This necessitates custom-built tools, and possibly a license (why is MS in talks with Napster about free software, anyway?)
Microsoft would offer napster cash and/or marketing assistance to use windows media.
Secondly, if MS does make Windows Media Rights Management the de facto standard for DRM, there's nothing to stop them from changing their business model, and requiring content providers to pay for different levels of protection.
While this is true, I would point out that they still don't charge for internet explorer.
Yes, but if you were a record label or a software company and wanted to use these products in a serious commercial operation, you would get the "professional" tools and pay MS accordingly.
Which professional tools are these? I've worked with WMA for some time now, and I'd be very surprised if you could find any tools that Microsoft makes for WMA encoding, manipulation or encryption that you can pay for. Some software companies like sonic foundry and adobe have included windows media support in their commercial software... but not with any licensing that goes back to Microsoft.
For those who are still confused, Windows Media is a platform play. They don't charge for the software components, but they do get two advantages. First is that most of their software only runs on Microsoft OS's, encouraging the use of windows 2000 among content creators and servers that might have otherwise been on macs and linux. Second is the control of the player. If Windows Media were to really take off, WM Player has the ability to be like Office is now. It currently works on Windows/Mac/Solaris, but would provide a powerful stick to co-opt new OS's or keep control over existing platforms.
Microsoft charges money, lots of it, for tools that encrypt audio and video into the Windows Media format.
This statement is blatently false. Did you even try to do any research? Perhaps you are thinking of Real? Microsoft's player, encoder, and DRM tools are all available for free. Almost everything can be instantly downloaded over the internet.
Since the fall, napster has had acquisition talks with just about everybody who stayed still long enough. It would indeed be much more illuminating to list companies which companies HADN'T been hit up to keep napster alive.
Napster just isn't an attractive property. With a deal price with 8 zeros after it, not to mention the potential of huge civil liabilities, no one is opening their checkbook. No surprise there.
This is actually interesting for two reasons: First, is napster persuing an approach where they seed all the content? It's certainly possible, as even if they included a WMA encoder and ripper in the package, one would assume that napster themselves would have to receive the file afterwards to encrypt it with microsoft's DRM tools, as I doubt they'd want to have the consumers generate the private keys for each encryption. Easier to just provide the files in the first place. But at that point, you have nothing more than a slow, complicated website that sells music on the back of my own bandwidth. I'm sure I feel like a lot of the rest of you: No Thanks, Napster.
Also interesting from the leak is that Napster is still shopping for technology for it's secure launch. I don't know about you, but when my "Summer launch" project is still selecting core technology in may, I'm not thinking about a summer launch anymore.
And while someone may point out that they could just be incorporating WMA playback into the engine... The windows media SDK's all have easy licensing terms and are downloadable over the Internet. No power meetings required.
Yeah, the claim of the first web based application in the summer of '95 is obviously hysterical. How convenient it is to have such a selective memory when we are recounting our past accomplishments.
Some of my notable past accomplishments:
Wrote the first video game in a late night hacking session in 1989
Developed a completely anonymous digital cash system... first in the world!... in 1997.
And finally, I was the first person to figure out how much smarter i was than the rest of the world and write a paper about it... in 1999!
Apparently we are supposed to trust this guy that LISP is such a great business language... because (gasp!) he was able to sell out in the great business school rush to the Internet of the late 90's. Well, congratulations Paul, but if we all wrote applications in whatever Yahoo was buying, lets see, we'd be writing in C, C++, Perl, Python, PHP, Java, shell, LISP.... Oh
Do a search on lunch box ATX and take a look at the results. These are "lunch box" sized PC's that are transportable but take normal components including full sized cd's drives, motherboards, cards, etc. They used to be popular back before laptops were everywhere, but they've kept them up to date for certain applications like yours.
I found this one which seems pretty representative. Note that there is a picture of it with dual pentium II's. You may have to shop around for a system with a beefy enough power supply to cover the load from the system (this one comes with a 250w PS which probably isn't enough).
I wouldn't seriously consider porting arounnd a 1U system with a rack lcd & keyboard. Those things are pretty damn unweildy even in the server room. These lunch boxes should move around pretty well.
Currently nearly 100% of internet email travels in plaintext over a relatively small number of interconnect points. I am no real conspiracy theorist, but I think it is obvious that this situation is being used to gather information by various nationalities.
