Australia is *the* country which could make Wireless useful and ubiquitous. Even UMTS would be a good alternative in that country.
However large Australian corporations tend to be run by greedy little bastards who have no qualms in squeezing their customers for those last few pennies. Perhaps Telstra should be known as Taipan and Optus as Funnel Web.
Customer satisfaction is not a widely recognised concept in Oz.
This was a Dutch TV series of documentaries on 5 scientists back in the early 90's. One of them was Stephan Gould. In the final show, the five scientists had a roundtable discussion and the subject got around to AI, which was one of the scientists strengths, and who was claiming that AI could replace humans and we wouldn't know it or be able to differentiate between it and life. Stephan Gould asked him if he had ever had a dog.
You may have a point. If one asks oneself what they really have to lose by disclosing all their APIs the answer might very well be that someone might find a disproportionate amount of properties, return values and methods that they recognise from elsewhere.
The only reason I can see someone from Microsoft saying this in a court of law is that they must be really, really desperate. Making wild claims about American national security and the war in Afghanistan is something that no one in the industry or the court is going to believe, and if they do many, many people are going to start to ask themselves if it isn't time that some form of government control and a change in Microsoft management is needed.
I cannot see this benefitting Microsoft in any way. There will of course be the usual pro microsoft sites such as ZDNet that will report this verbatim (with a straight face) but, for a company that is trying to garner support for "Trustworthy computing" and it's.Net initiative in the industry, this is desasterous. Most large companies that are dependant on Microsoft software will ask themselves if it is wise to take Microsoft seriously considering the statements made by Microsoft executives in court. Technical and business reviews are going to have a field day with this one ("If it is so insecure why are we using it?", "Can a company take them seriously when they come around trying to do business claiming Microsoft superiority?"). This will make a lot of press sites, and I seriously wonder if this won't be the thing that finally tips the balance against Microsoft in the eyes of the general population or at least the general business population. Although the general press is extremely ignorant about IT things (the BBC is a brilliant example of this) even they wil be able to put two and two together that something is very wrong with this company.
I don't know what kind of an effect this will have on foreign governments, but this will not go down well with EU even though they are just as IT-ignorant as American politicians.
I know that if I had my own company and read through some of the statements that Microsoft have made in court I wouldn't be laughing like I am now.
I don't want to appear to be a wiseguy, but I think the number of responses and above all their content answers a question I made in another post about movies to make you think. 12 Monkies does this by not giving one a clear ending. It doesn't really matter how or why the scientist got in the plane (my own idea is that from her point of view, 35 years in the future, all these people are already dead and in her past no one believed Cole/Willis or would have until people has already started dying, and by saying "insurance" she was making a pun as to why she was there). The thing is it leaves you with questions, both moral ones and ones related to the plot.
I see quite a few people making the following two points about the XBox and Microsoft's huge cash mountain: Microsoft can afford to lose money for years and still win the market in the end.
What I think is that this, while true, ignores some other possibilities. Some of us here remember the EA saying "NO" to Microsoft a few days ago, which raises the very real possibility that other game developers might follow EA's lead and desert the XBox. That would kill the XBox faster than anything. Another point is that the whole Enron/Andersen dubious accounting deal might spill over into other sectors of the US economy and the general media might start asking *public* questions about MIcrosoft not paying Tax or Dividends (I am *very* surprised that the States' lawyers didn't bring this one up everytime Microsoft claimed that the settlement would hurt the economy). I'm not saying that Microsoft is paying kickbacks but a spotlight on their cash mountain might cause it to evaporate very quickly.
Another point is that sooner or later, if the XBox keeps on losing money, Microsoft will probably cancel it on their own. They've canceled other projects for smaller reasons.
And just in case anyone wondered. No, I'm not a fan of Sony either. There business practices are not much better than Microsoft's, but their public image is.
I missed it in my other post, but if there ever was a science fiction film that had a brilliant story (The Anthrax scare last year) excellent acting (Madeleine Stow plays the part of a woman who is intelligent , warm and not some male macho replica, and we all love to see Bruce Willis suffer), Gillamesque wierdness (the strange society under the earth) and a refreshing sad and sweet ending (the tragic hero dies but humanity is saved), this was it.
I actually wonder why this didn't make it onto the list? I think possibly because of the ending. I think it frightens audiences to see the hero die.
