Consumers have a large library of MP3's that are currently free to encode, use, and share. They access the free CDDB to get information for ripping their CD's, and they share them for free on Kazaa, Napster, et. al. Life is perfect.
How many more of these conditions do you see surviving the next two years? Let's be realistic. MP3's eventually won't be free. Period. There will come a time once it has become an entrenched standard in the commercial world that group behind the MPEG codec start behaving in the way best fitting their stockholders. We've seen it with CDDB, we've seen it with GIF, we'll see it with MP3s. Ogg Vorbis, on the other hand, is a freely available alternative for streaming or downloading audio. While the idea of a non-recordable Ogg Vorbis stream may be as palatable to most slashdotters as having to pay Microsoft every time someone wants to print from word (don't get any ideas now), such a proposition could serve as a very appealing alternative to many broadcasters. If the end-to-end solution is in place, who cares what format it comes over? It can find a home there, especially if it can reduce both software and bandwidth costs.
Let's not forget that if you can reduce file size by 30% for the same audio quality, you can reduce your data costs by 30%. This will be a non-negligable issue to most large providers, and may become a non-negligable one to the average user as broadband companys start enforcing bandwidth caps.
There is no reason to go through your music collection and delete all of the WMA files you may find. There is no reason to convert all the GIF's on your website into JPG's. There is no reason that OVA's have to entirely supplant MP3's. There's no reason it has to happen right away.
Being open-source *should* also make it easier to build audio applications around it, though we all know how that can go.
The mind and wallet of the consumer is *not* the most important place to make changes. The mind and wallet of providers is (In the case of Gnutella, that is also the consumer. Que sera.) We don't need everyone to come on board for Ogg to survive, we just need some forward-thinking companies that realize the bottom line they should care about is theirs.
P.S. the majority of people on Gnutella are still dialup. Tell them that 30% faster transfers are unimportant.
Between.25 and 1 (according to the mac site) percent of all web surfing computers are linux-based. Boo hoo? Quite a low number?
According to the first site I could lazily pull off of Google, http://www.nua.ie/surveys/how_many_online/, roughly 500 million people are hooked up to the net. If we ignore that many people have multiple computers and multiple OS's,.25% is a paultry million and a half (or so) people. 1% is five million people. These numbers don't seem that far off to me.
Think of the number of people you know that own a mac, love a mac, and are basically normal, non-technical people. Think of the number of non-techie musicians you know that run Linux. I could easily see 10 times more people running macs than struggling to download and compile their graphics drivers into their kernel (and don't tell me it doesn't happen).
Likewise, I'm writing this on a Win 98 thinkpad because the Linux box sitting next to me is having X issues again (and the Mac next to me isn't multitasking, the Win ME box is lacking ethernet drivers, the Win 2k box is out on loan, and the other Mandrake box has been stripped to solve the X issue. Oh, and the NeXT stations aren't plugged in, the NeXT cube is noisy and slow, and the Sparc Station was never designed for this sort of thing.) Even if you *have* a linux box, which isn't the sort of thing that most people can have yet, it doesn't count unless you are actually bothering to boot the thing to just read ZDnet. I'm sure a lot of dual-booters surf on the dark side at least some of the time.
So, if we accept that the macintosh has about a 4% marketshare, and that linux users get the shaft when it comes to dual-boot counting, a 1 in 400 rating for the number of linux boxes doens't seem all that far-fetched.
Their music to no longer be classified as a "work for hire," aka a pointless industrial design owned by the system... such as the look of a car, the shape of a replica statue of liberty, or N' Sync. There isn't much money to be made creating "works for hire," nor is there many legislated rights associated with them.
Compulsory licencing for online music content with compulsory compensation for artists. Much in the same way that radio was working up until Clear Channel, compulsory licencing would mean increased online distribution and competition and with a per-song fee paid to artists. Artists would also like to have the option of licencing "their" music to free services like limewire and napster, in the hopes of making more on concert sales and merchandising.
An end to long-term contracts. This makes sense, as artists don't have much barganing power with their labels when they first sign that 10 year piece of paper. At the time it looks like a much better prospect than returning to Mc Donalds.
All of these things are aimed at making more money for the existing, successful (and unsuccessful but signed) artist, but with little real attempt to reduce the grip of the Recording Industry from the musical world.
