The article states that more CD-Rs are being sold than pre-recorded CDs. This statistic is a little silly if you ask me.
I work for an engineering firm of 120 people, and we go through nearly 1000 CD-Rs a month, and none of them are used for music, they are all for delivering reports, and data to our clients.
I know of many other firms that are using CD-Rs as their primary
delivery mechanism for documents and other digital data as well as for backups.
I have been using Gentoo since 1.0 came out a couple weeks ago. I have to say I am in love, fast, slim system with only what I want and need, and its easy.
I messed with LFS for a while, and sorcerer as well, LFS is kinda a pain, too much typing/babysitting, sorcerer never quite worked right.
Looking for a good source based distro? This is IT. Portage is very nice, so far, I'm always downloading the source at my bandwidth limits. I like it.
Sign me up as a defendant! What on earth is this company thinking? Scare tactics like these are horrid! Pets Warehouse has to be the worst company I've seen.
I host mulitple sites on my home computer, and I was just messing around on netcraft, asking it what I was running (of course Linux/Apache).
They are small sites with little traffic, but I like them, anyway..
My point is that none of them were in Netcraft's survey, I wonder if this is a widespread phenomenon?
If all of us were to go tell netcraft about our locally hosted sites, would linux/apache see an uptick in market share? I have 7 sites, if a large portion of Slashdot readers have 3 or 4 sites, or even 1 or 2, we could increase the apache numbers by 400,000-500,000 sites, this would be a nice market share jump for apache...
Some People have mentioned it, but no one seems to be doing anything about it. We need Music, and movies that some Independent artists have created, to be freely available on the net. Bands that say "screw the music companies" and pay their own production costs, and then put the CD on the net, if there was a sort of clearing-house site, where a bunch of indy artists could put things, I think it would take off. I think people would pay a subscription to a site like this. I'm not talking about 10 or 20 a month, more like 1 or 2. Even at that low of a rate, the musical groups would have much more to take home than the pitance the music industry gives them. or you could make it something like $.05 per song, and maybe $1.00 per movie. I don't know I haven't done extensive market research yet, but I really think this would be possible to pay the artists, and for bandwidth, and everything.. my $.02
I think this is fine, at work one should be WORKING. I really don't care if I can't shop online at work, and I really wouldn't mind not getting the spam, its annoying as hell.
However, as far as screening out everything, that seems ridiculous. We already have problems where I work (I am network admin, but I don't control the policies of the email that gets screened), anyway, we have problems all the time where people need to get jpgs, or mpegs or.exes or zips through email for legitimate business purposes. (Our email server currently stops jpgs and mpegs and any attachment over 1mb). This certainly negatively effects productivity, as we have to wait for 2 days for them to FedEx us stuff on CD that we could have had 2 days ago. I don't see how you can stop "private" use without curtailing legitimate business use as well... in some environments yes its possible, but not in mine.
Dell, Compaq, IBM, all of the big computer manufacturers have their OWN motherboards, that they design and build. (Seen the new GX240's from Dell? want to try to get a standard Asus p4t into one of those cases?) not gonna happen, because these companies make their own parts to fit in their own cases of weird shapes and sizes, therefore they do not have to buy their components from third party manufacturers, hence they do not need to "force" them to make their parts WinXP certified.
Poster states that in order to get the mobo WinXP certified they had to remove the ability to turn on/off ACPI, and that is causing problems with FreeBSD. Now, if that were the case wouldn't FreeBSD not run on *ANY* WinXP certified mobo? Because all of them would have to have this feature disabled? Furthermore, I am running FreeBSD on a new ASUS mobo that is on the WinXP HCL, and it runs just ducky, so I would think that it must be *his* mobo only that is not working properly.
you are missing the point as well. When they were in their prime WordPerfect and Novell both DID DOMINATE their respective markets. 10 years ago if you wanted a network it was Novell, that was it. Same for Word Processing, you wanted a graphical office suite here's WordPerfect. Microsoft pulled the same tactics that they did in the IE/Netscape battle with both of these products. Namely, build cheap fast 1st version that everyone hates, listen to complaints build better version, listen to more complaints build the 3rd version that might be usable, listen to more complaints, build 4th version that is comparable to competitor's, bundle with OS, take over the market (they didn't bundle Office, but networking yes). The reason they could do this is because you can't fight an attrition war with MS, they have too many resources. However, if developers leave them in the learch, and start working on Linux projects, then Linux/Unix will have the resources.