I think it's should be obvious that China would do this for national prestige - can anyone name a country that wouldn't? - and it's attendant military benefits. Whether they will succede in the given time frame is another question altogether. 2010 is an extremely near date even though the technology to get there is not rocket science (pun intended) any more. The chinese seem to be buying up a lot of already developed Russian technology and have the will to do this adventure, but given that China seems to have difficulties developing it's own *reliable* high tech (J10 fighter for example, Long March crashes for another) I have the feeling that if this does indeed go forward, it will more likely be around 2015 to 2020.
I appreciate that they made Gattaca, Blade Runner and Brazil rate highly for the simple reason these movies do some justice to one of the real strongpoints of science fiction - The ability to use an abstracted situation to point out conflicting situations of the present. Whether they do it well or not is another question but they do ask to you to think.
This is not a put down of technical effects films such as the Matrix, which also has that element of abstraction (where are we going with our preoccupation with things digital?) or terminator or the star wars series. There is a need for pure entertainment as well and everybody loves a simple action filled story full of effects and fairy tales. But disliking films because they ask you to think says more about you than it does about the movie.
Some films that didn't make it A film that was never popular but also had a good mix of action and the think factor (if higly simplified) was Enemy Mine.
And my own favourite fantasy film with brilliant acting and huge laughs was Time Bandits, also by Terry Gillam who made Brazil.
Even if one were to agree that internet piracy is decreasing the revenue of the RIAA and MPAA, even if Microsoft (yes, they are doing a similar scheme with their new licences) were actually right about the dangers (to microsoft) of OSS, in my opinion it boils down to a simple problem: Resitance to change.
Why are they resisting the change? Because of revenue. All the above organisation's profits are dropping for various reasons and they are trying to stem the loss with either restrictive laws or restrictive licences. As I posted in another topic, this only changes the response to the laws and licences, but does not stop the actual process itself. Trying to exert control, by American companies, of personal devices and media, in an effort to stop the growing digitalisation of society will only result in even more resistance by consumers and the general move of innovation away from the US and bitter infighting amongst the industry. Trying to outlaw devices such as the general purpose PC, will drive parts of an entire industry, into insolvency (Software and tool developers above all) and will make the US an unpopular place to do business in and shift the impetus of media away from there.
I'm not sure but I think that whichever way they go, they will have to face restructuring in the long term and this means losses. There are so many examples that one could fill pages with them- The steel industry trying to stop change with protectionism (only resulting in retaliation from overseas traders), The car industry trying to stop unionisation with violence and anti-communist propaganda (didn't win there either), the English monarchy trying to stop the US from gaining independance, AT&T trying to hold onto it's monopoly in the communication business. - In the long run it mostly backfires. Musicians who earn next to nothing from the RIAA can and will use these restricive laws to further their own poularity by speaking out against it. Companies moving to OSS because it's cheaper and less controlled. Developers not making products for sale or use in the US due to the restrictions there.
I think, in the long run, laws such as these, are immensly damaging to the very organisations trying to enforce them now, because your average person, who doesn't pirate, will get ticked off that he has to pay more for a DVD or CD (or did you think that they were going to implement all these copy restrictions for free?), the same guy will get ticked off that he has no access to independant media, that everything he does on his non-general purpose computing device is watched and controlled by someone. Programmers in the US will be the laughing stock of the world if they can only code within a strictly defined set of parameters that entails very little freedom.
I'm not a fan of Science Fiction analogies but "Flow my tears the policeman said" by Philip K Dick is good reading for the case that these restrictions become law.(Especially the epilog)
Just as in the Soviet Union, there was not much point in trying to be innovative or come up with good ideas, the IT industry in the US would suffer from laws that constrict what you can devise and what you can't. If there are laws inhibiting small firms (which are in general more innovative than larger ones), the OSS movement and the hardware industry from coming up with newer products the market in the US would possibly stagnate because there just wouldn't be any motivation to work on somthing new (P2P for example) if one has to fear legal presecution for developing a new technology.
As someone further down posted, I doubt that other countries will follow the US' example to the letter (although you can be sure that some US governments will try to force this onto some other countries). This would mean the at least a portion of the innovative edge will move outside the US and the US would fall behind because every technology would have to be "approved" by some body in the US. And you can bet that some countries and blocs will make as much PR capital out of this as they can ("US oppression etc"), and it would possibly make the current tension between the EU and the US worse than it is.
