academic n. - A person who avoids life by sitting in a classroom and continuing to stuff useless facts into their head well into adulthood. Typically disconnected with reality, so they make up their own.
I don't know how your school is, but I tried to set up the same thing when I was in high school. I was even able to secure an old XT, put WWIV on it and use a phone line in one of the teachers' rooms to set up a BBS.
I was hoping to not only create a club, but use the BBS as a public forum for the students. I spread the word and the activities of myself and the group I was in got printed up in the district newsletter. We didn't get one kid to call that BBS besides the people who had a hand in setting it up, let alone anyone to join our club.
There weren't even any takers from the already-existing Math/Computer Club, mostly beacuse those kids were into math, not computers, and its membership was so weak that I somehow got elected to Vice President when I sat in on one of their meetings.
Eventually I was pretty much the only one calling the BBS, so I said screw it and opened it up to the community, bought a copy of TradeWars, got rid of the school related messageboards and replaced them with general ones, and let them have at it. At that point I pretty much pulled the plug on my idea.
The moral of the story: Joe Student will not be interested in what you have to say about Windows vs. Linux. 3/4 of the stuff you will say will fly over their heads anyway. I hate to tell you to not even bother, but my bet is that you already know everyone in your school who knows anything about computers...All 10 of them. Why go though the formality of starting a club? Just approach these guys and ask them if they want to talk shop during lunch, or maybe go to a LAN party sometime, or have a Linux hacking session after school? I met some of my best friends this way.
Forget popups, even worse are those Flash ads that pop up, make all kinds of horrible noise, and cover what you are trying to read. I almost stopped going to wired.com because of those. After a visit to CounterExploitation , I discovered the Proxomitron and tried it out...It has eliminated 99% of ads. It even lets the "good" popups though, such as when you are shopping online and your cart pops up. Sometimes it causes problems with legitimate sites that require certain Javascript commands to operate properly, but it's easy enough to temporarily turn off Proxomitron to see those sites. It basically works by acting as a local proxy on your computer. As web requests comes down, it rewrites the http stream on the fly to get rid of objectionable commands (blink tags, status line scrollers, background midi music, popups, etc). All filters are 100% customizable, but the ones it comes with do a great job.
Well, the server appears to be down, but it a most Slashdot way, I'd like to comment on the article without even having read it! Nikola Tesla himself was known for doing stuff like this . But I don't believe the 95% efficiency for a second...You can't even get that though wires if they are long enough.
Practically, "Wireless Electricity" already exists; it's called radio. The difference is only a very tiny current is induced in an antenna, whereas these folks in the article are trying to power a light bulb.
The biggest problem with trying to do this is that electromagnetic waves drop off very, very rapidly as they propagate through space, and to counter this you need a huge generator. If you had such a thing you'd need to direct beam it to this village and you can bet the stream would barbeque everything in its path. Also, radio waves are not lasers...It is very difficult to control where they go, so you could expect a certain spread as it propagated form the power source. I would bet that a lot of the people in the source, destination, and everything in between would be exposed to these amounts of insane EM radiation constantly, and that can't be good.
In short, my take on it is that while this has a certain coolness factor, it's way too impractical. If they don't want to mess with running wire, they should just construct a fuel cell generator and leave them with a hell of a lot of hydrogen. And they can do this now, not wait three years.
What, did Hollywood run out of books to rape? You would think they would have learned from spiraling fireballs like Super Mario Brothers, Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter, Wing Commander, Resident Evil, etc. Now I see DOA the movie (I don't know about you guys, but if I want a movie full of hot chicks with no plot, well, that's what porn is for) and, god forbid, Pac Man. Jesus, even at the pinnacle of Pac Man fever they weren't insane enough to make a movie out of it. That whole list sends chills down my spine. I don't know whether to gape in horror or fall off my chair laughing.
Well, I wasn't speaking of proof in a court of law. Remember, ISP's are getting money from you, and if they cut enough people off for being suspected of running a NAT box, they would have much to explain to their shareholders.