The reason Wordperfect and Novell died was because MS had the DEVELOPERS and now the DEVELOPERS are swinging away from MS because, well, for me (being a CS student, and feeling exactly as this article states "fed up with MS"), I can't afford to pay $1000 every 2 years to have the latest IDE, so I develop for Linux.
CS Students don't decide IT purchases, but to a very large degree they decide what software gets written. (Once again you could argue that MBA's do that, but there are alot of small software companies that are owned and operated by purely CS people)
If the current crop of CS Grads devote alot of time and energy to Linux apps, Linux will spring far ahead of MS in a very short time, It's already very close. I am a CS Student, I write purely for Linux/Unix/X11, I do not write Windows Apps because I refuse to perpetuate the hell.
I am a Systems Admin, the company I work for is purely Windows (servers, workstations, engineering CAD stations everything), but I don't run a single MS app on my workstation, and I can interoperate almost seemlessly with everyone else in the building (remote admin of Win2k isn't quite what it could be, but thats more MS not building it in than Linux not being able to talk to it) and I feel that by the end of the year I will have a workable solution to the MS tax for my company to present to management, if not for everyone at least for most of the secretaries/accountants/middle managers, who only need Excel and Word (Star Office does the job just fine)
I do see this as a very exciting time for Linux/Unix/FreeBSD and the whole open source community, I think Linux is going to win on the desktop.
Re:transcripts, recordings and submitted content
on
SSSCA Hearing
·
· Score: 1
I have some server space available. if you want to use it, (the upload on my DSL is only 256, so it will be a bit slow..) drop me a line ogg@pavera.com
the problem is that the DMCA clearly states "nothing in this section shall require..." leaving the doors open for other legislation to require said measures, the DMCA simply states that it itself does not, and cannot be construed to mean that manufactureres are required to incorporate copy protection. Good try though.
The Opportunity in all of this
on
SSSCA Hearing
·
· Score: 1
Ok, there is one thing that upsets me about the whole Open Source movement, and that is all of the whining, and lack of action. Whining is ok at first, but while we scream and whine for the next 12 months about how evil the SSSCA is nothing will get done, and then we'll be stuck with it. Now, here is the opportunity: If as a community we can come up with a solution to this problem before the private industries or the gov't mandate the solution, we will hold the trump card. My idea of the solution would be that we set up a site or sites, (many competing sites would be the best) and use the resources and connections that the Open Source community has, to create a forum for artists to directly distribute their works. Obviously this would be a pay site (be it per download, or monthly subscription) but I am sure we could get alot of artists to sign up and start producing music, and I'm sure there are alot of Indy film producers that would like the exposure, eventually the idea would be to have TV-like programming available as well, all digital, none of which would be copy protected (the SSSCA mandates that all SW and HW have copy protection, but it does not mandate that all copy-righted material use said copy protection). Therefore, they would be able to copy-right their works, they would own them, and people would have to pay for them. (they would be freely distributable afterwards, but I think the artists would see that they would make alot more money doing things this way, than having to deal with the record companies, direct distribution is much more efficient) The idea being that if we can show that it is economically better for the artists to use these sites instead of the record companies for marketing/distribution, as artist's contracts lapse with the record companies, they will move to us. Furthermore, this idea would spawn a new age of innovation as the decreased cost of distribution would allow many more Indy films and music to be produced and distributed, and if the sites attracted the masses, could seriously change the world for the better. I'm sure I will get flamed about how this is an impossible thing to do, and how the music/film industries are monopolies and this isn't feasible, but really it is, the music industry turns over artists about every 3-4 years, and only the really great bands stay popular for longer than that, this turnover gives this idea the upper hand because if we can get a couple of the next crop of "popular" artists the idea is sold, and the music company is dead. Furthermore, I believe that many of the current artists that fully supported Napster would be good candidates to join this revolution (such big names as Dave Matthews, and others). The film industry is more difficult because production costs are astronomical, however, I feel that we could start with Indy films, prove that it is economically viable and then more big name producers/directors would get the idea and move to a similar scheme. This in my opinion is the way to use the internet and our knowledge of technology to competitively destroy the evils of the music and film industry.
