I think the author (and others), first of all, worries too much about data obsolescence, especially due to software or hardware obsolescence. The author fears that some day, a certain brand/style of computer (or all of them) will become antiquated to the point that the last one will break, and that will be the end of any data stored in a format which "only" that machine can read.
Not gonna happen! Are there many machines -- not just computers -- from history which later humans haven't been able to repair and get to work again? Or even rebuild from ancient pictures and documents? I can't think of one.
Nor am I worried that the lack of commercially available or even skilled help for repair of old computers will mean that we will be hopelessly unable to resurrect them. Groups like the l0pht have done wondrous things in the area of resurrecting old computers; from rebuilding an old VAX, to running a web server on a Mac Plus, and various reverse engineering of both antiquated and SOTA devices. Similarly my grandfather, a retired marine engineer, works at the railroad museum in Florida repairing old steam engine trains.
Should we be worried about people not being able to fix an Apple -- the first of which was built by two guys in a garage -- when three college students can build a nuclear breeder reactor under their bed? (See past/. story on that one.)
.....
On the other hand, the author worries a lot about software/hardware obsolescence as a threat to data persistence. What about the bogon factor? Data maintainers are worried about two big things when it comes to losing data: accidental deletion, and hardware failure. They're not worried about, for example, DDS tapes being discontinued, because they know they will eventually have to upgrade their backup methods to new technology. But if their backup tape gets caught in the drive mechanism, or gets immersed in water, or some fool munges the backup, or write over an old tape... These things are the real big problems, and I dare say much more data is going to fall to the factors of human error and natural disaster than any worries about data formats becoming obsolete.
Tell me what sort of really important, crucial data is sitting on old media? I know that apparently certain data tapes from mid-20C censuses are supposedly "lost forever" due to hardware obsolescence. But is the data on those tapes really useful? In other words, is there anything useful on those tapes that isn't in another format already (books, documents, etc.)? I think not.
I'm paranoid about losing my own data. I still migrate old disk drives from new machine to new machine because they contain old data which I can't replace (it's mostly all original work). I even shelled out top dollar for disk drive scanning software to recover data on a disk I was forced to reformat. Eventually I will back it all up, or copy it to a new drive. But if I were to delete any of that stuff by accident, and lose it to other disk operations, it would be gone, gone, gone. That's my real fear.
With paper and ink, it's rather time consuming and expensive to alter historical documents, even assuming you can get near them. With digital media, the situation may be different - it may become very simple to alter historical documents,
But its also much easier for others to make copies of the digital formats and also generally easier to hide, if needed. And I'm not just talking about encryption, but also squirreling away on a disk with a copy of some obsolete tax program, or stored on a nondescript floppy in the old box o' disks.
Look at DeCSS; companies, 'nonprofits' and governments are all trying to expunge it, and they're not doing a very good job.
On the other hand, governments et al. have been rewriting history just fine for ages now. TV has been doing a pretty good job of that in modern years. Books are already obsolete to most people in terms of a way to receive information. And old books have it worse, because old books can't possibly be as reliable as new books. Or as the expert on TV just last night.
even assuming you can get near them.
If the people who want to rewrite the historical documents cant get near them, theres a high probability that those who would be affected by them (or changing them) can get near them (to read them), either. No one (well few) really tries to rewrite history by crossing out offensive paragraphs and pasting labels over them -- its quite easy to write new books dismissing the old ones.
Older books were printed with a different method, and will last a couple hundred years. Newer books will only last maybe 50 years.
Regardless, there are still numerous books that are in danger of being lost forever, so rare that museums that own them keep them in climate-controlled rooms where no human may tread, for fear of destroying the books before some sure-fire method is devised to recover them.
These books are practically melting into dust at the edges.
Not all civs had nice, strong papyrus, especially after Rome fell, and especially when we found we could cut overhead by using elm pulp.
"...what might make the people who read Slashdot want to read daily papers."
I know. Stop being stupid -- esp. about tech news.
As an example, I was watching CNN HN about a week ago, a few days after the DDOS on Yahoo and whoever else. CNN HN had a blurb on updates on the DDOS saga.
The story on the DDOS was depressingly typical. It was full of half-truths, misused terms, and lots of assumptions which clearly had come directly from a government contact (and probably come to CNN via Reuters/AP) without any double checking. My favorite bit was the stock footage of random browsers failing to load various sites. It made me remember why I stopped reading/watching most news.
Well, the more cynical would say this is typical of all news, and that, for example, political news, business news, etc. are all reported horribly and with little to no fact-checking or legwork. I thought that for a second, and then I saw CNN HN's next story.
Ths next story was about the Alaska Air flight which had crashed or whatever the week before. Apparently they had discovered or theorized that the big screw fell out and caused havoc.
THIS story was full of good stuff! It even had 3D vectored FMV showing the parts of the airplane involved, spinning and working together. Over this was lots of talk of "elevators being controlled by ailerons and when the screw turns the torque provides the yadda for the thingamabob", with lots of technical terms, clearly-read explanations..., stuff that, if I cared how planes worked, would have been really informative. It made me go 'wow!'
I wondered, why was there such a difference between the two stories? Why was the Alaska Air story so informative, and the DDOS story so full of nonsense? Granted, Alaska Air probably provided those images and explanation. But why didnt CNN get good explanations of the DDOS? Why do they listen to government schleps, feds, and idiots with a.com on their business card? Why do they play the jingo whenever a tech story comes along?
That's what pisses me off, and I'm sure it pisses geeks off. And that's why I don't read the mainstream press anymore.
BTW, I do read unfiltered news feeds (as on certain portal sites), which although still often full of nonsense, have the benefit of not being further misinterpreted by geek-wannabes like Hiawatha Bray at the Boston Globe or talking heads on CNN.
I also read the Christian Science Monitor, because they are very rarely stupid when they report news. It's quite a nice feeling to read a well-researched story instead of a wire-pulled piece of crap.
Product planning, therefore, is focused with admirable clarity on those whose decisions really matter to Microsoft -- the information-technology manager at Chevron or the U.S. Department of Agriculture, for example -- rather than some writer with an idea about how to make his colleagues happier with a program.
I'm rapidly reaching the conclusion that there is little anyone can do to stop the large money'd interests from taking away our online freedom: the freedom of information, fair use, free speech, the right to peacefully assemble (ie: post in public forums without fear of retribution - like having your access revoked).