Let's take spam as an example. Most ISP's will cut off spammers at the drop of a dime. But let's say I'm running a mail server (we will assume I'm using an ISP that allows servers) but I was stupid and left relaying open. Now spam starts spewing forth from my connection and pretty soon the ISP hears about it. Snip snip. Then I'd call the ISP and explain what happened, and most likely get my connection restored. YMMV with strike 2, though:)
Now let's consider the topic at hand: NAT. The same thing could happen here, but instead of a dozen pieces of spam with your IP on it, they have a table with suspicious TTL's. Two words here: Plausible denial.
Besides this, the ISP has to make some decisions here:
1) Am I willing to cut off paying customers for traffic patterns that may or may not be from a NAT box?
2) Will the users be comfortable if they know I am sniffing their outbound packets?
3) Will they be alienated when they receive my call that tells them they are not allowed to run their already paid-for NAT box and if they continue they will be disconnected.
If an ISP decided to take up these policies, word would spread quick. Most (smart) ISP's know that techies' opinions of them are important. How many times have you been asked "What is the best ISP? Who should I go with?". On my worst day, I wouldn't recommend any ISP who sniffs any kind of traffic or dictates what kind of hardware you are allowed to run in your house.
Dude, I'd pick saving some money over adhering to some boilerplate gestapo contract that says I can't have more than one computer per connection. To most companies, your rights are barely worth the paper the contract is printed on, per the universal clause "Terms are subject to change without notice". In other words "We hold all the cards. Bow before our TOS. You got a problem? Tough. So nyah." I admire your moral sense, but believe me, regarding your ISP, it's completely unilateral.
Be that as it may, the approach to finding computers hiding behind a NAT box is an inexact science. It's probably of more use to crackers than ISP's. Such graphs of the decremented TTL's of suspected NAT boxes can be explained away by anomolies in the user's firewall software, or what have you. If the ISP implemented something like this and started calling people saying "you've violated the terms of service", you can just play the dumb user and say "I don't know what you're talking about, there is just one computer hooked up to the connection. What's this NAT you speak of?"
How can the ISP prove conclusively that you have a dozen boxes hooked up to the connection? Get a search warrant and take pictures? I think not. While the technique described in the paper is certainly clever, I believe it would have little value in nailing users to the wall when it comes to sharing access.
You do know the Matrix storyline was planned to be a trilogy from the start, right?
No. Allright, maybe I was off in left field comparing the Wachowskis to Lucas without knowing about the trilogy, but my point is that generally sequels are geared to make more money off the same formula, only rehashed a bit to give it only slightly new life. Just yesterday I saw "Charlotte's Web 2" on the shelf while I was shopping. What the hell, how about Snow White 2 or maybe Beauty and the Beast 2, or Watership Down 2. The only art the idiots cranking this stuff out care about is the kind that says "FEDERAL RESERVE NOTE" at the top. Movies made in this way not only have no soul, but detract from the original. They are nothing but cheap whores.
Ok, enough ranting, we were talking about the Matrix. The ending of the first one looked pretty final to me, although I did find myself wondering what would happen if Neo did what he said and unplugged these people and showed them the truth. I mean, they'd wake up in a wasteland and everyone would starve to death. I didn't think the Wachowski Bros would try to tackle that. Oh, well. I'll let my friends tell me what happens.
Even if it wasn't, do you really think the MPAA would give a damn about maybe a few hundred Slashdotters skipping out on a movie?
I didn't say that. The answer is no. And I can only speak for myself. I very, very, very rarely go see movies anymore. I watch TV for maybe an hour or two a week. If every slashdotter did the same, you would be right in that the MPAA wouldn't even notice. The general public doesn't give a crap about the MPAA/RIAA; they probably don't even know who they are. That's because right now only techies can see how they are pulling Washington's strings. When the MPAA/RIAA does something that interrupts the public's daily lives (like this ridiculous "closing the analog hole" thing), then we will see change in a big way. Hopefully by then it will not be too late.
I've got no problem skipping Matrix 2. Besides, I fear the Wachowski Bros may have got a touch of Lucas Syndrome. It's a psychological disorder where you attempt to captitalize on a previous smash success over and over again until it's bled dry, tweaking the story only slightly with each iteration to make it just about the same, but different enough to keep the audience from falling asleep.
Call me a pessimist, but can you say "Phantom Menace"?