Where you are wrong and Morpheus' lawyers have a leg (or in my opinion 2) to stand on, is the way case law works in America. Precedent is everything, and in all of these cases there is a very strong precedent that developers/producers of tools that have legitimate uses cannot be sued/shut down because these tools might have illegal uses as well. (Sony/Betamax, guns, alcohol, to name a few).
Ok, we have millions of people starving to death, wars all around us, the US gov't is taking away freedoms left and right, and we are worried about 1/1000000th of a second in the next 100 years? Give me a break, how did these people get funding. What a waste of time and money.
the University of Utah also uses one of these to keep students from "cheating". in fact in my last cs course 5 people were kicked out of the major because their code was "too similar" it wasn't even exactly the same, but they had too many similar styles/variable names. Of course, if anyone was thinking that college actually prepared you for the real world, they were always wrong, but whatever, I didn't go to college expecting that so I'm not suprised that its not preparing me for it.
I own a company that is doing just this in the Salt Lake City area. I have done a couple cat5 installs, and some wireless lan installs, (not quite a neat as cat5 cause its slower, but some of these buildings just don't take cat5 (being 60+ years old, plaster walls instead of wallboard). If any of you live in Salt Lake and want your Apt done up, tell your landlord to give me a call, paveraware inc. is the company name.
I think that it is ok that we let everyone know that MS has the best customer support. In my experience the companies that get rave reviews on their tech/customer support are the ones who have people using their tech/customer support all the time, because things are always broken. Great customer support generally can be directly translated into "crappy product".
Of course, then there's the problem of high humidity around the engine.. last I checked computers like humidity to an extent.. but I think you'd have to find a way to get it away from something like a laptop.. circuits don't like condensation.
Personally,
I think that it is perfectly acceptable to expect a programmer to know many languages (5 at least). Learning the intricacies of each language might be a pain, and keeping them straight also.. however, this is why we have multiple languages. People said "Hey, this language doesn't do 'x' very well, we need to do 'x'" and they made a new language. Furthermore, once one understands the concepts behind programming, learning a new language is not very difficult, syntax, and the different capabilities/intricacies, should not be a problem. So, I say mix and match. Use the tool that gets the job done fast/efficiently.
My company is also in the process of "locking down" all of the workstations. Not only is this creating a huge support bottleneck, it is also limiting productivity as many different departments use custom software solutions that do not comply with corporate "standards", and so will have to be discarded in exchange for "standard" software which does not satisfy the needs of the users. Some of these softwares require the users to have admin rights on their machines, so they are completely out of luck. It is a bad bad deal.
Then the search has absolutely no merit whatsoever. The only reason to search is to find something, so as to prosecute in a court of law. However, these searches violate the 4th amendment, and therefore, would nullify any incriminating evidence found, so basically, all the lab could do is say "ok, go away". Now, if a terrorist were entering with a bomb, he could detonate it there, or rush the guards and detonate it slightly inside the building.. the company has no power to enforce laws, only the gov't. and therefore, these searches are baseless.
Slashdot Mirror
The article states that more CD-Rs are being sold than pre-recorded CDs. This statistic is a little silly if you ask me.