There is a problem in this line of logic, that has existed since the early days of Prodigy (and with the shift of that userbase to the Internet, is persisting), where people insist on projecting goverment protections onto private companies, and then declaring "violation of my constitutional rights". And it ain't so.
We railed hard against government invading our privacy, our homes, and our lives... only to turn a blind eye to another group: corporations.
Fancy that. With the government, the people at least have the supposed ability to fix problems and redirect policy (change laws, impeach presidents, choose officials, etc.) Not so with corporations, unless you own 51% of stock, and especially not in a conservative/libertarian-driven anti-boycott social atmosphere.
(I'm inclined to ask, since I wasn't there in the 60's -- how pray tell did you let that happen?)
So many privately-run Internet forums are eager, once they become popular (and at the same time, once they become too unwieldy to operate out of pocket), to be purchased by business and other economic interests. At that point, although your personal financial future is stable in the medium run, you lose almost all future control over not only your operation's future, but your own financial future, to a sense. (Read:/. gets bought by Andover, and all is well for a time, until Andover gets bought by VA. And what happens when VA gets bought by RedHat? Or Compaq? And does CM et all retain the ability to take/. and run after all this? Hm? Anyone got their crystal ball? Magic Eight Ball? Big Red Button, even?)
So, while one could say "the answer to all these corporate-controlled forums is to replace them with private forums", the problem is those are still likely to become bought by the same corporate interests, especially when their own ones become failures.
Sigh. It's too bad Usenet is decreasing in 'popularity' (not to mention being swamped by unreinable spammers and their harvesters), because it suddenly seems the better solution -- since it'd be quite difficult for anyone to buy it. (Though Deja has made quite an effective attempt.)
But with all this in mind, please stop crying foul when large companies decide what's good for the government isn't good for them (cause it isn't). You signed the paper, and that means you shape up or ship out. (The question is begged -- Why are you there in the first place?)
"To be GOVERNED is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted,...measureed, numbered, assessed,... It is, under the pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harrassed, hunted down, abused,... judged, condemned,... sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality." [boldface mine]
You decide who you would rather have this power: our (still mostly) democratic government, in which we have some say, or large, boundless, unchecked corporations of the imaginary "free market".
In the electronic age, with DoubleClick et al tracking users around the internet, we find Internet users, not even just consumers, being spied upon, numbered, checked, valued, registered, counted, measured, and sometimes even prevented, forbidden, and reformed. I won't even get into the potential for consumers to be drilled, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, hoaxed, and robbed, if our happy-faced multinationals were given even more freedom than they effectively have now.
And when we resist the power of these forces, like DVD-CCA? Hunted down (all the way to Norway, punished (arrested and sued!), condemmned and vilified, that's what. Not to mention lied about, censored, exiled -- read the DeCSS news (in someplace other than Slashdot and the other geek media).
And the result of marketing, advertising, and other tools by which corporations promote the sale of their products? For those who dont accept them? Mocked, ridiculed, and derided -- for not falling into line with what is popular.
Make no mistake, our democracy is imperfect, and constantly hampered; and effective bureaucracy is an unhoned skill, but it's a far sight better than the ZikZak world of corporate power. "The World of Tomorrow - brought to you by GM" -- thanks, but no thanks.
If it weren't for the power that our government has -- most of which we GIVE it, either explicitly or tacitly -- we would be at the mercy of whatever corporations would want to do with us, that better serves their own interests. At least when the government says it is working in the public interest, it isn't totally full of it, and I don't have to buy 51% of 1,000,000 shares of stock selling at 87 dollars apiece in order to have some say in what that is going to mean.
FWIW, http://www.priorart.com/ exists, though a commercial patent record searching company. There's also http://www.priorart.org/ , which looks like it's going through testing but looks more promising.
There's also the Software Patent Institute at http://www.spi.org/ .
This is often regarded as a sexist view, but IMO, the major barriers to women's acceptance by certain male-dominated fields, male-targeted media, etc. start very early in life, practically at birth, and continue on through just after adolescence. (Naturally, the mechanisms and forces keep working after that, but there is a point of personal development at which these forces have already had enough of an effect that they are no longer major ones.)
From a very young age, we are taught that our physical sexual designation must define our social and personal behaviour. This is perpetuated mostly by familial forces working in a young child's life. The dynamic between young parents and their own older relatives (wanting to impress Mom and Dad, Grandma and Grandpa, etc.) ends up putting social pressure on parents to nudge their children towards the traditional roles; ranging from how they dress their children to which relatives and neighborhood kids they are encouraged to play with, to which school and community activities they are enrolled in or encouraged to join. The desire of children to fit in, which is defined by the 'norm', which is in turn defined by the directions their parents led them, then brings peer pressure into the mix of forces working to perpetuate this.
This is why little boys play with GI Joes and girls play with Barbies. This is also why teenage boys fiddle with cars and teenage girls fiddle with makeup kits and various fashion accessories. And this is why young adult males pump iron and young adult females do aerobics.
The fact that these observations are stereotypes and not actual blanket statements shows that there is not really any physical or other predilection towards these sexual roles based on one's physical gender. There are female bodybuilders and male aerobics instructors. Some young girls are tomboys and play cops n' robbers with the boys, and young boys who play house with girls. Queen Elizabeth knows how to fix army trucks and Ralph Lauren knows what fashion accessories go with what dress. The factors at work are purely social, and as most of us on/. know, some people have a greater ability/desire to resist social forces and go against the 'norm' than others. (Ask any gay person about these social forces if you dont believe me.)
Especially in the post-liberation era, women have more openly-expressed interest in traditional male activities. (Whether it was always there or not can't be said -- it probably was.) Women/girls are now more into sports, cars, even computers and video games than they might have been say 30 or even 15 years ago. There is, among an aging but younger portion of the population, a female force that says "if they [men] can do it, so can you", which helps this aspect. But this isn't universal, neither genealogically or geographically, and in some respects is even starting to fade.
With all this in mind, I don't quite buy the figures cited by the article. It should be pointed out that the research they cite only takes into account the binary of use or not-use in terms of "who plays", and not the quantitative measure of "how much each plays". The second graph is based on purchase, and not actual use or end ownership (i.e. of course 9/10 of purchasers of game systems are adults, because kids dont normally have the $30-$60 themselves to pick up a Playstation game or whatever -- they have to wait till Xmas or birthdays. And what about rentals?). Plus, women have more purchasing power then they have in the past in _all_ markets, not just video games.