-- It could form a black hole -- an object with such immense gravitational pull that nothing could escape, not even light -- which would "suck in everything around it."
-- The quark particles might form a very compressed object called a strangelet, "far smaller than a single atom," that could "infect" surrounding matter and "transform the entire planet Earth into an inert hyperdense sphere about 100 meters across."
-- Space itself, an invisible froth of subatomic forces and short-lived particles, might undergo a "phase transition" like water molecules that freeze into ice. Such an event could "rip the fabric of space itself. The boundary of the new-style vacuum would spread like an expanding bubble," devouring Earth and, eventually, the entire universe beyond it.
I remember that experiment. I am thinking that if the universe is that unstable, it would have been destroyed long ago. And the idea that that experiment could create a black hole is preposterous...Let's not forget what a black hole is - A huge amount of matter (generally from a very large collapsed star) compressed into a very small amount of space. In actuality it has no more or less than the original star (although as time goes on anything the black hole "sucks" in gets added to its total mass). I'm going to guess that it takes more than a few heavy atoms from a piddly experiment to form one.
As for the nanotech fears...Cowering in ignorance won't solve any problems. The last thing we need is the Good Guys thinking nanotech is bad and blacklisting it, while the Bad Guys are developing all kinds of nifty nanotech weapons.
It kind of is the same thing along the lines of the government and corporations locking up the white hats who are warning them about security flaws while the black hats are cracking the shit out of anything they want with impunity. It seems in their eyes white hats are nothing more than black hats who have confessed.
With "Microsoft wants everything in their proprietary format" being said, I'd like to put forth something else which crossed my mind.
As we all know, the record industry is ass backwards when it comes to tech. They want to keep doing things the old way, the way which allowed them very tight control over the product they sell. Everything changed, but they've pretty much resorted to outlawing any and all technology with the potential to shake that grip loose.
So what happens if a tech company, whether it's Apple or Microsoft, buys Universal Music? This could be exactly what we've been wanting - the voice of a powerful tech company at the heart of the RIAA. You can bet the way Universal Music does business would change overnight. Thus far, the Big 5 have only dabbled in digital distribution, mostly because of their fear their files will be copied. As we know, it's impossible to keep digital information from being copied. Apple and Microsoft understand this too, being in the software business. I would expect that if this buyout happens, we will see them go all out with digital distribution. It could very well be the best thing that has ever happened to music.
As for what format these tracks will be in, or how much it will cost, that's anyone's guess. The important thing that either Microsoft or Apple must understand if this deal goes though is that when people download the tracks, they are going to want to do whatever the hell they want with them, and that includes burning them onto CD, pushing them around their network, loading them into their MP3 player, etc, or they won't bite.
Microsoft may be anti-consumer, but they aren't stupid. They know how to make money, and they know how to sell. If they get Universal I think they will throw up the entire Universal library for download at a decent price, hopefully in MP3. Whatever they do, they will sell their mothers soul to bring people in, and THEN figure out how to get the return on investment out of them.
If Apple gets the deal, I expect more or less the same thing to happen, only much more slowly. They simply don't have the marketing power of Microsoft. On top of that, the company would be tapped after a buyout like that. Not much extra room in the budget for advertising:)
Regardless of who gets the deal, the other record companies are going to take notice. If Universal is a smashing success, they will follow suit quickly. If it crashes and burns, it will be business as usual. Either way, we have nothing to lose.
At my company we were filling out some forms at a meeting and it was asking for my job title. Everyone looked at me wondering what I would pick. I had quite a large choice: Microwave Repair Man, Vending Machine Technician, Security Camera Guy, Phone Monkey, WAN Admin, Sys Admin, DB Admin, Lead Programmer, Accounting system admin, Help Desk Manager, and Shoulder to Cry On. I ended up putting down whatever they made up for me when they printed by business cards: Technical Director.
Tell me about it. I too have fond memories of my DeskJet 500...a work horse by any measure. These days everyone seems to be making "disposable" printers...They are ultra cheap and probably sold at a loss, but they come back and rape you for the consumables. That perfectly explains why they are trying to put third party cartridge manufacturers out of business.