The larger corporations would not initially be hurt that much as they could attempt to pass the price rises entailed in developing and implementing DRM-compatible hardware and software on to the consumers, who would more than likely respond by buying less than they had before (The Napster example again, wrongly interpreted by the MPAA and RIAA). As is usual with seemly blind official organisations such as those mentioned above, they would in turn respond by trying to turn the screws even tighter than before claiming that piracy is growing (which it possibly very well could, considering that people who would copy their media would be labeled as criminals and be forced underground -as in the prohibition era in the US). It would, in other words, simply be a vicious circle and would probably, in the end drive the RIAA and MPAA into bankruptcy (Could those be voices saying "I told you so" in the background?) and certainly hurt the US economy.
Another good example would be Microsoft's attempts to raise prices with it's new licencing scheme - It simply drives more companies to seek cheaper alternatives.
While he acts the part of a normal user who forgets everything including password or that his wife etc might be the card holder, does seem to be somewhat naive. Since he knows that they don't want him to opt out and will make it difficult, why doesn't he prepare for this? Have all the information neccesary and ask immediately to get through to the accounting department. Better yet, why doesn't he just send a registered snail mail asking to be removed from the service? That way, after that date he can legally block all payments to them.
I couldn't figure out whether he was being tongue in cheek when he claimed that "Pinochet was a relatively benign dictator". Pinochet ordered the murder (with the help and blessing of the CIA) of the elected President, he had literaly thousands of supposed "dissidents" (anyone, who in the USA would just have been complaining) arrested, tortured and killed, including, without discrimination, many foreign nationals (Americans, Spanish and French citizens). This is why he is a wanted man in Spain and France. His reign of terror was only exceeded in South America by the Argetnian military Junta who murdered over 30 000 of their own citizens in the space of about ten years.
But perhaps it's funny, right? Perhaps he is one of these people who favour a "strong government" in times of emergency, irrespective of what that government is doing or the fact that he might be one of the first ones to be put up against the wall.
Someone posted further down that this is illegal in the UK. IANAL but as far as I can see, it's also ilegal in most of the EU. The EU laws on data protection is where you can read the relavent material. There is also a link there to mail the EU commission on abuse of these laws.
Some years ago I lived and worked in Turkey as a windsurfing instructor. Beautiful women and good dope can be had but you have to be very very careful there. The thing is to make sure you have enough money to buy yourself out of jail if you get into trouble.
This repression on the net thing will not last very long. Turkey has been trying for years to get into the EU and the EU has set some very strict limits as to what it will accept from Turkey in the way of censorship and repression. Turkey will have to drop this law to get into the EU.
Why? Because it's there. Because it serves a fundamental need of humanity: To expand and explore. When we will get there is another question altogether. It might happen suddenly because the Chinese are already planning to start a lunar colony by 2015 (astonautix.com) and the US feels the peer pressure. It might happen because the technology eventualy advances to the point where in 2030 say, it is relatively easy to do so. It might happen because someone might realise that the comet/asteroid wacking into the earth theory a la deep impact and armegeddon is not so far fetched (Just ask the dynosaurs) and they need to be able to rendezvous with asteroids. It might happen because of political reasons such as a president needing something to take away the focus from other important problems.
But it will happen. And even the deepest cynics don't even seem to doubt that. The how and when they doubt, but not the if.
Ms' little dances and tricks are making me wonder if they are indeed having some cashflow problems. They might have $40billion supposed cash but that could very possibly be the result of some fancy accounting, just like an ex energy concern was supposedly well endowed in cash until someone decied to look at the books a bit more closely.
The author of the article asked Craig "FUD Man" Mundie about the new settings in Hotmail while he was giving a talk about "Trustworthy computing". That must count as one of the ironies of this year.
I have to seriously thank slashdot for this info. I've been using Hotmail since 1997 when it was still very useful and had actually entered my real information there (like countless other idiots I presume) and never bothered to change them. Recently they (MSN) started to get more penetrant with their constant warnings about deleting mail if you get near the 2mb limit and now this, not so subtle attempt to sell your info.
