on copyright and they're using it to STEAL. Plain and simple. I'm not entirely sure how much simpler it can be put.
I'm only 24, but I have quite a bit more ethics and much more of a sense of responsibility when it comes to music piracy.
I recall when I was in high school and college, if I couldn't afford the newest CDs (which happened quite frequently) - I listened to the radio
My apologies for the tone of this, but I'm just as pissed about what the MPAA and RIAA are trying to do as the next geek.
You think PHP promotes itself? Why don't you ask the folks at Zend, the SPONSORS of your free software, if their promotion is free and if the development that makes PHP as wonderful as it is (I'm a PHP developer, too) is free as well.
... no patience for folks that aren't seeing the big picture, I guess. My apologies to any that I've offended (or will offend in future posts today while I'm in this groove).
I doubt it.
Oh, and MySQL AB, the company that writes the MySQL engine and provides support for it, ALSO spends money on marketing.
One last thing, the fact that you actually FOUND those sites on the 'Net means that someone's paying for the bandwidth used to get the information to your screen from across the continent or world. And probably paying a pretty penny if you didn't have to wait a long time to get what you were trying to get. Or, if you downloaded from a mirror, someone was nice enough to provide a server and bandwidth (which SOMEONE is paying for).
Did we forget that the world revolves around money, still?!? Maybe in 50 yrs it won't as much, but not here and now.
God, I'm awfully cynical today
The record industry spends tons of money promoting artists that they think other people will enjoy listening to and by extension, will want to spend money on so that they (the recording industry) can make some money and the artist can make music instead of having to have a 9-5 job on the side.
I think what most people are upset about is that they're not one of the people making $40, $60, $150 an hour like all the people that work to bring a CD to market. Face it, you're the consumer. If you're *not* making that kind of money, the skill you're exercising is not valued in the same way as that of the people bringing that new album to best buy that are making the big $$ that drive the price of the CD up. If you *are* making those big $$, then you're either one of those people or you need to sit back and not complain because you can afford to pay $18 for a CD (incidentally, I can't remember the last time I paid $18 for an album at best buy, even a new release ...)
You gotta play big to win big.
Does that mean all CDs should be a lot less so that record labels can't "strike it rich" when they discover an artist that's really hot?!? I don't think so - that's never going to fly because they won't ever take any risks if there isn't a good chance that they'll "RECOUP" their expenses.
At no point did I say that the record labels aren't making money hand over fist - sure, they are. But, it costs a ton of money to launch a new artist or even a new album for an existing artist. I also know that the artist doesn't necessarily get a lot of money when they're a huge hit, at least not right off. But, they wouldn't have BECOME a huge hit without the prior investment of the record labels, so that's an acceptable trade-off for most artists.
Your crash course in music industry economics is appreciated, but it doesn't change the fact that the cost of bringing that album to your local best buy is NOT $2.50 or some hack-neyed amount like that.
No, it doesn't. The recording labels out there aren't saying that it costs $18 to duplicate a CD (en masse), print jewel-case inserts and stuff everything into a package and shrink-wrap it so that you can't get into it.
Now, repeat after me: That's not what costs $18 per CD! What costs $18 per CD is the audio engineer that was paid to mix the tracks in the studio where the music was recorded; the rental time for that studio space and hi quality recording, mixing and sampling equipment; the designer that was paid to create the artwork you see on the jewel-case inserts and on the CD face; the copywriter that came up with what should be written on the inside sleeves of the jewel-case inserts; the production monkey that laid out the text + images in Quark for the jewel-case inserts. OK, so that all costs some money, right? Well, that's NOTHING compared with the cost of food, travel, housing that many recording labels provide their artists while they are recording. Some artists have VERY high demands for this ... caviar, first class plane tickets, 5 star hotels, the works. That costs money. The promotion work that is done when the artist goes on tour - that costs money: TV spots, banner ads, Ticketmaster kick-backs, deposits for venues, etc., etc. The promotion work that is done when a new CD launches: getting the artist on talk shows, on MTV - speaking of MTV, getting the new video shot for MTV, VH1, etc., etc.
Guess what, folks?!? That ALL costs money, and lots of it. So much, in fact, that if a particular artist doesn't make it BIG most record labels lose their pants. Ever heard of a record label that doesn't have a big name artist signed? No? I'm not surprised ... until a big artist is "discovered" a record label is nothing because it has NO MONEY.
There's a significant cost involved in promoting new music ... now, should you have to pay for lots of bad artists to be able to release their music?!? Maybe not, but that's the breaks. You can't really weed out the good from the mediocre before you incur all those costs ...
I'm quite tired of all these misinformed people thinking that they're paying an outrageous amount of money for a plastic disc with binary information encoded on it. WAKE UP! There's a lot more that goes on behind the scenes with the money that you're paying.
The link you sent uses a window.open from a javascript function that is called *as the link* - not from the 'onClick' ... the window.open from 'onClick' is what is disabled, as this is "hidden" from the user ... if its in the link (or a function called by the link), it is assumed that the user would *want* to be opening that window if they're clicking on the link.