The only printers that I have noticed that are still built really well are the mid-range to high end HP Laserjets. The personal Laserjets have always been a bit iffy, and I would never touch one. Their Inkjets have been a mixed bag since the 600 series. The nice thing about the HP inkjets though is that their carts last quite a long time due to a large reservoir, the price is comparable to other manufacturers cartidges, and you geat a print head replacement when you put in a new cart.
In contrast, I noticed Epson, Brother, and Canon inkjet carts come with a puny amount of ink, and suck it up in no time. And if the heads get clogged bad, good luck.
Now that I didn't know, ah computing was so much more open back in the day...
After some googling, I was able to find a site that expands on your statement. Compaq couldn't take the BIOS listings and copy them for obvious legal reasons, but the way they got around this was rather novel. Take a look!
The entire PC industry comes to mind. Remember, the original IBM PC was the first IBM built out of off the shelf parts. Compaq took one look at this, bought the same stuff and assembled a computer of their own. The only thing missing was the BIOS. And I think that if the DMCA existed back in the early 80's, Compaq would have been sued out of existance upon re-engineering IBM's PC BIOS, regardless of whether they disassembled the code or not. Even if that wasn't the case, they surely would have been dinged for building the same platform the BIOS was based on and selling it. What the DMCA and the current patent environment does is guarantee intellectual property monopolies by locking up knowledge and imposing stuff penalties on anyone who wishes to use it. In other words, if the conditions of today existed in the early 80's we would all be using Apples. Draw your own conclusions as to whether that's a good or bad thing, but also consider that the same environment probably wouldn't have allowed the Internet to exist at all as it is today. How much do you want to bet that if this happened, the PC industry would be based in China today?
Slashdot Mirror
Hilary Rosen is a human.
Are you sure?
academic n. - A person who avoids life by sitting in a classroom and continuing to stuff useless facts into their head well into adulthood. Typically disconnected with reality, so they make up their own.
Is it just me or did all this guy do is take the components out of a microwave and put a big cone around them?
too much porn
If you were a geek, those words would never escape your lips! Repent!!
Slipping is an understatement. Nothing says "it's over" like the crew encountering an alien race that requres a threesome in order to reproduce.
Seriously, if I wanted to see a bunch of oddly proportioned women who wear too much makeup getting it on with average looking guys, I'll watch a porn.
I don't know how your school is, but I tried to set up the same thing when I was in high school. I was even able to secure an old XT, put WWIV on it and use a phone line in one of the teachers' rooms to set up a BBS.
I was hoping to not only create a club, but use the BBS as a public forum for the students. I spread the word and the activities of myself and the group I was in got printed up in the district newsletter. We didn't get one kid to call that BBS besides the people who had a hand in setting it up, let alone anyone to join our club.
There weren't even any takers from the already-existing Math/Computer Club, mostly beacuse those kids were into math, not computers, and its membership was so weak that I somehow got elected to Vice President when I sat in on one of their meetings.
Eventually I was pretty much the only one calling the BBS, so I said screw it and opened it up to the community, bought a copy of TradeWars, got rid of the school related messageboards and replaced them with general ones, and let them have at it. At that point I pretty much pulled the plug on my idea.
The moral of the story: Joe Student will not be interested in what you have to say about Windows vs. Linux. 3/4 of the stuff you will say will fly over their heads anyway. I hate to tell you to not even bother, but my bet is that you already know everyone in your school who knows anything about computers...All 10 of them. Why go though the formality of starting a club? Just approach these guys and ask them if they want to talk shop during lunch, or maybe go to a LAN party sometime, or have a Linux hacking session after school? I met some of my best friends this way.
Forget popups, even worse are those Flash ads that pop up, make all kinds of horrible noise, and cover what you are trying to read. I almost stopped going to wired.com because of those. After a visit to CounterExploitation , I discovered the Proxomitron and tried it out...It has eliminated 99% of ads. It even lets the "good" popups though, such as when you are shopping online and your cart pops up. Sometimes it causes problems with legitimate sites that require certain Javascript commands to operate properly, but it's easy enough to temporarily turn off Proxomitron to see those sites.