Currently TLS for SMTP provides this functionality. It can be implemented using open-ssl which is distributable, and isn't patent encumbered as far as i understand it. sendmail and other MTAs support this with patches, but buggy implementations such as Microsoft's in exchange 5.5 hamper it's adoption (if you turn it on you currently can't communicate with Exchange servers). Other vendors have compatibility problems as well.
The new SMTP team would have done us all a great service if they had made TLS implementation mandatory in the new spec. This would have the effect of getting MTA's like sendmail to support it without serious hacking, and shame Microsoft into releasing a non-buggy implementation. The end result would be an ever increasing amount of email traffic sent across the wire, and in the end foil attempts at mass sniffing.
While I agree that SMIME and other end to end solutions offer better security, user based adoption will always be hard. point to point security still provides much better privacy for the masses, and is within our reach. But without a real push, will it be another ten years with our email the digital equivalent of postcards?
Just as future advice, and not to berate you at all, but people don't typically take to cleaning things off of sidewalks using paper towels. I agree they are very handy.
the guy self promoted. Look at how far it fell back down. He pulled the same stunt in another recent thread. Damn good troll i think. look at the results
How much fun is it really to continually intentionally pretend not to understand what someone means simply because you disagree with the common usage of a word?
That is of course, unless you mean that Richard stallman was the fuck who rooted my redhat box last week.
[note if you wish please silently change the word hacker to cracker, black hat hacker, ciminal, h4x0r or whatever other word will keep you from replying to me about the use of the word hacker. you know damn well who we're talking about and it's not alan cox]
OK, so of course I've seen all those movies. Good stuff, i guess, especially if you can turn off the "that's not how it works" part of your brain.
But what are we celebrating here? I understand that all this could be pretty exciting for the population at large, as it's an unknown world. But what about the geeks out there? It's a pretty known world right? Worse yet, it's pretty fucking boring.
Why do we all seem to have a soft spot in our hearts for hacking? Was it because of that thrill we got when we guessed mr. hibbard the science teacher's password so we could up our print-out quotas and print a bunch of ascii porn? Maybe so. I reckon most everyone out there has at least something like that in their background. Is this what makes hacking so fastenating to us all? It's really glorified in our community.
But what do "hacking" bring us? Where are the 31337 hackers that have stopped an evil mastermind hacker from bring down greenpeace and killing all the whales for his huge whale oil bomb to be set off at the polls? Where have the robin hoods been that stol 100th's of a penny from everyone's account at BigMegaBancCorp to fund the orphanage up on lookout road so that little jimmy would get the liver transplant? Where in fact is a single account of anyone anywhere close to black hatery doing anything that wasn't 100% in their own interests?
I don't see the examples. In fact 99.99% of the self-proclaimed hackers out there are into nothing more than web site defacement via the unicode bug, or root hacking cable modem linux boxes with the DNS exploit to put up eggdrop bots to hold their favorite channel. Maybe once in a blue moon someone will apply these pre-written tools and break in somewhere good, see lots of data, and have absolutely no idea what to do with it. Wow, look at all these credit cards, maybe I should buy freestolencreditcards.com and post em all? Hahaha, that'll stick it to the man.
I was a netcom subscriber in '94/'95 when kevin mitnick was raveging their networks. He's supposed to be an elite uber-hacker, using cell-phone booky boxes and all manner of tools to hide his tracks. The FBI was after him at this point, and I think he knew. Never the less, what was he doing on netcom? Mostly making stupidly named files in people's root directories with root priv's, just to show people he could. And who was he doing this to? Mostly to people a friend of his (and netcom subscriber) didn't like. Wow, way to go kevin.
When it comes right down to it, everything that goes on with hacking these days is pretty damn juvenile. But has this changed? Not in 10 or 15 years. It's not worse now, it's always been stupid. Back in the 80's elite hackery generally involved getting someone's TRW records and posting it somewhere to let people screw with them.