We know that games (and ads, naturally) appeal to men primarily; we know that male gamers are in the majority...
Most of the games themselves, especially the ones we're likely to see take off, usually focus on traditional male things, like karate dudes kicking lots of ass or spacemen with big f'ing guns killing lots of aliens, or the good old standby, gratuitous sex. We're not likely to see games with more sensitive aspects, such as a game where you run away from weddings in order to get Richard Gere to come after you.
I'd say that usually, women play with video games when males are around, e.g. her boyfriend moved in with his Nintendo and she likes to play MarioLand. Less likely is she to pick up a console system after he leaves her on her own. Partly due to the lingering of the forces I'm talking about -- chances are her go-shopping-with friends are shopping at Ann Taylor and not Circuit City. But when new boyfriend moves in, she might buy him a system for Xmas, and pick up some games she knows about / has played before as well.
But do the games/ads actually turn women away, or are they just catering to the pre-existing audience?
If the arguments and figures in the article are to be believed, no. The article is upset that video game advertising (not even marketing!) is not trying to to lure women in. (A strange complaint. I'd personally be quite happier if there was much less advertising trying to lure me in.)
The article is making some tired observations, the sort which, if the authors are suggesting that their problems are limited to the field of VG advertising, they are sorely mistaken and perhaps somehow don't see much advertising of other sorts. Complaints like a picture of a joystick being too "phallic" are getting sort of old. (Nowadays I'd expect computing women to be complaining about certain people's pronunciation of 'tty', but most noise is still harping on things like joysticks. I thought joysticks were out and cross-buttons were in anyway.)
Now, if as the magazine states, 50% percent of gamers are women, obviously the lack of female-directed advertising hasn't made a bit of difference. If it were me, I'd be celebrating the fact that my group of people had successfully overcome the lures and traps of advertising and had become a force in the market without that benefit.
Question: Is Lara Croft a good thing for men, or a good thing for women? Is it more significant to say that women are good to look at, or to say that women can raid tombs just as well as Harrison Ford can?
(Is this why I'm single? Cause I call it like I see it?)
According to the "manual" that came with my CD-R drive, CD-R's actually last _longer_ than stamped CDs, by something like 7:1.
Okay, I don't know if I believe that, but that fact might be outdated, and based on early (or cheaper) CD stamping technology, when CDs weren't selling well. Some discs I've seen that were stamped in the early-mid 80's were starting to fray around the edges and peel on the surface, about 10 years after they were made. They still worked, but definitely showed remarkable wear from age for what was once hailed as THE audio medium.
I wouldn't be surprised if it's only about 5 years at best. Just in time for them to sell you your whole movie collection all over again in whatever the new technology of the moment is.
Hmm, well VHS lasted for quite some time before DVD came along... It even fought off videodiscs for all concerned except the most hardcore of entertainment system junkies. I bet it'll still be around for a while, and DVD won't ever quite take over.
(Then again, I didn't own a CD player until 1994, and that was a CD-ROM drive, so I was bit behind the curve.)
As for this DVD-DA thing, I see it as even less likely to take off.
...is that even though they keep updating the technology, they don't keep changing the damned connectors.
How many different types of SCSI cable are there, between original SCSI, Wide SCSI, Ultra Wide Scsi, etc.?
I can still use the same 1GB drive that I had on my 486/33, on my much newer PII/450. And I can use the same cable. This makes me happy. The fact that IDE is also cheaper than SCSI makes me happy.
Now, if the SCSI advocates are only talking about practicality for high-load file servers, and server candy like hot-swappability, they have a point. But if they want to treat workstation practicality as being equivalent to server practicality, that's an all too common fallacy.
The fact that these are large i.e. congested markets we're talking about, your range for 10 watts isn't going to get you 4 miles. In Boston, with 10W you're lucky if you can get as far as five city blocks.
Oh well. Large markets also have DSL, so they don't need this IMO.
...[T]he radio business has consolidated in very dramatic fashion...
Don't they have market-ownership laws that are supposed to remedy that exact problem?
The nation's largest broadcasters have fought to block the rules... asserting that [this] could create interference for established stations in the form of static or distorted signals./i>
Sniffle. It's these same largest broadcasters who constantly increase their wattage, infringing (illegally) on other (usually smaller) stations' broadcast radii. And the FCC has approved these increases in most cases without a smidge of regard for the lower-power stations, who get rejected for their own power increase petitions, being drowned out.
The supporters of the F.C.C.'s move... included... the United States Catholic Conference and the United Church of Christ.
Between christian college radio stations (which always seem to be school-run as opposed to student-run) and AM radio, I'm not glad to hear that churches want to use this. I'm much more interested in the Stephen Dunifer (Free Radio Berkeley) types getting on.
I have to say in the realm of radio and maybe even TV, the FCC seems to mean well. But they normally have no teeth whatsoever when it comes to large-power stations.
1. Word processor with wysiwyg page view. (Wordperfect comes closest. You can forget about EMACS, if it does do this, it doesnt by default) 2. Spreadsheet (gnumeric is pretty minimal) 3. Visual database (okay, anything you can run on linux beats the crap out of MSSQL7 and definintely out of Access, but does psql or sqlplus look as nice as Access? No.) 4. Presentation managers (see past Ask/. story about there being no powerpoint-like sw out there) 5. Games (DOOM and Quake and a few others ported as resources allow -- but aside from Id, what major game developers release linux versions?) 6. Graphic tools (GIMP is pretty good. Not great, but better than what we've had to deal with)
The things that matter to geeks -- full system control, quite good system transparency, original development (and easy and cheap at that), and more or less at the forefront of networking -- are what we get with Linux -- but hardly anyone besides us cares about any of those.
It's a shame, and I agree the passive attitude of many to computer use should change, but until we can address THAT, releasing new dists of Linux isn't really impressing anyone besides ourselves, other geeks, the deplorable trenderati, and some bright-eyed MIS-majors-couldn't-get-through-CS-intro-to-progra mming who usually screw up their computer halfway through installing System Commander so they can sorta install Linux but still keep their relied-upon Windows around. (And we still are letting this sort of people define mainstream computing? Come on!)
Re:beautiful... a product that makes no sense lega
on
MP3.com's Beam-It
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· Score: 2
My question is, who is liable?