It basically works by acting as a local proxy on your computer. As web requests comes down, it rewrites the http stream on the fly to get rid of objectionable commands (blink tags, status line scrollers, background midi music, popups, etc). All filters are 100% customizable, but the ones it comes with do a great job.
Well, the server appears to be down, but it a most Slashdot way, I'd like to comment on the article without even having read it!
Nikola Tesla himself was known for doing stuff like this . But I don't believe the 95% efficiency for a second...You can't even get that though wires if they are long enough.
Practically, "Wireless Electricity" already exists; it's called radio. The difference is only a very tiny current is induced in an antenna, whereas these folks in the article are trying to power a light bulb.
The biggest problem with trying to do this is that electromagnetic waves drop off very, very rapidly as they propagate through space, and to counter this you need a huge generator. If you had such a thing you'd need to direct beam it to this village and you can bet the stream would barbeque everything in its path. Also, radio waves are not lasers...It is very difficult to control where they go, so you could expect a certain spread as it propagated form the power source. I would bet that a lot of the people in the source, destination, and everything in between would be exposed to these amounts of insane EM radiation constantly, and that can't be good.
In short, my take on it is that while this has a certain coolness factor, it's way too impractical. If they don't want to mess with running wire, they should just construct a fuel cell generator and leave them with a hell of a lot of hydrogen. And they can do this now, not wait three years.
What, did Hollywood run out of books to rape? You would think they would have learned from spiraling fireballs like Super Mario Brothers, Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter, Wing Commander, Resident Evil, etc.
Now I see DOA the movie (I don't know about you guys, but if I want a movie full of hot chicks with no plot, well, that's what porn is for) and, god forbid, Pac Man. Jesus, even at the pinnacle of Pac Man fever they weren't insane enough to make a movie out of it. That whole list sends chills down my spine. I don't know whether to gape in horror or fall off my chair laughing.
Hm, maybe the problem is that Square thought it was Sci-Fi, too.
Well, I wasn't speaking of proof in a court of law. Remember, ISP's are getting money from you, and if they cut enough people off for being suspected of running a NAT box, they would have much to explain to their shareholders.
:)
Let's take spam as an example. Most ISP's will cut off spammers at the drop of a dime. But let's say I'm running a mail server (we will assume I'm using an ISP that allows servers) but I was stupid and left relaying open. Now spam starts spewing forth from my connection and pretty soon the ISP hears about it. Snip snip. Then I'd call the ISP and explain what happened, and most likely get my connection restored. YMMV with strike 2, though
Now let's consider the topic at hand: NAT. The same thing could happen here, but instead of a dozen pieces of spam with your IP on it, they have a table with suspicious TTL's. Two words here: Plausible denial.
Besides this, the ISP has to make some decisions here:
1) Am I willing to cut off paying customers for traffic patterns that may or may not be from a NAT box?
2) Will the users be comfortable if they know I am sniffing their outbound packets?
3) Will they be alienated when they receive my call that tells them they are not allowed to run their already paid-for NAT box and if they continue they will be disconnected.
If an ISP decided to take up these policies, word would spread quick. Most (smart) ISP's know that techies' opinions of them are important. How many times have you been asked "What is the best ISP? Who should I go with?". On my worst day, I wouldn't recommend any ISP who sniffs any kind of traffic or dictates what kind of hardware you are allowed to run in your house.
You seem pretty complacent with letting The Man get his way. What are you doing on Slashdot? :)
Dude, I'd pick saving some money over adhering to some boilerplate gestapo contract that says I can't have more than one computer per connection. To most companies, your rights are barely worth the paper the contract is printed on, per the universal clause "Terms are subject to change without notice". In other words "We hold all the cards. Bow before our TOS. You got a problem? Tough. So nyah." I admire your moral sense, but believe me, regarding your ISP, it's completely unilateral.
Be that as it may, the approach to finding computers hiding behind a NAT box is an inexact science. It's probably of more use to crackers than ISP's. Such graphs of the decremented TTL's of suspected NAT boxes can be explained away by anomolies in the user's firewall software, or what have you. If the ISP implemented something like this and started calling people saying "you've violated the terms of service", you can just play the dumb user and say "I don't know what you're talking about, there is just one computer hooked up to the connection. What's this NAT you speak of?"