When the revolution comes, I think I'll stick with the government instead of the cyber-revolutionaries. At least when the government wins they won't be sitting alone in their bedroom laughing and snorting up a storm saying "oh kewl. viva la revolution. Heh. I am the supreme elite commander, you all must bow down to me! Haha! maybe i should order a pizza"
[note if you wish please silently change the word hacker to cracker, black hat hacker, ciminal, h4x0r or whatever other word will keep you from replying to me about the use of the word hacker. you know damn well who we're talking about and it's not alan cox]
asus has been shipping a pair of glasses like that (lcd shutter glasses) that work with directx games with their high end video cards for years.
I was really psyched to get one and shelled out the extra $100 or so the package cost. But I didn't use them for more than a week or two, even then not very often. They weren't very effective and made my head hurt. Everyone else I've known that got glasses like that didn't end up using them regularly. Just FYI
Re:It's not the distribution that's the problem...
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Open Courses at MIT
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· Score: 1
yep, but there's a lot of work involved in putting course materials online as well
Re:Why not record videos of classes as well?
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Open Courses at MIT
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· Score: 2
Because this video streaming costs money
That's true, but in the time-scale of this project it shouldn't be a big problem. I just recently signed up for network service with cogent who is proving 100 megabits of internat based transit for $1000/mo. If you figure 256kbit mpeg4 streams (very watchable even now) that's 400 people watching video at the same time for only $12,000 a year. Dirt cheap. Cogent is part of a new breed of ISP that will be coming to market in the next few years that aggresively use DWDM to provide much more bandwidth per dollar than traditional service providers can. Bill Joy said in a recent interview that he thinks the biggest thing coming that people don't expect is an explosion of optical bandwidth. So I wouldn't be too worried about 1990's economics of video streaming.
I worked on a project last year that completed a subscription based music on demand application. That project is totally finished and working (I'm listening to it now) but you'll never get to use it, because the company that built it (a large well known name in the digital audio business that's not going out of business) couldn't get a single big-five label to even begin serious negotiations. It's clear that there is no interest in giving out these licenses no matter what the terms of the agreement are. Because of this, I do think compulsory licenses make a lot of sense.
However, what does napster add to this debate? While they on the surface want to provide a similar application (on the backs of their user's bandwidth which is ugh, an ugly solution)... but who trusts napster now? Their $1 billion proposed package was nothing but a lot of hype... the economics of the situation on both sides seems poor for a deal like this that doesn't even include stable payment per user.
Having Hank Barry push for this kind of legislation groups the rest of the folks that suppport or would benefit from this into this attempt, which is nothing more than a company that promoted massive piracy gasping for it's last breaths. The industry (and the public) will be much better off when napster finally dies.
Why not record videos of classes as well?
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Open Courses at MIT
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· Score: 2
10 years ago (1000 years in internet time) I worked on a project for the University of Maryland called the AT&T teaching theater. It was a high tech classroom that could link up with other classrooms and allow the students to use their built in pc's to record the lecture, screen capture the white-board, and use collaborative software. The project also worked over the internet linking the classrooms with TCP for applications and using satellites for video.
While the groupware aspects never really took off, i always thought the video streaming was a pretty useful aspect of the room. Students could screen cap on a camera pointed at the white board, the shots automatically getting saved in their portable university account.
Since MIT seems to be genuinely interested in giving open access, maybe they should look into installing a few cameras in the class rooms. Scheduling automatic recordings based on class schedules and automatically posting the resulting recordings should be a snap, and net video standards have come a long way... using some MPEG4 implementations they could get many hours per gigabyte. It's probably an easier (and complimentary) task to record the video than organizing and publishing everyone's changing course materials.
Plus with a video stream of the professor, a video stream of the whiteboard, and the course materials, well it'd be pretty close to being there. Helpful for students in the class, but key for actually teaching folks around the world.
I think it's easy to be a cynical about almost anything you hear these days re: the internet. But this is much closer to the spirit with which the Internet was built, and it's easily a net positive for the world (no pun intended).
Look at it this way, at least it isn't a year ago and MIT didn't just announce: "iMIT a pre-IPO startup spin-off of MIT to leverage offline content sources to profit from an advertising and subscription content model"
The village voice article certainly paints Paul Garrin in a sympathetic light. There's a lot of talk of high ideals, a movement for the people, a nd powerful monopolies.
"We're reterritorializing the Net," Garrin boasted, "bringing it back to its original ideal of virtual space without borders or hierarchies."