I know a dozen musicians, all of whom have in-house recording studios capable of producing some truly professional quality audio and burning it to disk. And I know dozens of people who run sites, some of which involve payment authentication systems. Add a buck for postage, a few downloadable sample MP3's, and make the artists do all the legwork and you have a replacement for the traditional music distribution system. Why, then, do we not have benefit concerts to startup alternatives like this? (Hint - look at the dinner tables of the artists throwing this concert... )
While the tweaks to the system advocated by these artists are by and large good ideas (lord knows we could use a compulsory licencing scheme for online music), they are not in reality as revolutionary as some people here seem to think.
"And for those that are wonderi ng, the RAC's site, ArtistsAgainstPiracy.com, is actually an anti-RIAA and somewhat pro-Napster site, not what you would immediately expect it to be."
Hmm... Pirates used to come storming into small villages, give people the choice of becoming their slaves or dying, and then exploited them as thoroughly as possible while dragging them around the world to steal ritches from other poor saps. Of course, except for the lucky few who went on to head their own pirate ships, these slaves were pushed off the boat to die when they became too old to rob from the middle class.
Hmm... A large group of people who know how to get what they want for free and who have enough time to sit through dozens of failed and / or remotely disconnected transfers in order to watch a movie without just paying the $1.50 rental fee. That sounds like the perfect target market for my product... Where does my company sign up for one of those banner ads?
I can't seriously see anyone jumping at the potential to advertise to this group of people. Don't get me wrong... I've limed a few episodes of Tenchi Muyo in my day. But quite frankly I wouldn't bother pitching to me either.
The spyware should steal the user's address, e-mail, and telephone number and send it straight to the "don't bother" list. That alone could save companies hundreds of thousands in telemarketer fees.
-Chris
"An ad for the Shrek DVD? I should go download that."
Hmm... Hack a 99$ I-opener. Connect it as an ftp server, and have it ftp to a directory used by one of those ever popular picture-displaying screen savers. Mount the moniter on the wall, mount the box in a closet or with the rest fo the servers in your house, problem solved. (for I-opener info, visit linux-hacker.org)
If you get tired of cutting holes in the wall (and who doesn't?) there is a less geeky solution. Just buy one. Kensington has out a 640x480 7" solution that is in the 150 range. The USB connection won't let you remotely manage your photograph collection from a motel in kenya, but this will actually work and with minimal effort.
http://shop.store.yahoo.com/cfarr/kendigphotal1. ht ml (too lazy to html at this time of morning)
The inherint problem with any controller of this type is that you have to radically change hand position when going from chatting to movement, both of which should be common in an online rpg. It has to be rested upon something to type, but movement requires that you hands be wrapped around the sides and back. Even mice are manipulated from the top like a keyboard, and yet all online rpg'ers find the transition annoying. This new controller is the aesthetic and gameplay equivalent of gluing a controller and a keyboard together with Elmer's white. While that might have some post-modern artistic appeal, I doubt it will be anything but kludgy in practice. Why didn't ascii design something that could be controlled entirely from the top, designed specifically for pso?
the reason.com is the only game in town is because it has become as integral to the functioning of the internet from an end-user level as "http://". It would be as taxing for both new and experienced users to remember cocacolainc.com as it would be to remember cocacola.inc. To find out information about fords people go to Ford.com. It might as well not have the.com at the end at all, and be just Ford. Ford.info, however, has to be remembered with the ending. Even slashdot gets a huge percentage of users coming to slashdot.com. It will be a long time before people automatically go to xxx.museum to look for a museum piece, or xxx.biz to look for a business that isn't a.com.
There are only so many combinations of letters in the alphabet. [company_name][qualifier].com is just as easy to remember as [company_name].[qualifier] but is a whole lot more flexible.
How many software applications are refocused and redesigned every iteration? For that matter how many software applications have you see that have been designed to not only not annoy the heck out of the user, but to make the process of learning the application genuinely pleasant? Of course Games are going to lead the pack in "humanized" interfaces, they are the only area of software development whose bread and butter is humanized interfaces. This is why in the late 80's, games had adopted iconized interfaces long before Windows existed. This is why Black and White is using mouse gestures, a feature followed by Opera and hopefully soon everyone else. While clarity of menus is important in, say, Microsoft Word, no medium is as frequently organized, focused, and edited as gaming menus. Unlike in word processors that may continue to support everything from DOS printing to ROT-13 encryption, Game designers know that clarity of interface is more important than the ability to sort a contact list by last letter of their middle name.