How can the ISP prove conclusively that you have a dozen boxes hooked up to the connection? Get a search warrant and take pictures? I think not. While the technique described in the paper is certainly clever, I believe it would have little value in nailing users to the wall when it comes to sharing access.
You do know the Matrix storyline was planned to be a trilogy from the start, right?
No. Allright, maybe I was off in left field comparing the Wachowskis to Lucas without knowing about the trilogy, but my point is that generally sequels are geared to make more money off the same formula, only rehashed a bit to give it only slightly new life. Just yesterday I saw "Charlotte's Web 2" on the shelf while I was shopping. What the hell, how about Snow White 2 or maybe Beauty and the Beast 2, or Watership Down 2. The only art the idiots cranking this stuff out care about is the kind that says "FEDERAL RESERVE NOTE" at the top. Movies made in this way not only have no soul, but detract from the original. They are nothing but cheap whores.
Ok, enough ranting, we were talking about the Matrix. The ending of the first one looked pretty final to me, although I did find myself wondering what would happen if Neo did what he said and unplugged these people and showed them the truth. I mean, they'd wake up in a wasteland and everyone would starve to death. I didn't think the Wachowski Bros would try to tackle that. Oh, well. I'll let my friends tell me what happens.
Even if it wasn't, do you really think the MPAA would give a damn about maybe a few hundred Slashdotters skipping out on a movie?
I didn't say that. The answer is no. And I can only speak for myself. I very, very, very rarely go see movies anymore. I watch TV for maybe an hour or two a week. If every slashdotter did the same, you would be right in that the MPAA wouldn't even notice. The general public doesn't give a crap about the MPAA/RIAA; they probably don't even know who they are. That's because right now only techies can see how they are pulling Washington's strings. When the MPAA/RIAA does something that interrupts the public's daily lives (like this ridiculous "closing the analog hole" thing), then we will see change in a big way. Hopefully by then it will not be too late.
I've got no problem skipping Matrix 2. Besides, I fear the Wachowski Bros may have got a touch of Lucas Syndrome. It's a psychological disorder where you attempt to captitalize on a previous smash success over and over again until it's bled dry, tweaking the story only slightly with each iteration to make it just about the same, but different enough to keep the audience from falling asleep.
Call me a pessimist, but can you say "Phantom Menace"?
I'd like to chat with you more about this via email if you don't mind. Mail me via the obfuscated address attached you see there on the header.
In actuality it has no more or less than the original star
That's supposed to be more or less MASS than the original star. Sheesh.
-- It could form a black hole -- an object with such immense gravitational pull that nothing could escape, not even light -- which would "suck in everything around it."
-- The quark particles might form a very compressed object called a strangelet, "far smaller than a single atom," that could "infect" surrounding matter and "transform the entire planet Earth into an inert hyperdense sphere about 100 meters across."
-- Space itself, an invisible froth of subatomic forces and short-lived particles, might undergo a "phase transition" like water molecules that freeze into ice. Such an event could "rip the fabric of space itself. The boundary of the new-style vacuum would spread like an expanding bubble," devouring Earth and, eventually, the entire universe beyond it.
I remember that experiment. I am thinking that if the universe is that unstable, it would have been destroyed long ago. And the idea that that experiment could create a black hole is preposterous...Let's not forget what a black hole is - A huge amount of matter (generally from a very large collapsed star) compressed into a very small amount of space. In actuality it has no more or less than the original star (although as time goes on anything the black hole "sucks" in gets added to its total mass). I'm going to guess that it takes more than a few heavy atoms from a piddly experiment to form one.
As for the nanotech fears...Cowering in ignorance won't solve any problems. The last thing we need is the Good Guys thinking nanotech is bad and blacklisting it, while the Bad Guys are developing all kinds of nifty nanotech weapons.
It kind of is the same thing along the lines of the government and corporations locking up the white hats who are warning them about security flaws while the black hats are cracking the shit out of anything they want with impunity. It seems in their eyes white hats are nothing more than black hats who have confessed.
With "Microsoft wants everything in their proprietary format" being said, I'd like to put forth something else which crossed my mind.