Well, I deleted everything there, addresses, stored mails the works, mailed everyone I knew telling them of the private mail change and urged them to change their private web mail as well. I then changed my info to some junk and mailed MSN feedback that they were now free to delete my account. I lso mailed a couple of online news sites about it to top it off.
Not bad, Microsoft makes middle ages feudal robber barons look like pillars of enlightenment, and to boot, I now have a really nice little story to fling at people when they start praising Microsoft as a "decent" company again.
I used to work in Multimedia in a large Internet Agency doing Director CD-rom productions for clients in teams ofusually about 5 or 6 people. The problems he describes in the article are exactly the same, on a smaller scale, to be found in most productions where you have management (the art director), designers (graphics, video and sound), project managers and coders. While coders and project managers want to see structured plans, directories, storyboards and timelines, each creative person usually has his or her own way of working with files which is often coupled with the fact that not many designers can communicate their wishes well to coders and coders seem to make interfaces that designers cannot use.
On one especially long hard project, we had several mishaps and lost assets because the designers forced us to work with a non logical file naming system, and at that time I wished for a tool that would enable designers to have their certain flexibility that they need but would still be structured enough not to hinder the coding process.
I notice that everytime MS gets a negative posting here, which is often and to be expected, since this is a place where you don't have to fear any recriminations when posting negative MS articles (Rob Malda does not have to report to an editor in chief and explain why he's undermining the MS advertising on the site), A lot of people post a lot of anti-slashot commentaries about anti-MS bias etc.
This is one of the few *very* public sites that I can go to and read public criticisms of MS, step by step. If I wanted to read what a fantastic job MS is doing with it's security and how it really is such a *fab* company, then I could either go to MS' site and read the marketing departments latest press releases or go to ZDNet and read commentaries by the zombies in their editorial department.
I *want* to read extremely critical news here on/. Criticism keeps MS on it's toes and stops them from doing what they like with users' (including your) rights. It gives me a good critical counterclaim for every piece of anti-linux FUD that comes from MS.
/. May often be wrong but they don't try to tell me how wonderful is and how I can just back and let MS handle all my problems.
I already posted on what the target market would be that Apple is aiming at, but I thought it over a bit and came to the conclusion that the target market is larger than that: 1.Video Production houses: A lot of those houses already use Macs (Final Cut, After Effects, Maya etc) and already have Mac OSX expertise. This machine with it's Firewire port on the front of the machine is made for them: Most Video Production houses have racks of VCR's and effects gear in the studios and with this machine they could patch the gear to the server without having to crawl around the back of the rack. In addition to this this machine can do the file and web serving for these companies and thereby remove the need for them to have seperate platforms for this. 2.Audio Studios. The same as Video houses. 3.Schools. The server managment software makes it very interesting due to it's simplicity. While I doubt that cash strapped schools already using PC's will switch, those schools who can afford iMacs and iBooks will almost surely be using these on the server side, as well as the Apple remote desktop to control the classroom. 4.Any enterprise that needs one platform for web and file serving. This is the riskiest bet, but there is some merit in it. Since Apple makes a point of saying how well it works with both Unix and MS servers, there could well be effective reasons for enterprises to go with some of these. While they have qualified server technicians and admins, the managment software's ease of use, combined with the Unix underpinnings make it definitely a good idea to make those areas more efficient, especially since it can double as an MS file server at the same time except for Exchange.
I really do wonder if MS will start to do haul out the dirty tricks dept. with Apple since this is competeing head on with them? For instance changing the CIFS standard in future XP versions to make them incompatible with this server and refusing to licence the standard to Apple, or withholding updates to Office on OSX.
William Gibson's Neuromancer series (Neuromancer, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive) were AKAIK *the* stories that kicked off what we know as "Cyberpunk" or modern dark, high-tech, low-life science fiction. I personally have reread the books dozens of times andhave dearly wished that someone would make an excellent movie rendition of them, unlike the piss poor "Johnny Mnemonic" movie with a poor storyline and, ironically, Keanu Reeves doing his best to save the story from total loss.
I think that the makers of the matrix would have made an excellent rendition of Neuromancer and still could, and I wish that there would be massive support for this.
Slashdot Mirror
No, I'm sorry, but it was the original title - schitterende oogemblik. (This translates as a brilliant moment or brilliant event)
Australia is *the* country which could make Wireless useful and ubiquitous. Even UMTS would be a good alternative in that country.