I work for an engineering firm of 120 people, and we go through nearly 1000 CD-Rs a month, and none of them are used for music,
they are all for delivering reports, and data to our clients.
I know of many other firms that are using CD-Rs as their primary
delivery mechanism for documents and other digital data as well as for backups.
I have been using Gentoo since 1.0 came out a couple weeks ago.
I have to say I am in love, fast, slim system
with only what I want and need, and its easy.
I messed with LFS for a while, and sorcerer as well,
LFS is kinda a pain, too much typing/babysitting, sorcerer never quite worked right.
Looking for a good source based distro?
This is IT. Portage is very nice, so far, I'm always downloading the source at my bandwidth limits. I like it.
Sign me up as a defendant!
What on earth is this company thinking?
Scare tactics like these are horrid!
Pets Warehouse has to be the worst company I've seen.
I know,
thats my point, how many small sites are sitting there not being counted?
I host mulitple sites on my home computer,
and I was just messing around on netcraft, asking it what I was running (of course Linux/Apache).
They are small sites with little traffic, but I like them, anyway..
My point is that none of them were in Netcraft's survey, I wonder if this is a widespread phenomenon?
If all of us were to go tell netcraft about our locally hosted sites, would linux/apache see an uptick in market share?
I have 7 sites, if a large portion of Slashdot readers have 3 or 4 sites, or even 1 or 2,
we could increase the apache numbers by 400,000-500,000 sites, this would be a nice market share jump for apache...
Some People have mentioned it, but no one seems to be doing anything about it.
We need Music, and movies that some Independent artists have created, to be freely available on the net. Bands that say "screw the music companies" and pay their own production costs, and then put the CD on the net, if there was a sort of clearing-house site, where a bunch of indy artists could put things, I think it would take off.
I think people would pay a subscription to a site like this.
I'm not talking about 10 or 20 a month, more like 1 or 2.
Even at that low of a rate, the musical groups would have much more to take home than the pitance the music industry gives them.
or you could make it something like $.05 per song, and maybe $1.00 per movie.
I don't know I haven't done extensive market research yet, but I really think this would be possible to pay the artists, and for bandwidth, and everything..
my $.02
I think this is fine, at work one should be WORKING. I really don't care if I can't shop online at work, and I really wouldn't mind not getting the spam, its annoying as hell.
.exes or zips through email for legitimate business purposes. (Our email server currently stops jpgs and mpegs and any attachment over 1mb).
However, as far as screening out everything, that seems ridiculous. We already have problems where I work (I am network admin, but I don't control the policies of the email that gets screened), anyway, we have problems all the time where people need to get jpgs, or mpegs or
This certainly negatively effects productivity, as we have to wait for 2 days for them to FedEx us stuff on CD that we could have had 2 days ago.
I don't see how you can stop "private" use without curtailing legitimate business use as well... in some environments yes its possible, but not in mine.
I wish I had mod points!
Funny!!
Other posters have said basically this, but really, isn't it time for another Party of some sort?
This is exactly the thing that caused the Boston Tea Party, unreasonable taxes levied against a public that receives no benefit from said taxes.
If someone wants to argue that paying the MPAA is somehow benefiting the general public, good luck.
"When in the course of human events..."
Dell, Compaq, IBM, all of the big computer manufacturers have their OWN motherboards, that they design and build. (Seen the new GX240's from Dell? want to try to get a standard Asus p4t into one of those cases?) not gonna happen, because these companies make their own parts to fit in their own cases of weird shapes and sizes, therefore they do not have to buy their components from third party manufacturers, hence they do not need to "force" them to make their parts WinXP certified.