You borrow a CD from a friend - not illegal, afaik. The software detects it, scans its track info, ships the data to Beam-It and Beam-It registers this as "yours", and now allows you to stream the songs on the CD, even though you don't own it, and even after you've given the CD back to your friend.
Do you click on a button that says "Yes, I own this CD"? That would at least make you liable. Otherwise, would they be liable for sending you music you don't have rights to?
Another thing is the spokenword message saying "Too many open streams. Please close some and continue. You should not share your password."
It doesn't play DVDs, but does play CD's, and it's supposedly prepared for all the issues the Apex apparently isn't - supports LFNs, M3U's, VBR, subdirectories, index and search, plus 45-sec skip buffer.
So what if they're held up in production. Maybe that really does mean they're making sure they make a better product.
You have to admit, though, that the nature of computer technology is a fairly big culture shock to the notions of the workings of the world that pretty much all laws have been based on for ages.
In the past, even though major technological advances have always happened, and law has always been fairly slow to catch up to them, most of these advances have not presented major, widespread challenges to the common worldview. So what if you now have this railroad thing that can carry sugar farther and faster than pickups or horse-drawn carts? You eventually find that control of this can cause an uneven market system, and if you believe in equal access being essential to the economy, then you have to make a new law. But that's only one new law here and there.
So you find that these new horseless carriages are spewing out this black smoke. No big deal, until you notice that too much of this smoke causes air pollution, makes cities dingy, and affects peoples' health. So you make a law or so that limits the amount of smoke that gets spewed out (somehow).
IN both cases, for the most part, only a few laws turn out ot be needed, and in neitehr case does the new technology cause the entire application of law to be invalid.
As has been observed, most laws apply to the natural world, and are made with concrete objects in mind. This falls apart quite rapidly though, when you bring computer abstraction into the forum.
We now find such problems as patents being issued for abstract, not concrete things, laws being made to apply to the movement, ownership, and modification of computer files as if they were tactile objects, hard drives are being searched like houses. In all cases, the laws that were made in a concrete world are now being applied to a non-concrete world, and this is, as one would expect, falling apart quite neatly.
Most laws are about physical concepts, visible, non-transient characteristics, and concrete objects and posessions. Few laws are ever written that take into account how they should be applied to abstract objects, because until the computer age, such potential applications didn't exist.
Certainly some disappointing losses have been witnessed due to lawyers being unclear about the aspects of technology. The same precept applies: lawyers are only applying the tactics they would use in a concrete situation, to an abstract one. IN all fairness, this is hardly limited to the computer or technical realm. Few lawyers, especially not personal lawyers, are experts on any given field. The market for field-specialized law wasn't that great for a while, and then it boomed in the mid-90's with all the technical startups. Law schools are only just now beginning to catch up to the demand with doctorate programs in high-tech law. The fact is though, that attorney ignorance about the sordid details of a legal affair is hardly limited to the computer world (thinking: white lawyers representing black clients), and furthremore, this is not ALWAYS bad (ditto). And even if you did have goo high-tech lawyers, its much more important for them to understand high-tech LAWS than it is to know the high-tech field itself.
So basically, the primary problem is, and will be, the sheer amount of laws that are designed for the concrete world, that are now being applied blindly and without much second thought to the abstract world. In order to rectify the problems we are sensing, these laws, or law in general, will need to be refined and changed in order to appropriately address the nuances of the abstract computer world.
They are starting to do this, and I by no means want to suggest that we should stop putting pressure on lawmakers to bring these changes about, but we should still expect the process to be painfully slow.
Dunno about jhu, but neu has been part of I2 for about three years or so, and I never did anything with it or even see a computer that was attached to it. NEU has pretty much kept the rest of their net separate.
Possibly grad CS students in the new corporate research center get to play with it, but those are few and far; the main CS resources are enough for most students' projects involving things like FTP'ing large 3D data files, even if they do have to start it at 9PM and come back at 8Am to see the results. (After all, that's the way it was on the old Internet, too.)
Most of the CS research being done on I-2 there seem to be testing new high-speed protocols, not taking advantage of the speed for shipping monumentous research data in convenient amounts of time. (Besides, most of yall get 6 more weeks per term than NEU does. Plenty of time to finish your research.)
Other than that, a programmer turned sociology professor that I've done projects with has mentioned that they are also doing human-network interaction research with I-2.
Traceroutes from neu to mit go though BBN, just like you would expect.
So are you saying that you would prefer the crustier, exclusive, countable-node Internet of pre-1994 to today's looser, accessible, and ever-expanding Net?
Don't get me wrong. I like the idea of geeks, nerds, academics, scholars, and accelerated students having a mode of communication over which they can share information (and ultimately, commune) without added noise from web spiders, *@aol.com, MMF, spam, and pron-hocking sites. But I think you can do most of this over the Internet as it stands.
The poster is right to say that 'Internet 2' is a misleading name, because it gives the impression that someday, reasonably soon, the lumbering Internet being widely used today will be rebuilt with Internet 2 technology, the same way Amtrak might like to replace its old lumbering rail system with Acela technology, or the way the phone companies have mostly replaced the old analog system with a digital system, or the way car companies have replaced catalytic converters with fuel injectors. But the word is that it probably wont.
The goal/purpose of Internet 2, as it seems to stand, is to replace the academic backbone that the 'original' Internet once was. Despite geek wistfulness and a tenacity to history, it really should be called something else. Cable TV wasn't called Television 2, nor was FM radio called Radio-2. These both served the same purposes as their originals, and have come to largely replace them, just as Internet 2 is wont to do for the institutional origins of Internet 1.
But for the detractors of the new exclusive networks like I-2 and U2, have no fear. Someday (if not already), bofh.forsale will be created and it will all start to come crumbling down, again.
Accept, at least, this observation: that those who program computers make computers do what they want, and those who don't program computers do what the computers want them to do.
Certainly people should opt to be in the former group, in terms of the ends.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a Timex, too. Digital. Bought less than a year ago. I expected better.
(oh, dont downmoderate this, just leave it. it's on topic. sort of.)
Why not? they took Vanessa Williams' crown away.
Sure sounds more professional than turning Slashdot into a "h3r3z s0me l33t l/p's to g3t 1n 4 fr33 d00d!" site.