However large Australian corporations tend to be run by greedy little bastards who have no qualms in squeezing their customers for those last few pennies. Perhaps Telstra should be known as Taipan and Optus as Funnel Web.
Customer satisfaction is not a widely recognised concept in Oz.
This was a Dutch TV series of documentaries on 5 scientists back in the early 90's. One of them was Stephan Gould. In the final show, the five scientists had a roundtable discussion and the subject got around to AI, which was one of the scientists strengths, and who was claiming that AI could replace humans and we wouldn't know it or be able to differentiate between it and life. Stephan Gould asked him if he had ever had a dog.
You may have a point. If one asks oneself what they really have to lose by disclosing all their APIs the answer might very well be that someone might find a disproportionate amount of properties, return values and methods that they recognise from elsewhere.
If you can do that, why can't /. ?
The only reason I can see someone from Microsoft saying this in a court of law is that they must be really, really desperate. Making wild claims about American national security and the war in Afghanistan is something that no one in the industry or the court is going to believe, and if they do many, many people are going to start to ask themselves if it isn't time that some form of government control and a change in Microsoft management is needed.
.Net initiative in the industry, this is desasterous. Most large companies that are dependant on Microsoft software will ask themselves if it is wise to take Microsoft seriously considering the statements made by Microsoft executives in court. Technical and business reviews are going to have a field day with this one ("If it is so insecure why are we using it?", "Can a company take them seriously when they come around trying to do business claiming Microsoft superiority?"). This will make a lot of press sites, and I seriously wonder if this won't be the thing that finally tips the balance against Microsoft in the eyes of the general population or at least the general business population. Although the general press is extremely ignorant about IT things (the BBC is a brilliant example of this) even they wil be able to put two and two together that something is very wrong with this company.
I cannot see this benefitting Microsoft in any way. There will of course be the usual pro microsoft sites such as ZDNet that will report this verbatim (with a straight face) but, for a company that is trying to garner support for "Trustworthy computing" and it's
I don't know what kind of an effect this will have on foreign governments, but this will not go down well with EU even though they are just as IT-ignorant as American politicians.
I know that if I had my own company and read through some of the statements that Microsoft have made in court I wouldn't be laughing like I am now.
I don't want to appear to be a wiseguy, but I think the number of responses and above all their content answers a question I made in another post about movies to make you think. 12 Monkies does this by not giving one a clear ending. It doesn't really matter how or why the scientist got in the plane (my own idea is that from her point of view, 35 years in the future, all these people are already dead and in her past no one believed Cole/Willis or would have until people has already started dying, and by saying "insurance" she was making a pun as to why she was there). The thing is it leaves you with questions, both moral ones and ones related to the plot.
I see quite a few people making the following two points about the XBox and Microsoft's huge cash mountain: Microsoft can afford to lose money for years and still win the market in the end.
What I think is that this, while true, ignores some other possibilities. Some of us here remember the EA saying "NO" to Microsoft a few days ago, which raises the very real possibility that other game developers might follow EA's lead and desert the XBox. That would kill the XBox faster than anything. Another point is that the whole Enron/Andersen dubious accounting deal might spill over into other sectors of the US economy and the general media might start asking *public* questions about MIcrosoft not paying Tax or Dividends (I am *very* surprised that the States' lawyers didn't bring this one up everytime Microsoft claimed that the settlement would hurt the economy). I'm not saying that Microsoft is paying kickbacks but a spotlight on their cash mountain might cause it to evaporate very quickly.
Another point is that sooner or later, if the XBox keeps on losing money, Microsoft will probably cancel it on their own. They've canceled other projects for smaller reasons.
And just in case anyone wondered. No, I'm not a fan of Sony either. There business practices are not much better than Microsoft's, but their public image is.
I missed it in my other post, but if there ever was a science fiction film that had a brilliant story (The Anthrax scare last year) excellent acting (Madeleine Stow plays the part of a woman who is intelligent , warm and not some male macho replica, and we all love to see Bruce Willis suffer), Gillamesque wierdness (the strange society under the earth) and a refreshing sad and sweet ending (the tragic hero dies but humanity is saved), this was it.