When in reality Name.Space has by far the most to gain in this movement. What they've been doing for years is selling alternative tld's, with the idea that they would have to be grandfather'd in once the world was ready to use nearly unlimited tld's. All Name.Space is selling to it's customers is a risky bet that Name.Space will get the domains because ICANN feels that there is enough adoption that the conflicts will cause real problems. From the looks of things, ICANN doesn't buy it.
In my book, Paul Garrin is essentially participating in massive domain speculation, with the idea that he can hold ICANN and the roots hostage on the day they decide to open them up to the public. How is this different than domain name squatting?
Someone should tell him that the boom is over and everyone is moving on to new get rich quick schemes.
"Covad's bonds are now trading below 10 cents on the dollar, Rhythms' below 9 cents, and NorthPoint's at about 1.5 cents."
So the financial markets give covad and rythms less than a 10% chance of surviving long enough to pay their corporate debt. With all due respect to the covad and rythms fans (*cough*stockholders*cough*) this article doesn't put forth a radical viewpoint... as far as the bond market is concerned, it's not if but when.
ILEC pricing must have had a lot to due with their untimely demise. While the immediate problem these company face is insufficient capital to continue operating and no access to additional capital through the bond markets, who knows what the situation would be if these companies could have charged the 2x-3x their current prices for the last few years.
I'm not sure what the situation was in other parts of the country, but here in the Bay Area the cheapest i could order DSL for before PacBell entered the market was somewhere north of $200. Then PacBell started offering 1500/128 for $50. Within months, northpoint and covad were offering consumer packages below $100. Now, I don't know a lot about the economics of offering copper wire DSL service, but I do know something about ISP service, and the $10 portion of the PacBell bill dedicated to ISP charges was obviously below their cost. It wouldn't surprise me if the copper portion was also below cost (now $30/mo)... perhaps if amortized over 20 years it looks OK.
In my eyes this kind of pricing was always designed to drive the competing DSL providers out of business. And it seems like it's worked just fine. It wouldn't be too surprising to see ILEC's raise their prices for DSL service after the others go out of business. They will (rightly) be able to cite difficulties making these price points profitable, and the PUC will likely roll out the red carpet for them... Can you imagine the uproar there would be in california if the PUC stood their ground and PacBell (as the last remaining dsl provider) threatened to turn off DSL service? Surely they'd have to go along with whatever price hikes were suggested.
It strikes me that the ILEC's may be able to benefit again by this behavior by doing like AT&T and buying equipment for a couple pennies on the dollar from their bankrupt competitors. After all, they'll need the equipment, they'll have a lot more business soon.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you.
You know, I wasn't around when 2001 first came out. I guess I was never sure when it did come out, only that it was before my time.
Hearing that is was 1968 sure does explain a lot of things though, doesn't it? As a kid as I watched that movie I could never figure it out, especially the trippier scenes. Perhaps I didn't have any context for them. No I look back and I can nod, oh sure, ok, I know what was up with you people.
There were a lot of movies released in that vague time period that qualified either in whole or in part as acid movies, or at least "psychadelic romps". I'm honestly shocked at how broadly influencing the peace movement was on american cinema. Was everyone in hollywood high from 1967-1972? Thinking back on other generations of film I really can't think of another time that seems to have such a similar dramatic influence on film making style.
Anyone have any favorite LSD-era movies? easy rider comes to mind, as well as another kubrick film a clockwork orange but there are plenty more out there. What are your favorites?
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Microsoft would offer napster cash and/or marketing assistance to use windows media.
Secondly, if MS does make Windows Media Rights Management the de facto standard for DRM, there's nothing to stop them from changing their business model, and requiring content providers to pay for different levels of protection.
While this is true, I would point out that they still don't charge for internet explorer.
Which professional tools are these? I've worked with WMA for some time now, and I'd be very surprised if you could find any tools that Microsoft makes for WMA encoding, manipulation or encryption that you can pay for. Some software companies like sonic foundry and adobe have included windows media support in their commercial software... but not with any licensing that goes back to Microsoft.
For those who are still confused, Windows Media is a platform play. They don't charge for the software components, but they do get two advantages. First is that most of their software only runs on Microsoft OS's, encouraging the use of windows 2000 among content creators and servers that might have otherwise been on macs and linux. Second is the control of the player. If Windows Media were to really take off, WM Player has the ability to be like Office is now. It currently works on Windows/Mac/Solaris, but would provide a powerful stick to co-opt new OS's or keep control over existing platforms.