I think the author (and others), first of all, worries too much about data obsolescence, especially due to software or hardware obsolescence. The author fears that some day, a certain brand/style of computer (or all of them) will become antiquated to the point that the last one will break, and that will be the end of any data stored in a format which "only" that machine can read.
/. story on that one.)
Not gonna happen! Are there many machines -- not just computers -- from history which later humans haven't been able to repair and get to work again? Or even rebuild from ancient pictures and documents? I can't think of one.
Nor am I worried that the lack of commercially available or even skilled help for repair of old computers will mean that we will be hopelessly unable to resurrect them. Groups like the l0pht have done wondrous things in the area of resurrecting old computers; from rebuilding an old VAX, to running a web server on a Mac Plus, and various reverse engineering of both antiquated and SOTA devices. Similarly my grandfather, a retired marine engineer, works at the railroad museum in Florida repairing old steam engine trains.
Should we be worried about people not being able to fix an Apple -- the first of which was built by two guys in a garage -- when three college students can build a nuclear breeder reactor under their bed? (See past
.....
On the other hand, the author worries a lot about software/hardware obsolescence as a threat to data persistence. What about the bogon factor? Data maintainers are worried about two big things when it comes to losing data: accidental deletion, and hardware failure. They're not worried about, for example, DDS tapes being discontinued, because they know they will eventually have to upgrade their backup methods to new technology. But if their backup tape gets caught in the drive mechanism, or gets immersed in water, or some fool munges the backup, or write over an old tape... These things are the real big problems, and I dare say much more data is going to fall to the factors of human error and natural disaster than any worries about data formats becoming obsolete.
Tell me what sort of really important, crucial data is sitting on old media? I know that apparently certain data tapes from mid-20C censuses are supposedly "lost forever" due to hardware obsolescence. But is the data on those tapes really useful? In other words, is there anything useful on those tapes that isn't in another format already (books, documents, etc.)? I think not.
I'm paranoid about losing my own data. I still migrate old disk drives from new machine to new machine because they contain old data which I can't replace (it's mostly all original work). I even shelled out top dollar for disk drive scanning software to recover data on a disk I was forced to reformat. Eventually I will back it all up, or copy it to a new drive. But if I were to delete any of that stuff by accident, and lose it to other disk operations, it would be gone, gone, gone. That's my real fear.
With paper and ink, it's rather time consuming and expensive to alter historical documents, even assuming you can get near them. With digital media, the situation may be different - it may become very simple to alter historical documents,
But its also much easier for others to make copies of the digital formats and also generally easier to hide, if needed. And I'm not just talking about encryption, but also squirreling away on a disk with a copy of some obsolete tax program, or stored on a nondescript floppy in the old box o' disks.
Look at DeCSS; companies, 'nonprofits' and governments are all trying to expunge it, and they're not doing a very good job.
On the other hand, governments et al. have been rewriting history just fine for ages now. TV has been doing a pretty good job of that in modern years. Books are already obsolete to most people in terms of a way to receive information. And old books have it worse, because old books can't possibly be as reliable as new books. Or as the expert on TV just last night.
even assuming you can get near them.
If the people who want to rewrite the historical documents cant get near them, theres a high probability that those who would be affected by them (or changing them) can get near them (to read them), either. No one (well few) really tries to rewrite history by crossing out offensive paragraphs and pasting labels over them -- its quite easy to write new books dismissing the old ones.
Older books were printed with a different method, and will last a couple hundred years. Newer books will only last maybe 50 years.
Regardless, there are still numerous books that are in danger of being lost forever, so rare that museums that own them keep them in climate-controlled rooms where no human may tread, for fear of destroying the books before some sure-fire method is devised to recover them.
These books are practically melting into dust at the edges.
Not all civs had nice, strong papyrus, especially after Rome fell, and especially when we found we could cut overhead by using elm pulp.
that hotbed of liberal thinking, Reader's Digest
Just checking -- that was sarcasm, right?
Can you say LZW?
"...what might make the people who read Slashdot want to read daily papers."
.com on their business card? Why do they play the jingo whenever a tech story comes along?
I know. Stop being stupid -- esp. about tech news.
As an example, I was watching CNN HN about a week ago, a few days after the DDOS on Yahoo and whoever else. CNN HN had a blurb on updates on the DDOS saga.
The story on the DDOS was depressingly typical. It was full of half-truths, misused terms, and lots of assumptions which clearly had come directly from a government contact (and probably come to CNN via Reuters/AP) without any double checking.
My favorite bit was the stock footage of random browsers failing to load various sites. It made me remember why I stopped reading/watching most news.
Well, the more cynical would say this is typical of all news, and that, for example, political news, business news, etc. are all reported horribly and with little to no fact-checking or legwork. I thought that for a second, and then I saw CNN HN's next story.
Ths next story was about the Alaska Air flight which had crashed or whatever the week before. Apparently they had discovered or theorized that the big screw fell out and caused havoc.
THIS story was full of good stuff! It even had 3D vectored FMV showing the parts of the airplane involved, spinning and working together. Over this was lots of talk of "elevators being controlled by ailerons and when the screw turns the torque provides the yadda for the thingamabob", with lots of technical terms, clearly-read explanations...,
stuff that, if I cared how planes worked, would have been really informative. It made me go 'wow!'
I wondered, why was there such a difference between the two stories? Why was the Alaska Air story so informative, and the DDOS story so full of nonsense? Granted, Alaska Air probably provided those images and explanation. But why didnt CNN get good explanations of the DDOS? Why do they listen to government schleps, feds, and idiots with a
That's what pisses me off, and I'm sure it pisses geeks off. And that's why I don't read the mainstream press anymore.
BTW, I do read unfiltered news feeds (as on certain portal sites), which although still often full of nonsense, have the benefit of not being further misinterpreted by geek-wannabes like Hiawatha Bray at the Boston Globe or talking heads on CNN.
I also read the Christian Science Monitor, because they are very rarely stupid when they report news. It's quite a nice feeling to read a well-researched story instead of a wire-pulled piece of crap.
Product planning, therefore, is focused with admirable clarity on those whose decisions really matter to Microsoft -- the information-technology manager at Chevron or the U.S. Department of Agriculture, for example -- rather than some writer with an idea about how to make his colleagues happier with a program.
In other words, 'the end-users be damned.'
Could someone tell Jon that today's keyboards all have 1's on them, and he doesn't have to hit L anymore?
(yes, some old [analog typewriter] keyboards didn't have 1's on them.)