Yes, gaming interfaces are specific to game situations. But as they are the only truly experimentive medium in computing specifically designed for human satisfaction and completely re-done every six months (much like in the early days of the web), gaming is quite a learning ground for what works when interacting with human beings and what doesn't.
It's like how soap operas are a form of training for actors. UI developers should be game developers for a year. Maybe then we would never have been given that accursed "windows" key.
GoldenEye and PerfectDark were developed by the same team.
-Chris
Hong Kong smiles, little johnny has no clue
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MAME on X-Box
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· Score: 1
Ah, perhaps now with a stronger long-term memory Video Gaming will be able to be classified as an art form along the lines of that which gave us the Great Train Robbery and Mario Brothers the Movie. It's always been hard to share classic gaming experiences because no modern system would stoop to playing Gauntlet or Crossed Swords. Now, perhaps with a system powerful and compatible enough to run MAME, and probably NESticle, GenSX, and the rest of the modern emulators, classic gaming won't be relegated to simply those computer users who don't mind using keyboards instead of joypads and scavaging the web for viable rom download sites. Now classic gaming can be extended to all people with connections in Hong Kong or friends willing to burn copies of compliation CD's, along with the mod chips required to play them. Which, unfortunately, is not exactly a sizable portion of the population at large. While the idea is fun, this is not exactly going to change the gaming world.
How much do you suppose it would cost to buy licences from older gaming companies for their titles, get a Microsoft developer's licence, and sell the results to a publisher?
"When asked about Mundie's warning of the risks associated with Linux, Laudati said: 'I'm not sure what he meant. Linux goes through a lot of testing before we use it.'"
If I had a dime for every occasion I've uttered similar words at a Microsoft press release, I could buy Linux an infinite number of times.
If people are going to be turning to.info to find out actual information about companies and services, shouldn't those companies be excluded from registering that name? In fact, isn't it our moral imperative to register microsoft.info to let people know the actual information about shoddy software and trust violations? I personally see this registering of other companies trademarks as the exact sort of thing which should be encouraged (except for squatting purposes).
If aolsucks.com violates some sort of trademark law against saying anything that could possibly reduce the stock options of the directors, wouldn't a reasoned aol.info site with reasoned news about system outages, social acceptability, and technology lockdowns pass a legal test?
Re:Therein lies the dilemna
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Mac Rants
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· Score: 3, Insightful
The "Value" of computers.
Some people value their computers as gaming platforms, utilizing the latest Athlon processors and (obviously) reluctantly running windows OS. Polygon-power and compatability are the most valuable things to them.
Some people use them as simple web and word processing boxes. Any box will do, and so choice of Opera, Netscape, IE, KDE, OSX, OS9, Be, 98, NT, etc is purely an aesthetic choice, reflecting tradeoffs between simplicity, conformity, and access. To them, the Computer might as well be a television, and occupies an intimate, relaxing space in the mind where clutter is not acceptable.
Some people run servers, where Linux / Unix / BSD is essential. Some people restart servers, obvious NT users. Bandwidth, ram, requests per second are all valuable.
There are graphics professionals. Some use windows and some use the Macintosh. Many things that previously could only be done on the Mac can now be done under Windows, leveling the playfield quite a bit. Still, though, graphics professionals also appreciate the aesthetic qualities of the internals of the tools they use, and if anyone has opened their windows folder in the past 10 years they know just how unappealing it can be.
Then, of course, there is business or specialized software composed soley to run on a single platform. That user much is buying a system for a killer-ap, so anything that may optimize that (or reduce costs) is essential.
Finally, we have the pundits, ranters, and corporate iconographers who bask in the reflected glory of their chosen OS, and staunchly support it as a lifestyle representation. Their macs, windows PC's, Linux boxes, dusty old OS2 machines are symbols for other people to judge them by. It's distinctly possible that these are the people who say that coke is delicious and pepsi is undrinkable crap, but I haven't done any research into that connection. Scott "Damage" Wasson appears to fall into this category, though I cannot tell if he's a wintel pundit or a disgruntled mac pundit. We here all know that the evidence is in favor of the G4 and Athlon architectures and against the P4 marketing device, so why is this hardware guru ignorant on the subject if not either a sworn enemy or a lover scorned?