This statement is blatently false. Did you even try to do any research? Perhaps you are thinking of Real? Microsoft's player, encoder, and DRM tools are all available for free. Almost everything can be instantly downloaded over the internet.
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsmedia/
Napster just isn't an attractive property. With a deal price with 8 zeros after it, not to mention the potential of huge civil liabilities, no one is opening their checkbook. No surprise there.
This is actually interesting for two reasons: First, is napster persuing an approach where they seed all the content? It's certainly possible, as even if they included a WMA encoder and ripper in the package, one would assume that napster themselves would have to receive the file afterwards to encrypt it with microsoft's DRM tools, as I doubt they'd want to have the consumers generate the private keys for each encryption. Easier to just provide the files in the first place. But at that point, you have nothing more than a slow, complicated website that sells music on the back of my own bandwidth. I'm sure I feel like a lot of the rest of you: No Thanks, Napster.
Also interesting from the leak is that Napster is still shopping for technology for it's secure launch. I don't know about you, but when my "Summer launch" project is still selecting core technology in may, I'm not thinking about a summer launch anymore.
And while someone may point out that they could just be incorporating WMA playback into the engine... The windows media SDK's all have easy licensing terms and are downloadable over the Internet. No power meetings required.
Some of my notable past accomplishments:
- Wrote the first video game in a late night hacking session in 1989
- Developed a completely anonymous digital cash system... first in the world!... in 1997.
- And finally, I was the first person to figure out how much smarter i was than the rest of the world and write a paper about it... in 1999!
Apparently we are supposed to trust this guy that LISP is such a great business language... because (gasp!) he was able to sell out in the great business school rush to the Internet of the late 90's. Well, congratulations Paul, but if we all wrote applications in whatever Yahoo was buying, lets see, we'd be writing in C, C++, Perl, Python, PHP, Java, shell, LISP.... OhI found this one which seems pretty representative. Note that there is a picture of it with dual pentium II's. You may have to shop around for a system with a beefy enough power supply to cover the load from the system (this one comes with a 250w PS which probably isn't enough).
I wouldn't seriously consider porting arounnd a 1U system with a rack lcd & keyboard. Those things are pretty damn unweildy even in the server room. These lunch boxes should move around pretty well.
Currently TLS for SMTP provides this functionality. It can be implemented using open-ssl which is distributable, and isn't patent encumbered as far as i understand it. sendmail and other MTAs support this with patches, but buggy implementations such as Microsoft's in exchange 5.5 hamper it's adoption (if you turn it on you currently can't communicate with Exchange servers). Other vendors have compatibility problems as well.
The new SMTP team would have done us all a great service if they had made TLS implementation mandatory in the new spec. This would have the effect of getting MTA's like sendmail to support it without serious hacking, and shame Microsoft into releasing a non-buggy implementation. The end result would be an ever increasing amount of email traffic sent across the wire, and in the end foil attempts at mass sniffing.
While I agree that SMIME and other end to end solutions offer better security, user based adoption will always be hard. point to point security still provides much better privacy for the masses, and is within our reach. But without a real push, will it be another ten years with our email the digital equivalent of postcards?
I am a resin user as well. Better support, better feature set, faster. Much better than tomcat.
Just as future advice, and not to berate you at all, but people don't typically take to cleaning things off of sidewalks using paper towels. I agree they are very handy.
what color is the yuppie zone? I saw em on 17th and on mission at 20th or so
They sprayed these on the mission sidewalks as well
the guy self promoted. Look at how far it fell back down. He pulled the same stunt in another recent thread. Damn good troll i think. look at the results
That is of course, unless you mean that Richard stallman was the fuck who rooted my redhat box last week.
But what are we celebrating here? I understand that all this could be pretty exciting for the population at large, as it's an unknown world. But what about the geeks out there? It's a pretty known world right? Worse yet, it's pretty fucking boring.
Why do we all seem to have a soft spot in our hearts for hacking? Was it because of that thrill we got when we guessed mr. hibbard the science teacher's password so we could up our print-out quotas and print a bunch of ascii porn? Maybe so. I reckon most everyone out there has at least something like that in their background. Is this what makes hacking so fastenating to us all? It's really glorified in our community.