TIA.
I'm rapidly reaching the conclusion that there is little anyone can do to stop the large money'd interests from taking away our online freedom: the freedom of information, fair use, free speech, the right to peacefully assemble (ie: post in public forums without fear of retribution - like having your access revoked).
/. gets bought by Andover, and all is well for a time, until Andover gets bought by VA. And what happens when VA gets bought by RedHat? Or Compaq? And does CM et all retain the ability to take /. and run after all this? Hm? Anyone got their crystal ball? Magic Eight Ball? Big Red Button, even?)
There is a problem in this line of logic, that has existed since the early days of Prodigy (and with the shift of that userbase to the Internet, is persisting), where people insist on projecting goverment protections onto private companies, and then declaring "violation of my constitutional rights". And it ain't so.
We railed hard against government invading our privacy, our homes, and our lives... only to turn a blind eye to another group: corporations.
Fancy that. With the government, the people at least have the supposed ability to fix problems and redirect policy (change laws, impeach presidents, choose officials, etc.) Not so with corporations, unless you own 51% of stock, and especially not in a conservative/libertarian-driven anti-boycott social atmosphere.
(I'm inclined to ask, since I wasn't there in the 60's -- how pray tell did you let that happen?)
So many privately-run Internet forums are eager, once they become popular (and at the same time, once they become too unwieldy to operate out of pocket), to be purchased by business and other economic interests. At that point, although your personal financial future is stable in the medium run, you lose almost all future control over not only your operation's future, but your own financial future, to a sense. (Read:
So, while one could say "the answer to all these corporate-controlled forums is to replace them with private forums", the problem is those are still likely to become bought by the same corporate interests, especially when their own ones become failures.
Sigh. It's too bad Usenet is decreasing in 'popularity' (not to mention being swamped by unreinable spammers and their harvesters), because it suddenly seems the better solution -- since it'd be quite difficult for anyone to buy it. (Though Deja has made quite an effective attempt.)
But with all this in mind, please stop crying foul when large companies decide what's good for the government isn't good for them (cause it isn't). You signed the paper, and that means you shape up or ship out. (The question is begged -- Why are you there in the first place?)
Kdt
"To be GOVERNED is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, ...measureed, numbered, assessed,... It is, under the pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harrassed, hunted down, abused,... judged, condemned,... sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality." [boldface mine]
You decide who you would rather have this power: our (still mostly) democratic government, in which we have some say, or large, boundless, unchecked corporations of the imaginary "free market".
In the electronic age, with DoubleClick et al tracking users around the internet, we find Internet users, not even just consumers, being spied upon, numbered, checked, valued, registered, counted, measured, and sometimes even prevented, forbidden, and reformed. I won't even get into the potential for consumers to be drilled, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, hoaxed, and robbed, if our happy-faced multinationals were given even more freedom than they effectively have now.
And when we resist the power of these forces, like DVD-CCA? Hunted down (all the way to Norway, punished (arrested and sued!), condemmned and vilified, that's what. Not to mention lied about, censored, exiled -- read the DeCSS news (in someplace other than Slashdot and the other geek media).
And the result of marketing, advertising, and other tools by which corporations promote the sale of their products? For those who dont accept them? Mocked, ridiculed, and derided -- for not falling into line with what is popular.
Make no mistake, our democracy is imperfect, and constantly hampered; and effective bureaucracy is an unhoned skill, but it's a far sight better than the ZikZak world of corporate power. "The World of Tomorrow - brought to you by GM" -- thanks, but no thanks.
If it weren't for the power that our government has -- most of which we GIVE it, either explicitly or tacitly -- we would be at the mercy of whatever corporations would want to do with us, that better serves their own interests. At least when the government says it is working in the public interest, it isn't totally full of it, and I don't have to buy 51% of 1,000,000 shares of stock selling at 87 dollars apiece in order to have some say in what that is going to mean.
FWIW, http://www.priorart.com/ exists, though a commercial patent record searching company.
There's also http://www.priorart.org/ , which looks like it's going through testing but looks more promising.
There's also the Software Patent Institute at http://www.spi.org/ .
This is often regarded as a sexist view, but IMO, the major barriers to women's acceptance by certain male-dominated fields, male-targeted media, etc. start very early in life, practically at birth, and continue on through just after adolescence. (Naturally, the mechanisms and forces keep working after that, but there is a point of personal development at which these forces have already had enough of an effect that they are no longer major ones.)
/. know, some people have a greater ability/desire to resist social forces and go against the 'norm' than others. (Ask any gay person about these social forces if you dont believe me.)
From a very young age, we are taught that our physical sexual designation must define our social and personal behaviour. This is perpetuated mostly by familial forces working in a young child's life. The dynamic between young parents and their own older relatives (wanting to impress Mom and Dad, Grandma and Grandpa, etc.) ends up putting social pressure on parents to nudge their children towards the traditional roles; ranging from how they dress their children to which relatives and neighborhood kids they are encouraged to play with, to which school and community activities they are enrolled in or encouraged to join. The desire of children to fit in, which is defined by the 'norm', which is in turn defined by the directions their parents led them, then brings peer pressure into the mix of forces working to perpetuate this.
This is why little boys play with GI Joes and girls play with Barbies. This is also why teenage boys fiddle with cars and teenage girls fiddle with makeup kits and various fashion accessories. And this is why young adult males pump iron and young adult females do aerobics.
The fact that these observations are stereotypes and not actual blanket statements shows that there is not really any physical or other predilection towards these sexual roles based on one's physical gender. There are female bodybuilders and male aerobics instructors. Some young girls are tomboys and play cops n' robbers with the boys, and young boys who play house with girls. Queen Elizabeth knows how to fix army trucks and Ralph Lauren knows what fashion accessories go with what dress. The factors at work are purely social, and as most of us on
Especially in the post-liberation era, women have more openly-expressed interest in traditional male activities. (Whether it was always there or not can't be said -- it probably was.) Women/girls are now more into sports, cars, even computers and video games than they might have been say 30 or even 15 years ago. There is, among an aging but younger portion of the population, a female force that says "if they [men] can do it, so can you", which helps this aspect. But this isn't universal, neither genealogically or geographically, and in some respects is even starting to fade.