Computers have gotten to the point, thankfully, that the question of a single overarching "performance" measurement is irrelevant to most people. Most people have objectives, preferences, skills, and a budget. None of these rubrics have yet to take into account, for example, people's preferences for a quiet computer, or one that doesn't waste a lot of space. People want webcams, DSL, DVD / CDR drives, and big moniters. They want their particular cherished trackball or mouse to work, they want something that gets their work done, and they want it so that it doesn't become obsolete right away. I doubt anyone cares anymore if their cpu is 800 mhz or 900 mhz. Long gone is the day where that is the most important factor.
-Wintel machines would be great if it wasn't for the Win part.
Remember back in the days when we could freely modify systems on the completely undubious grounds that we owned them? Chips could be slipped into playstations, Ms. Pac Man tables could be overclocked, and freaks could weld together Wonderswans and GBA's to the amusement of the world.
From what I've seen of this trick NONE of it falls under the DMCA: no encryption/decryption involved. It can be argued, probably successfully, that getting an image of the software that runs the system is copyright violation. However, estimating the value of the code per copy at less than 100 dollars, a single copy under the non-profit copyright laws would be insufficient for jailtime. Of course, I could be remembering the statute incorrectly: it has been several months since I last looked at the law.
As for a licence... that's a civil matter. Thank goodness that so far no company has managed to convince congress that violation of a click-through or shrink-wrap agreement should result in incarceration.
Someday these companies will realize that what we want is to pay a fair price for a box that works on our terms. In the mean time, let's pay an absurdly undervalued price and hack away.
I don't think the reinforcement of his engine mount is going to matter heads or tails if he gets in an accident and there is nothing holding him into the kart. He is STILL running tests while sitting on a plank of wood. This is not indicative of proper highway safety. In a rollover situation (the most likely accident, it seems, considering his steering and high engine mount) his body will be thrown clear to roll down the highway at 30-60 mph without a helmet, gloves, or braces on all of those joints that could snap in the wrong direction. It appears to have all of the safety of a motorcycle, and you know what THAT means.
That means we should start a fund on Slashdot to buy the boy a seatbelt and a helmet.
Not that I'm deriding the project... It actually seems like a really fun, geeky hobby that will create something the neighbors will talk about for years. "My son's Bay-o wolf clu-star? I don't know anything about that, but this guy next door has a freight loader with a jet engine!"
My personal favorite cooler has always been the old camping trick of tying the cans to a rope staked to the ground, then dropping the whole thing into a running river. That makes them either cool down, or break off and go floating. Either way the warm beer is dealt with.
Of course, this works for any flowing material. There is no reason that he couldn't, say, put beer in front of a fan, then pour gasoline on it to get some additional cooling from evaporation. Or use a nice, quiet water pump / radiator combination to get that quick fluid flow.
If, however, one wanted to use decompressing gas to achieve coolness, why not weld a CO2 mini canister holder onto a metal can holder, then insulate the heck out of the outside? You could be using one cartridge per beer (maybe two), and it would be a heck of a lot quicker than the five-minutes it takes him now.
Or perhaps there is a way to put the can inside of a piston or compression chamber, compress it (without crushing the can), let it return to room temperature while stored inside the piston, then De-compress it just before you were planning on drinking.
The irony of all this is that his current design pretty accurately mimics the principles at work in all modern refridgerator compressors, but with the added bonus of a jet turbine. That, of course, would be a nice feature for a modern refridgerator, but you would have antitrust suits from the microwave people in the blink of an eye.
Obviously a cartridge is a more viable format for portable gaming than a CD. CD's get scratched, wobble, and are generally a pain.
But what about a cartridge VS a DataPlay or a MiniDisk? These skip far less often, are far cheaper to produce, have tons of space to spare, and are re-writable. Plus the technology is (relatively) mature and have been designed from day one for small, power-conserving portable devices. The only problem is that a player designed around a DataPlay would probably be roughly 200 dollars. But with the higher capacity and re-writable disks games like Roller Coaster Tycoon, Loom, and Final Fantasy (7+) would be possible.