But what do "hacking" bring us? Where are the 31337 hackers that have stopped an evil mastermind hacker from bring down greenpeace and killing all the whales for his huge whale oil bomb to be set off at the polls? Where have the robin hoods been that stol 100th's of a penny from everyone's account at BigMegaBancCorp to fund the orphanage up on lookout road so that little jimmy would get the liver transplant? Where in fact is a single account of anyone anywhere close to black hatery doing anything that wasn't 100% in their own interests?
I don't see the examples. In fact 99.99% of the self-proclaimed hackers out there are into nothing more than web site defacement via the unicode bug, or root hacking cable modem linux boxes with the DNS exploit to put up eggdrop bots to hold their favorite channel. Maybe once in a blue moon someone will apply these pre-written tools and break in somewhere good, see lots of data, and have absolutely no idea what to do with it. Wow, look at all these credit cards, maybe I should buy freestolencreditcards.com and post em all? Hahaha, that'll stick it to the man.
I was a netcom subscriber in '94/'95 when kevin mitnick was raveging their networks. He's supposed to be an elite uber-hacker, using cell-phone booky boxes and all manner of tools to hide his tracks. The FBI was after him at this point, and I think he knew. Never the less, what was he doing on netcom? Mostly making stupidly named files in people's root directories with root priv's, just to show people he could. And who was he doing this to? Mostly to people a friend of his (and netcom subscriber) didn't like. Wow, way to go kevin.
When it comes right down to it, everything that goes on with hacking these days is pretty damn juvenile. But has this changed? Not in 10 or 15 years. It's not worse now, it's always been stupid. Back in the 80's elite hackery generally involved getting someone's TRW records and posting it somewhere to let people screw with them.
When the revolution comes, I think I'll stick with the government instead of the cyber-revolutionaries. At least when the government wins they won't be sitting alone in their bedroom laughing and snorting up a storm saying "oh kewl. viva la revolution. Heh. I am the supreme elite commander, you all must bow down to me! Haha! maybe i should order a pizza"
[note if you wish please silently change the word hacker to cracker, black hat hacker, ciminal, h4x0r or whatever other word will keep you from replying to me about the use of the word hacker. you know damn well who we're talking about and it's not alan cox]
I was really psyched to get one and shelled out the extra $100 or so the package cost. But I didn't use them for more than a week or two, even then not very often. They weren't very effective and made my head hurt. Everyone else I've known that got glasses like that didn't end up using them regularly. Just FYI
yep, but there's a lot of work involved in putting course materials online as well
That's true, but in the time-scale of this project it shouldn't be a big problem. I just recently signed up for network service with cogent who is proving 100 megabits of internat based transit for $1000/mo. If you figure 256kbit mpeg4 streams (very watchable even now) that's 400 people watching video at the same time for only $12,000 a year. Dirt cheap. Cogent is part of a new breed of ISP that will be coming to market in the next few years that aggresively use DWDM to provide much more bandwidth per dollar than traditional service providers can. Bill Joy said in a recent interview that he thinks the biggest thing coming that people don't expect is an explosion of optical bandwidth. So I wouldn't be too worried about 1990's economics of video streaming.
"You're not going to repeal the speed of light in the near future. You're going to have a latency issue, but you won't have any real bandwidth constraints. This has enormous implications: It helps things to become a service, and it makes it possible to cobble together machines to do certain problems and to replicate things real easily. It affects the whole economics of peer to peer. It's a strong wind at the back of this kind of distributed architecture."
amen brother
However, what does napster add to this debate? While they on the surface want to provide a similar application (on the backs of their user's bandwidth which is ugh, an ugly solution)... but who trusts napster now? Their $1 billion proposed package was nothing but a lot of hype... the economics of the situation on both sides seems poor for a deal like this that doesn't even include stable payment per user.
Having Hank Barry push for this kind of legislation groups the rest of the folks that suppport or would benefit from this into this attempt, which is nothing more than a company that promoted massive piracy gasping for it's last breaths. The industry (and the public) will be much better off when napster finally dies.
While the groupware aspects never really took off, i always thought the video streaming was a pretty useful aspect of the room. Students could screen cap on a camera pointed at the white board, the shots automatically getting saved in their portable university account.