With all this in mind, I don't quite buy the figures cited by the article. It should be pointed out that the research they cite only takes into account the binary of use or not-use in terms of "who plays", and not the quantitative measure of "how much each plays". The second graph is based on purchase, and not actual use or end ownership (i.e. of course 9/10 of purchasers of game systems are adults, because kids dont normally have the $30-$60 themselves to pick up a Playstation game or whatever -- they have to wait till Xmas or birthdays. And what about rentals?). Plus, women have more purchasing power then they have in the past in _all_ markets, not just video games.
We know that games (and ads, naturally) appeal to men primarily; we know that male gamers are in the majority...
Most of the games themselves, especially the ones we're likely to see take off, usually focus on traditional male things, like karate dudes kicking lots of ass or spacemen with big f'ing guns killing lots of aliens, or the good old standby, gratuitous sex. We're not likely to see games with more sensitive aspects, such as a game where you run away from weddings in order to get Richard Gere to come after you.
I'd say that usually, women play with video games when males are around, e.g. her boyfriend moved in with his Nintendo and she likes to play MarioLand.
Less likely is she to pick up a console system after he leaves her on her own. Partly due to the lingering of the forces I'm talking about -- chances are her go-shopping-with friends are shopping at Ann Taylor and not Circuit City.
But when new boyfriend moves in, she might buy him a system for Xmas, and pick up some games she knows about / has played before as well.
But do the games/ads actually turn women away, or are they just catering to the pre-existing audience?
If the arguments and figures in the article are to be believed, no. The article is upset that video game advertising (not even marketing!) is not trying to to lure women in. (A strange complaint. I'd personally be quite happier if there was much less advertising trying to lure me in.)
The article is making some tired observations, the sort which, if the authors are suggesting that their problems are limited to the field of VG advertising, they are sorely mistaken and perhaps somehow don't see much advertising of other sorts. Complaints like a picture of a joystick being too "phallic" are getting sort of old. (Nowadays I'd expect computing women to be complaining about certain people's pronunciation of 'tty', but most noise is still harping on things like joysticks. I thought joysticks were out and cross-buttons were in anyway.)
Now, if as the magazine states, 50% percent of gamers are women, obviously the lack of female-directed advertising hasn't made a bit of difference. If it were me, I'd be celebrating the fact that my group of people had successfully overcome the lures and traps of advertising and had become a force in the market without that benefit.
Question: Is Lara Croft a good thing for men, or a good thing for women? Is it more significant to say that women are good to look at, or to say that women can raid tombs just as well as Harrison Ford can?
(Is this why I'm single? Cause I call it like I see it?)
According to the "manual" that came with my CD-R drive, CD-R's actually last _longer_ than stamped CDs, by something like 7:1.
Okay, I don't know if I believe that, but that fact might be outdated, and based on early (or cheaper) CD stamping technology, when CDs weren't selling well. Some discs I've seen that were stamped in the early-mid 80's were starting to fray around the edges and peel on the surface, about 10 years after they were made. They still worked, but definitely showed remarkable wear from age for what was once hailed as THE audio medium.
I wouldn't be surprised if it's only about 5 years at best. Just in time for them to sell you your whole movie collection all over again in whatever the new technology of the moment is.
Hmm, well VHS lasted for quite some time before DVD came along... It even fought off videodiscs for all concerned except the most hardcore of entertainment system junkies. I bet it'll still be around for a while, and DVD won't ever quite take over.
(Then again, I didn't own a CD player until 1994, and that was a CD-ROM drive, so I was bit behind the curve.)
As for this DVD-DA thing, I see it as even less likely to take off.
...is that even though they keep updating the technology, they don't keep changing the damned connectors.
How many different types of SCSI cable are there, between original SCSI, Wide SCSI, Ultra Wide Scsi, etc.?
I can still use the same 1GB drive that I had on my 486/33, on my much newer PII/450. And I can use the same cable. This makes me happy. The fact that IDE is also cheaper than SCSI makes me happy.
Now, if the SCSI advocates are only talking about practicality for high-load file servers, and server candy like hot-swappability, they have a point. But if they want to treat workstation practicality as being equivalent to server practicality, that's an all too common fallacy.
The fact that these are large i.e. congested markets we're talking about, your range for 10 watts isn't going to get you 4 miles. In Boston, with 10W you're lucky if you can get as far as five city blocks.
...[T]he radio business has consolidated in very dramatic fashion...
Oh well. Large markets also have DSL, so they don't need this IMO.
Don't they have market-ownership laws that are supposed to remedy that exact problem?
The nation's largest broadcasters have fought to block the rules... asserting that [this] could create interference for established stations in the form of static or distorted signals./i>
Sniffle. It's these same largest broadcasters who constantly increase their wattage, infringing (illegally) on other (usually smaller) stations' broadcast radii. And the FCC has approved these increases in most cases without a smidge of regard for the lower-power stations, who get rejected for their own power increase petitions, being drowned out.
The supporters of the F.C.C.'s move... included... the United States Catholic Conference and the United Church of Christ.
Between christian college radio stations (which always seem to be school-run as opposed to student-run) and AM radio, I'm not glad to hear that churches want to use this. I'm much more interested in the Stephen Dunifer (Free Radio Berkeley) types getting on.
I have to say in the realm of radio and maybe even TV, the FCC seems to mean well. But they normally have no teeth whatsoever when it comes to large-power stations.
1. Word processor with wysiwyg page view. (Wordperfect comes closest. You can forget about EMACS, if it does do this, it doesnt by default) /. story about there being no powerpoint-like sw out there)
a mming who usually screw up their computer halfway through installing System Commander so they can sorta install Linux but still keep their relied-upon Windows around. (And we still are letting this sort of people define mainstream computing? Come on!)
2. Spreadsheet (gnumeric is pretty minimal)
3. Visual database (okay, anything you can run on linux beats the crap out of MSSQL7 and definintely out of Access, but does psql or sqlplus look as nice as Access? No.)
4. Presentation managers (see past Ask
5. Games (DOOM and Quake and a few others ported as resources allow -- but aside from Id, what major game developers release linux versions?)
6. Graphic tools (GIMP is pretty good. Not great, but better than what we've had to deal with)
The things that matter to geeks -- full system control, quite good system transparency, original development (and easy and cheap at that), and more or less at the forefront of networking -- are what we get with Linux -- but hardly anyone besides us cares about any of those.