I actually wonder why this didn't make it onto the list? I think possibly because of the ending. I think it frightens audiences to see the hero die.
I think it's should be obvious that China would do this for national prestige - can anyone name a country that wouldn't? - and it's attendant military benefits. Whether they will succede in the given time frame is another question altogether. 2010 is an extremely near date even though the technology to get there is not rocket science (pun intended) any more. The chinese seem to be buying up a lot of already developed Russian technology and have the will to do this adventure, but given that China seems to have difficulties developing it's own *reliable* high tech (J10 fighter for example, Long March crashes for another) I have the feeling that if this does indeed go forward, it will more likely be around 2015 to 2020.
I appreciate that they made Gattaca, Blade Runner and Brazil rate highly for the simple reason these movies do some justice to one of the real strongpoints of science fiction - The ability to use an abstracted situation to point out conflicting situations of the present. Whether they do it well or not is another question but they do ask to you to think.
This is not a put down of technical effects films such as the Matrix, which also has that element of abstraction (where are we going with our preoccupation with things digital?) or terminator or the star wars series. There is a need for pure entertainment as well and everybody loves a simple action filled story full of effects and fairy tales. But disliking films because they ask you to think says more about you than it does about the movie.
Some films that didn't make it
A film that was never popular but also had a good mix of action and the think factor (if higly simplified) was Enemy Mine.
And my own favourite fantasy film with brilliant acting and huge laughs was Time Bandits, also by Terry Gillam who made Brazil.
Even if one were to agree that internet piracy is decreasing the revenue of the RIAA and MPAA, even if Microsoft (yes, they are doing a similar scheme with their new licences) were actually right about the dangers (to microsoft) of OSS, in my opinion it boils down to a simple problem: Resitance to change.
Why are they resisting the change? Because of revenue. All the above organisation's profits are dropping for various reasons and they are trying to stem the loss with either restrictive laws or restrictive licences. As I posted in another topic, this only changes the response to the laws and licences, but does not stop the actual process itself. Trying to exert control, by American companies, of personal devices and media, in an effort to stop the growing digitalisation of society will only result in even more resistance by consumers and the general move of innovation away from the US and bitter infighting amongst the industry. Trying to outlaw devices such as the general purpose PC, will drive parts of an entire industry, into insolvency (Software and tool developers above all) and will make the US an unpopular place to do business in and shift the impetus of media away from there.
I'm not sure but I think that whichever way they go, they will have to face restructuring in the long term and this means losses. There are so many examples that one could fill pages with them- The steel industry trying to stop change with protectionism (only resulting in retaliation from overseas traders), The car industry trying to stop unionisation with violence and anti-communist propaganda (didn't win there either), the English monarchy trying to stop the US from gaining independance, AT&T trying to hold onto it's monopoly in the communication business. - In the long run it mostly backfires. Musicians who earn next to nothing from the RIAA can and will use these restricive laws to further their own poularity by speaking out against it. Companies moving to OSS because it's cheaper and less controlled. Developers not making products for sale or use in the US due to the restrictions there.
I think, in the long run, laws such as these, are immensly damaging to the very organisations trying to enforce them now, because your average person, who doesn't pirate, will get ticked off that he has to pay more for a DVD or CD (or did you think that they were going to implement all these copy restrictions for free?), the same guy will get ticked off that he has no access to independant media, that everything he does on his non-general purpose computing device is watched and controlled by someone. Programmers in the US will be the laughing stock of the world if they can only code within a strictly defined set of parameters that entails very little freedom.
I'm not a fan of Science Fiction analogies but "Flow my tears the policeman said" by Philip K Dick is good reading for the case that these restrictions become law.(Especially the epilog)
Just as in the Soviet Union, there was not much point in trying to be innovative or come up with good ideas, the IT industry in the US would suffer from laws that constrict what you can devise and what you can't. If there are laws inhibiting small firms (which are in general more innovative than larger ones), the OSS movement and the hardware industry from coming up with newer products the market in the US would possibly stagnate because there just wouldn't be any motivation to work on somthing new (P2P for example) if one has to fear legal presecution for developing a new technology.