Poster states that in order to get the mobo WinXP certified they had to remove the ability to turn on/off ACPI, and that is causing problems with FreeBSD. Now, if that were the case wouldn't FreeBSD not run on *ANY* WinXP certified mobo? Because all of them would have to have this feature disabled? Furthermore, I am running FreeBSD on a new ASUS mobo that is on the WinXP HCL, and it runs just ducky, so I would think that it must be *his* mobo only that is not working properly.
you are missing the point as well. When they were in their prime WordPerfect and Novell both DID DOMINATE their respective markets. 10 years ago if you wanted a network it was Novell, that was it. Same for Word Processing, you wanted a graphical office suite here's WordPerfect. Microsoft pulled the same tactics that they did in the IE/Netscape battle with both of these products. Namely, build cheap fast 1st version that everyone hates, listen to complaints build better version, listen to more complaints build the 3rd version that might be usable, listen to more complaints, build 4th version that is comparable to competitor's, bundle with OS, take over the market (they didn't bundle Office, but networking yes). The reason they could do this is because you can't fight an attrition war with MS, they have too many resources. However, if developers leave them in the learch, and start working on Linux projects, then Linux/Unix will have the resources.
The reason Wordperfect and Novell died was because MS had the DEVELOPERS and now the DEVELOPERS are swinging away from MS because, well, for me (being a CS student, and feeling exactly as this article states "fed up with MS"), I can't afford to pay $1000 every 2 years to have the latest IDE, so I develop for Linux.
CS Students don't decide IT purchases, but to a very large degree they decide what software gets written. (Once again you could argue that MBA's do that, but there are alot of small software companies that are owned and operated by purely CS people)
If the current crop of CS Grads devote alot of time and energy to Linux apps, Linux will spring far ahead of MS in a very short time, It's already very close. I am a CS Student, I write purely for Linux/Unix/X11, I do not write Windows Apps because I refuse to perpetuate the hell.
I am a Systems Admin, the company I work for is purely Windows (servers, workstations, engineering CAD stations everything), but I don't run a single MS app on my workstation, and I can interoperate almost seemlessly with everyone else in the building (remote admin of Win2k isn't quite what it could be, but thats more MS not building it in than Linux not being able to talk to it) and I feel that by the end of the year I will have a workable solution to the MS tax for my company to present to management, if not for everyone at least for most of the secretaries/accountants/middle managers, who only need Excel and Word (Star Office does the job just fine)
I do see this as a very exciting time for Linux/Unix/FreeBSD and the whole open source community, I think Linux is going to win on the desktop.
I have some server space available. if you want to use it, (the upload on my DSL is only 256, so it will be a bit slow..) drop me a line ogg@pavera.com
the problem is that the DMCA clearly states "nothing in this section shall require..." leaving the doors open for other legislation to require said measures, the DMCA simply states that it itself does not, and cannot be construed to mean that manufactureres are required to incorporate copy protection. Good try though.
Ok, there is one thing that upsets me about the whole Open Source movement, and that is all of the whining, and lack of action. Whining is ok at first, but while we scream and whine for the next 12 months about how evil the SSSCA is nothing will get done, and then we'll be stuck with it. Now, here is the opportunity: If as a community we can come up with a solution to this problem before the private industries or the gov't mandate the solution, we will hold the trump card. My idea of the solution would be that we set up a site or sites, (many competing sites would be the best) and use the resources and connections that the Open Source community has, to create a forum for artists to directly distribute their works. Obviously this would be a pay site (be it per download, or monthly subscription) but I am sure we could get alot of artists to sign up and start producing music, and I'm sure there are alot of Indy film producers that would like the exposure, eventually the idea would be to have TV-like programming available as well, all digital, none of which would be copy protected (the SSSCA mandates that all SW and HW have copy protection, but it does not mandate that all copy-righted material use said copy protection). Therefore, they would be able to copy-right their works, they would own them, and people would have to pay for them. (they would be freely distributable afterwards, but I think the artists would see that they would make alot more money doing things this way, than having to deal with the record companies, direct distribution is much more efficient) The idea being that if we can show that it is economically better for the artists to use these sites instead of the record companies for marketing/distribution, as artist's contracts lapse with the record companies, they will move to us. Furthermore, this idea would spawn a new age of innovation as the decreased cost of distribution would allow many more Indy films and music to be produced and distributed, and if the sites attracted the masses, could seriously change the world for the better. I'm sure I will get flamed about how this is an impossible thing to do, and how the music/film industries are monopolies and this isn't feasible, but really it is, the music industry turns over artists about every 3-4 years, and only the really great bands stay popular for longer than that, this turnover gives this idea the upper hand because if we can get a couple of the next crop of "popular" artists the idea is sold, and the music company is dead. Furthermore, I believe that many of the current artists that fully supported Napster would be good candidates to join this revolution (such big names as Dave Matthews, and others). The film industry is more difficult because production costs are astronomical, however, I feel that we could start with Indy films, prove that it is economically viable and then more big name producers/directors would get the idea and move to a similar scheme. This in my opinion is the way to use the internet and our knowledge of technology to competitively destroy the evils of the music and film industry.