It's a shame, and I agree the passive attitude of many to computer use should change, but until we can address THAT, releasing new dists of Linux isn't really impressing anyone besides ourselves, other geeks, the deplorable trenderati, and some bright-eyed MIS-majors-couldn't-get-through-CS-intro-to-progr
My question is, who is liable?
You borrow a CD from a friend - not illegal, afaik. The software detects it, scans its track info, ships the data to Beam-It and Beam-It registers this as "yours", and now allows you to stream the songs on the CD, even though you don't own it, and even after you've given the CD back to your friend.
Do you click on a button that says "Yes, I own this CD"? That would at least make you liable. Otherwise, would they be liable for sending you music you don't have rights to?
Another thing is the spokenword message saying "Too many open streams. Please close some and continue. You should not share your password."
Why not log in as yourself? Or a dummy login?
It doesn't play DVDs, but does play CD's, and it's supposedly prepared for all the issues the Apex apparently isn't - supports LFNs, M3U's, VBR, subdirectories, index and search, plus 45-sec skip buffer.
So what if they're held up in production. Maybe that really does mean they're making sure they make a better product.
It should make you wonder how little PR the tech/OS community even tries to do, and how much it could really use in cases like this one.
Obviously CNN and ABC et al aren't feeling the need to troll Slashdot themselves for this story.
You have to admit, though, that the nature of computer technology is a fairly big culture shock to the notions of the workings of the world that pretty much all laws have been based on for ages.
In the past, even though major technological advances have always happened, and law has always been fairly slow to catch up to them, most of these advances have not presented major, widespread challenges to the common worldview. So what if you now have this railroad thing that can carry sugar farther and faster than pickups or horse-drawn carts? You eventually find that control of this can cause an uneven market system, and if you believe in equal access being essential to the economy, then you have to make a new law. But that's only one new law here and there.
So you find that these new horseless carriages are spewing out this black smoke. No big deal, until you notice that too much of this smoke causes air pollution, makes cities dingy, and affects peoples' health. So you make a law or so that limits the amount of smoke that gets spewed out (somehow).
IN both cases, for the most part, only a few laws turn out ot be needed, and in neitehr case does the new technology cause the entire application of law to be invalid.
As has been observed, most laws apply to the natural world, and are made with concrete objects in mind. This falls apart quite rapidly though, when you bring computer abstraction into the forum.
We now find such problems as patents being issued for abstract, not concrete things, laws being made to apply to the movement, ownership, and modification of computer files as if they were tactile objects, hard drives are being searched like houses. In all cases, the laws that were made in a concrete world are now being applied to a non-concrete world, and this is, as one would expect, falling apart quite neatly.
Most laws are about physical concepts, visible, non-transient characteristics, and concrete objects and posessions. Few laws are ever written that take into account how they should be applied to abstract objects, because until the computer age, such potential applications didn't exist.
Certainly some disappointing losses have been witnessed due to lawyers being unclear about the aspects of technology. The same precept applies: lawyers are only applying the tactics they would use in a concrete situation, to an abstract one. IN all fairness, this is hardly limited to the computer or technical realm. Few lawyers, especially not personal lawyers, are experts on any given field. The market for field-specialized law wasn't that great for a while, and then it boomed in the mid-90's with all the technical startups. Law schools are only just now beginning to catch up to the demand with doctorate programs in high-tech law. The fact is though, that attorney ignorance about the sordid details of a legal affair is hardly limited to the computer world (thinking: white lawyers representing black clients), and furthremore, this is not ALWAYS bad (ditto). And even if you did have goo high-tech lawyers, its much more important for them to understand high-tech LAWS than it is to know the high-tech field itself.
So basically, the primary problem is, and will be, the sheer amount of laws that are designed for the concrete world, that are now being applied blindly and without much second thought to the abstract world. In order to rectify the problems we are sensing, these laws, or law in general, will need to be refined and changed in order to appropriately address the nuances of the abstract computer world.
They are starting to do this, and I by no means want to suggest that we should stop putting pressure on lawmakers to bring these changes about, but we should still expect the process to be painfully slow.
Dunno about jhu, but neu has been part of I2 for about three years or so, and I never did anything with it or even see a computer that was attached to it. NEU has pretty much kept the rest of their net separate.
Possibly grad CS students in the new corporate research center get to play with it, but those are few and far; the main CS resources are enough for most students' projects involving things like FTP'ing large 3D data files, even if they do have to start it at 9PM and come back at 8Am to see the results. (After all, that's the way it was on the old Internet, too.)
Most of the CS research being done on I-2 there seem to be testing new high-speed protocols, not taking advantage of the speed for shipping monumentous research data in convenient amounts of time. (Besides, most of yall get 6 more weeks per term than NEU does. Plenty of time to finish your research.)
Other than that, a programmer turned sociology professor that I've done projects with has mentioned that they are also doing human-network interaction research with I-2.
Traceroutes from neu to mit go though BBN, just like you would expect.
So are you saying that you would prefer the crustier, exclusive, countable-node Internet of pre-1994 to today's looser, accessible, and ever-expanding Net?
Don't get me wrong. I like the idea of geeks, nerds, academics, scholars, and accelerated students having a mode of communication over which they can share information (and ultimately, commune) without added noise from web spiders, *@aol.com, MMF, spam, and pron-hocking sites. But I think you can do most of this over the Internet as it stands.
The poster is right to say that 'Internet 2' is a misleading name, because it gives the impression that someday, reasonably soon, the lumbering Internet being widely used today will be rebuilt with Internet 2 technology, the same way Amtrak might like to replace its old lumbering rail system with Acela technology, or the way the phone companies have mostly replaced the old analog system with a digital system, or the way car companies have replaced catalytic converters with fuel injectors. But the word is that it probably wont.
The goal/purpose of Internet 2, as it seems to stand, is to replace the academic backbone that the 'original' Internet once was. Despite geek wistfulness and a tenacity to history, it really should be called something else. Cable TV wasn't called Television 2, nor was FM radio called Radio-2. These both served the same purposes as their originals, and have come to largely replace them, just as Internet 2 is wont to do for the institutional origins of Internet 1.
But for the detractors of the new exclusive networks like I-2 and U2, have no fear. Someday (if not already), bofh.forsale will be created and it will all start to come crumbling down, again.
Whassamatter? Scott break his cup holder?
Accept, at least, this observation: that those who program computers make computers do what they want, and those who don't program computers do what the computers want them to do.
Certainly people should opt to be in the former group, in terms of the ends.