As someone further down posted, I doubt that other countries will follow the US' example to the letter (although you can be sure that some US governments will try to force this onto some other countries). This would mean the at least a portion of the innovative edge will move outside the US and the US would fall behind because every technology would have to be "approved" by some body in the US. And you can bet that some countries and blocs will make as much PR capital out of this as they can ("US oppression etc"), and it would possibly make the current tension between the EU and the US worse than it is.
The larger corporations would not initially be hurt that much as they could attempt to pass the price rises entailed in developing and implementing DRM-compatible hardware and software on to the consumers, who would more than likely respond by buying less than they had before (The Napster example again, wrongly interpreted by the MPAA and RIAA). As is usual with seemly blind official organisations such as those mentioned above, they would in turn respond by trying to turn the screws even tighter than before claiming that piracy is growing (which it possibly very well could, considering that people who would copy their media would be labeled as criminals and be forced underground -as in the prohibition era in the US). It would, in other words, simply be a vicious circle and would probably, in the end drive the RIAA and MPAA into bankruptcy (Could those be voices saying "I told you so" in the background?) and certainly hurt the US economy.
Another good example would be Microsoft's attempts to raise prices with it's new licencing scheme - It simply drives more companies to seek cheaper alternatives.
John Katz knows what a stamp is? or where the nearest postoffice is?
While he acts the part of a normal user who forgets everything including password or that his wife etc might be the card holder, does seem to be somewhat naive. Since he knows that they don't want him to opt out and will make it difficult, why doesn't he prepare for this? Have all the information neccesary and ask immediately to get through to the accounting department. Better yet, why doesn't he just send a registered snail mail asking to be removed from the service? That way, after that date he can legally block all payments to them.
I couldn't figure out whether he was being tongue in cheek when he claimed that "Pinochet was a relatively benign dictator". Pinochet ordered the murder (with the help and blessing of the CIA) of the elected President, he had literaly thousands of supposed "dissidents" (anyone, who in the USA would just have been complaining) arrested, tortured and killed, including, without discrimination, many foreign nationals (Americans, Spanish and French citizens). This is why he is a wanted man in Spain and France. His reign of terror was only exceeded in South America by the Argetnian military Junta who murdered over 30 000 of their own citizens in the space of about ten years.
But perhaps it's funny, right? Perhaps he is one of these people who favour a "strong government" in times of emergency, irrespective of what that government is doing or the fact that he might be one of the first ones to be put up against the wall.
Someone posted further down that this is illegal in the UK. IANAL but as far as I can see, it's also ilegal in most of the EU.
The EU laws on data protection is where you can read the relavent material. There is also a link there to mail the EU commission on abuse of these laws.
Some years ago I lived and worked in Turkey as a windsurfing instructor. Beautiful women and good dope can be had but you have to be very very careful there. The thing is to make sure you have enough money to buy yourself out of jail if you get into trouble.
This repression on the net thing will not last very long. Turkey has been trying for years to get into the EU and the EU has set some very strict limits as to what it will accept from Turkey in the way of censorship and repression. Turkey will have to drop this law to get into the EU.
Why? Because it's there. Because it serves a fundamental need of humanity: To expand and explore. When we will get there is another question altogether. It might happen suddenly because the Chinese are already planning to start a lunar colony by 2015 (astonautix.com) and the US feels the peer pressure. It might happen because the technology eventualy advances to the point where in 2030 say, it is relatively easy to do so. It might happen because someone might realise that the comet/asteroid wacking into the earth theory a la deep impact and armegeddon is not so far fetched (Just ask the dynosaurs) and they need to be able to rendezvous with asteroids. It might happen because of political reasons such as a president needing something to take away the focus from other important problems.
But it will happen. And even the deepest cynics don't even seem to doubt that. The how and when they doubt, but not the if.
Ms' little dances and tricks are making me wonder if they are indeed having some cashflow problems. They might have $40billion supposed cash but that could very possibly be the result of some fancy accounting, just like an ex energy concern was supposedly well endowed in cash until someone decied to look at the books a bit more closely.
The author of the article asked Craig "FUD Man" Mundie about the new settings in Hotmail while he was giving a talk about "Trustworthy computing". That must count as one of the ironies of this year.
I have to seriously thank slashdot for this info. I've been using Hotmail since 1997 when it was still very useful and had actually entered my real information there (like countless other idiots I presume) and never bothered to change them. Recently they (MSN) started to get more penetrant with their constant warnings about deleting mail if you get near the 2mb limit and now this, not so subtle attempt to sell your info.