Where you are wrong and Morpheus' lawyers have a leg (or in my opinion 2) to stand on, is the way case law works in America. Precedent is everything, and in all of these cases there is a very strong precedent that developers/producers of tools that have legitimate uses cannot be sued/shut down because these tools might have illegal uses as well. (Sony/Betamax, guns, alcohol, to name a few).
Ok, we have millions of people starving to death, wars all around us, the US gov't is taking away freedoms left and right, and we are worried about 1/1000000th of a second in the next 100 years? Give me a break, how did these people get funding. What a waste of time and money.
the University of Utah also uses one of these to keep students from "cheating". in fact in my last cs course 5 people were kicked out of the major because their code was "too similar" it wasn't even exactly the same, but they had too many similar styles/variable names. Of course, if anyone was thinking that college actually prepared you for the real world, they were always wrong, but whatever, I didn't go to college expecting that so I'm not suprised that its not preparing me for it.
I own a company that is doing just this in the Salt Lake City area. I have done a couple cat5 installs, and some wireless lan installs, (not quite a neat as cat5 cause its slower, but some of these buildings just don't take cat5 (being 60+ years old, plaster walls instead of wallboard). If any of you live in Salt Lake and want your Apt done up, tell your landlord to give me a call, paveraware inc. is the company name.
I think that it is ok that we let everyone know that MS has the best customer support. In my experience the companies that get rave reviews on their tech/customer support are the ones who have people using their tech/customer support all the time, because things are always broken. Great customer support generally can be directly translated into "crappy product".
Of course, then there's the problem of high humidity around the engine.. last I checked computers like humidity to an extent.. but I think you'd have to find a way to get it away from something like a laptop.. circuits don't like condensation.
Personally,
I think that it is perfectly acceptable to expect a programmer to know many languages (5 at least). Learning the intricacies of each language might be a pain, and keeping them straight also.. however, this is why we have multiple languages. People said "Hey, this language doesn't do 'x' very well, we need to do 'x'" and they made a new language. Furthermore, once one understands the concepts behind programming, learning a new language is not very difficult, syntax, and the different capabilities/intricacies, should not be a problem. So, I say mix and match. Use the tool that gets the job done fast/efficiently.
My company is also in the process of "locking down" all of the workstations. Not only is this creating a huge support bottleneck, it is also limiting productivity as many different departments use custom software solutions that do not comply with corporate "standards", and so will have to be discarded in exchange for "standard" software which does not satisfy the needs of the users. Some of these softwares require the users to have admin rights on their machines, so they are completely out of luck. It is a bad bad deal.
Then the search has absolutely no merit whatsoever. The only reason to search is to find something, so as to prosecute in a court of law. However, these searches violate the 4th amendment, and therefore, would nullify any incriminating evidence found, so basically, all the lab could do is say "ok, go away". Now, if a terrorist were entering with a bomb, he could detonate it there, or rush the guards and detonate it slightly inside the building.. the company has no power to enforce laws, only the gov't. and therefore, these searches are baseless.