Since MIT seems to be genuinely interested in giving open access, maybe they should look into installing a few cameras in the class rooms. Scheduling automatic recordings based on class schedules and automatically posting the resulting recordings should be a snap, and net video standards have come a long way... using some MPEG4 implementations they could get many hours per gigabyte. It's probably an easier (and complimentary) task to record the video than organizing and publishing everyone's changing course materials.
Plus with a video stream of the professor, a video stream of the whiteboard, and the course materials, well it'd be pretty close to being there. Helpful for students in the class, but key for actually teaching folks around the world.
I think it's easy to be a cynical about almost anything you hear these days re: the internet. But this is much closer to the spirit with which the Internet was built, and it's easily a net positive for the world (no pun intended).
Look at it this way, at least it isn't a year ago and MIT didn't just announce: "iMIT a pre-IPO startup spin-off of MIT to leverage offline content sources to profit from an advertising and subscription content model"
"We're reterritorializing the Net," Garrin boasted, "bringing it back to its original ideal of virtual space without borders or hierarchies."
When in reality Name.Space has by far the most to gain in this movement. What they've been doing for years is selling alternative tld's, with the idea that they would have to be grandfather'd in once the world was ready to use nearly unlimited tld's. All Name.Space is selling to it's customers is a risky bet that Name.Space will get the domains because ICANN feels that there is enough adoption that the conflicts will cause real problems. From the looks of things, ICANN doesn't buy it.
In my book, Paul Garrin is essentially participating in massive domain speculation, with the idea that he can hold ICANN and the roots hostage on the day they decide to open them up to the public. How is this different than domain name squatting?
Someone should tell him that the boom is over and everyone is moving on to new get rich quick schemes.
So the financial markets give covad and rythms less than a 10% chance of surviving long enough to pay their corporate debt. With all due respect to the covad and rythms fans (*cough*stockholders*cough*) this article doesn't put forth a radical viewpoint... as far as the bond market is concerned, it's not if but when.
ILEC pricing must have had a lot to due with their untimely demise. While the immediate problem these company face is insufficient capital to continue operating and no access to additional capital through the bond markets, who knows what the situation would be if these companies could have charged the 2x-3x their current prices for the last few years.
I'm not sure what the situation was in other parts of the country, but here in the Bay Area the cheapest i could order DSL for before PacBell entered the market was somewhere north of $200. Then PacBell started offering 1500/128 for $50. Within months, northpoint and covad were offering consumer packages below $100. Now, I don't know a lot about the economics of offering copper wire DSL service, but I do know something about ISP service, and the $10 portion of the PacBell bill dedicated to ISP charges was obviously below their cost. It wouldn't surprise me if the copper portion was also below cost (now $30/mo)... perhaps if amortized over 20 years it looks OK.
In my eyes this kind of pricing was always designed to drive the competing DSL providers out of business. And it seems like it's worked just fine. It wouldn't be too surprising to see ILEC's raise their prices for DSL service after the others go out of business. They will (rightly) be able to cite difficulties making these price points profitable, and the PUC will likely roll out the red carpet for them... Can you imagine the uproar there would be in california if the PUC stood their ground and PacBell (as the last remaining dsl provider) threatened to turn off DSL service? Surely they'd have to go along with whatever price hikes were suggested.
It strikes me that the ILEC's may be able to benefit again by this behavior by doing like AT&T and buying equipment for a couple pennies on the dollar from their bankrupt competitors. After all, they'll need the equipment, they'll have a lot more business soon.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you.
that is fucking funny. amen brother
Hearing that is was 1968 sure does explain a lot of things though, doesn't it? As a kid as I watched that movie I could never figure it out, especially the trippier scenes. Perhaps I didn't have any context for them. No I look back and I can nod, oh sure, ok, I know what was up with you people.
There were a lot of movies released in that vague time period that qualified either in whole or in part as acid movies, or at least "psychadelic romps". I'm honestly shocked at how broadly influencing the peace movement was on american cinema. Was everyone in hollywood high from 1967-1972? Thinking back on other generations of film I really can't think of another time that seems to have such a similar dramatic influence on film making style.
Anyone have any favorite LSD-era movies? easy rider comes to mind, as well as another kubrick film a clockwork orange but there are plenty more out there. What are your favorites?