Well, I deleted everything there, addresses, stored mails the works, mailed everyone I knew telling them of the private mail change and urged them to change their private web mail as well. I then changed my info to some junk and mailed MSN feedback that they were now free to delete my account. I lso mailed a couple of online news sites about it to top it off.
Not bad, Microsoft makes middle ages feudal robber barons look like pillars of enlightenment, and to boot, I now have a really nice little story to fling at people when they start praising Microsoft as a "decent" company again.
I used to work in Multimedia in a large Internet Agency doing Director CD-rom productions for clients in teams ofusually about 5 or 6 people. The problems he describes in the article are exactly the same, on a smaller scale, to be found in most productions where you have management (the art director), designers (graphics, video and sound), project managers and coders. While coders and project managers want to see structured plans, directories, storyboards and timelines, each creative person usually has his or her own way of working with files which is often coupled with the fact that not many designers can communicate their wishes well to coders and coders seem to make interfaces that designers cannot use.
On one especially long hard project, we had several mishaps and lost assets because the designers forced us to work with a non logical file naming system, and at that time I wished for a tool that would enable designers to have their certain flexibility that they need but would still be structured enough not to hinder the coding process.
I'm still waiting today.
I notice that everytime MS gets a negative posting here, which is often and to be expected, since this is a place where you don't have to fear any recriminations when posting negative MS articles (Rob Malda does not have to report to an editor in chief and explain why he's undermining the MS advertising on the site), A lot of people post a lot of anti-slashot commentaries about anti-MS bias etc.
/. Criticism keeps MS on it's toes and stops them from doing what they like with users' (including your) rights. It gives me a good critical counterclaim for every piece of anti-linux FUD that comes from MS.
This is one of the few *very* public sites that I can go to and read public criticisms of MS, step by step. If I wanted to read what a fantastic job MS is doing with it's security and how it really is such a *fab* company, then I could either go to MS' site and read the marketing departments latest press releases or go to ZDNet and read commentaries by the zombies in their editorial department.
I *want* to read extremely critical news here on
/. May often be wrong but they don't try to tell me how wonderful is and how I can just back and let MS handle all my problems.
I already posted on what the target market would be that Apple is aiming at, but I thought it over a bit and came to the conclusion that the target market is larger than that:
1.Video Production houses: A lot of those houses already use Macs (Final Cut, After Effects, Maya etc) and already have Mac OSX expertise. This machine with it's Firewire port on the front of the machine is made for them: Most Video Production houses have racks of VCR's and effects gear in the studios and with this machine they could patch the gear to the server without having to crawl around the back of the rack. In addition to this this machine can do the file and web serving for these companies and thereby remove the need for them to have seperate platforms for this.
2.Audio Studios. The same as Video houses.
3.Schools. The server managment software makes it very interesting due to it's simplicity. While I doubt that cash strapped schools already using PC's will switch, those schools who can afford iMacs and iBooks will almost surely be using these on the server side, as well as the Apple remote desktop to control the classroom.
4.Any enterprise that needs one platform for web and file serving. This is the riskiest bet, but there is some merit in it. Since Apple makes a point of saying how well it works with both Unix and MS servers, there could well be effective reasons for enterprises to go with some of these. While they have qualified server technicians and admins, the managment software's ease of use, combined with the Unix underpinnings make it definitely a good idea to make those areas more efficient, especially since it can double as an MS file server at the same time except for Exchange.
I really do wonder if MS will start to do haul out the dirty tricks dept. with Apple since this is competeing head on with them? For instance changing the CIFS standard in future XP versions to make them incompatible with this server and refusing to licence the standard to Apple, or withholding updates to Office on OSX.
William Gibson's Neuromancer series (Neuromancer, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive) were AKAIK *the* stories that kicked off what we know as "Cyberpunk" or modern dark, high-tech, low-life science fiction. I personally have reread the books dozens of times andhave dearly wished that someone would make an excellent movie rendition of them, unlike the piss poor "Johnny Mnemonic" movie with a poor storyline and, ironically, Keanu Reeves doing his best to save the story from total loss.
I think that the makers of the matrix would have made an excellent rendition of Neuromancer and still could, and I wish that there would be massive support for this.