:)
As we all know, the record industry is ass backwards when it comes to tech. They want to keep doing things the old way, the way which allowed them very tight control over the product they sell. Everything changed, but they've pretty much resorted to outlawing any and all technology with the potential to shake that grip loose.
So what happens if a tech company, whether it's Apple or Microsoft, buys Universal Music? This could be exactly what we've been wanting - the voice of a powerful tech company at the heart of the RIAA. You can bet the way Universal Music does business would change overnight. Thus far, the Big 5 have only dabbled in digital distribution, mostly because of their fear their files will be copied. As we know, it's impossible to keep digital information from being copied. Apple and Microsoft understand this too, being in the software business. I would expect that if this buyout happens, we will see them go all out with digital distribution. It could very well be the best thing that has ever happened to music.
As for what format these tracks will be in, or how much it will cost, that's anyone's guess. The important thing that either Microsoft or Apple must understand if this deal goes though is that when people download the tracks, they are going to want to do whatever the hell they want with them, and that includes burning them onto CD, pushing them around their network, loading them into their MP3 player, etc, or they won't bite.
Microsoft may be anti-consumer, but they aren't stupid. They know how to make money, and they know how to sell. If they get Universal I think they will throw up the entire Universal library for download at a decent price, hopefully in MP3. Whatever they do, they will sell their mothers soul to bring people in, and THEN figure out how to get the return on investment out of them.
If Apple gets the deal, I expect more or less the same thing to happen, only much more slowly. They simply don't have the marketing power of Microsoft. On top of that, the company would be tapped after a buyout like that. Not much extra room in the budget for advertising
Regardless of who gets the deal, the other record companies are going to take notice. If Universal is a smashing success, they will follow suit quickly. If it crashes and burns, it will be business as usual. Either way, we have nothing to lose.
At my company we were filling out some forms at a meeting and it was asking for my job title. Everyone looked at me wondering what I would pick. I had quite a large choice: Microwave Repair Man, Vending Machine Technician, Security Camera Guy, Phone Monkey, WAN Admin, Sys Admin, DB Admin, Lead Programmer, Accounting system admin, Help Desk Manager, and Shoulder to Cry On. I ended up putting down whatever they made up for me when they printed by business cards: Technical Director.
Tell me about it. I too have fond memories of my DeskJet 500...a work horse by any measure. These days everyone seems to be making "disposable" printers...They are ultra cheap and probably sold at a loss, but they come back and rape you for the consumables. That perfectly explains why they are trying to put third party cartridge manufacturers out of business.
The only printers that I have noticed that are still built really well are the mid-range to high end HP Laserjets. The personal Laserjets have always been a bit iffy, and I would never touch one. Their Inkjets have been a mixed bag since the 600 series. The nice thing about the HP inkjets though is that their carts last quite a long time due to a large reservoir, the price is comparable to other manufacturers cartidges, and you geat a print head replacement when you put in a new cart.
In contrast, I noticed Epson, Brother, and Canon inkjet carts come with a puny amount of ink, and suck it up in no time. And if the heads get clogged bad, good luck.
Now that I didn't know, ah computing was so much more open back in the day...
After some googling, I was able to find a site that expands on your statement. Compaq couldn't take the BIOS listings and copy them for obvious legal reasons, but the way they got around this was rather novel. Take a look!
The entire PC industry comes to mind. Remember, the original IBM PC was the first IBM built out of off the shelf parts. Compaq took one look at this, bought the same stuff and assembled a computer of their own. The only thing missing was the BIOS. And I think that if the DMCA existed back in the early 80's, Compaq would have been sued out of existance upon re-engineering IBM's PC BIOS, regardless of whether they disassembled the code or not. Even if that wasn't the case, they surely would have been dinged for building the same platform the BIOS was based on and selling it.
What the DMCA and the current patent environment does is guarantee intellectual property monopolies by locking up knowledge and imposing stuff penalties on anyone who wishes to use it. In other words, if the conditions of today existed in the early 80's we would all be using Apples. Draw your own conclusions as to whether that's a good or bad thing, but also consider that the same environment probably wouldn't have allowed the Internet to exist at all as it is today.
How much do you want to bet that if this happened, the PC industry would be based in China today?
Democracies do not wage wars of aggression.
Indeed.