I really think that another company (Bandai? Sony?) has a chance to release a portable, DataPlay-based system with stronger emphasis on story and audio quality and win the older section of the portable market. If they scored some big-name RPG's from a certain company who Nintendo refuses to deal with, and a linup of EA sports games, I think they could be incredibly successful on both sides of the pond.
(Not that I won't be buying an Advance come June 11, mind you. I just think it is time someone made a credible challenge again.)
Do computers have international rights? The Russians were on US soil, abiding by US law, and were taken down in what I consider a nice and legal little scheme (it's not entrapment unless they ask you specifically for the drugs, so to speak). The extortionists are down, and should get no sympathy cards from white hats anywhere.
However, the computer was compromised on Russian soil and THAT is a real issue. Obviously it is some form of search and seisure, as one needs a warrant to utilize the data. While there is no physical invasion of foreign soil any more than there would be if one accessed gov.uk, using stolen passwords is a violation of most legal systems. The complete lack of any sort of information transfer between the US and Russia is horrible, and a clear violation of both Russian law and the sanctity of their borders. Whether or not the Russians were inept at dealing with crime in their borders, they must be gone through or else militant fundamentalists will have the right to violate US borders because of US ineptitude in dealing with "the abortion problem" or "the satanist problem" or the just general corporate worldwide domination and exploitation problem.
Then again, this action seems to fall directly in line with Bush's policy goal of getting into another really big war.
-Cgenman finds it cute that they were only caught when the tried to get real jobs.
Do terrorist groups have magazines? It's interesting how the MPAA uses language referring to 2600, and specifically Corley, as a terrorist group hell-bent upon illegal activities, and yet Corley's lawyers keep representing himself as a magazine. The MPAA refer to Corley's "abusive misconduct," "electronic civil disobedience," and his "purposeful and intentional linking scheme." But more than that, they go out of their way repeatedly to try and "prove" that 2600 is not (does not run) a magazine, which they don't even give the legitimacy of referring to by name. This is obviously because removing a magazine's ability to publish an article, however illegal that article would be, pushes a lot of first-amendment buttons and definitely requires the highest scrutany clause.
However, can one really redefine a magazine as a mere solidification of the authors ill will if one does not agree with the content, or that content is socially unacceptable? If Bin Laden published an informative piece on how to make TNT (which has many legal uses), would he be protected under the first Amendment? Is the Anarchist's Handbook protected?
Do we really want to venture into the realm where socially unacceptable knowledge is deemed through inference to be not knowledge?
Aside - It's interesting how the MPAA keeps referring to DeCSS as a way of opening a museum with a crowbar. If I bought the museum, can't I open it any way I want? Furthermore, aren't crowbars legal?
...seems a little like trying to marry a global distribution of pet food and a toaster.
If you have studied any history of gaming, you know that network access over consoles has ranged from a moderate to tremendous failure, from the early NES-enabled modems to the Dreamcast web. Obviously this is not what they plan to use SSL for, as Sony has a lot of corporate resources to do at least a little research with.
What SSL can be to them is an extension of their "set top box" theory of gaming (whose benefits we won't go into... *cough* 3D0 *cough*). This is their first step to being able to sell movies, music, or other traditional media that corporate-types understand, as well as the rather odd proposition by Square of selling character upgrades and new levels.
None of this seems likely, yet, to take off. Can you imagine typing in a credit card number with a dual-shock controller? It's heinous enough as is with a qwerty. And trying to stuff a DVD quality movie through even the most modern Cable modem is like trying to haul the Statue of liberty with the latest Dodge Durango and being surprised that it still doesn't fit.
Even things like character upgrades in traditional media have to be given away for free (without requiring a secure connection) or else must be so substantial as to consider it an expensive add-on and a separate purchase. None of this, of course, has any sort of real gameplay use or reason.
I guess the real story here is how Sony is paying all of its attention to the doomed convergence of paid movies, e-commerce, and consoles and how little attention it is paying the things that will matter in the coming console wars: good second and third party support and a wealth of fun, exclusive games.
That's what we get when congress cuts the budget
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Nostrildamus
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· Score: 1
You know, one has to be a little taken aback when one combines the words "NASA," "Safety," and "Canary." It makes me wonder if they also have tasters down here on the planet discovering if the food is poisonous or if the command screens cause permanent eye damage.
It also makes me wonder if these people are required to smell the astronauts.
I'm not at all convinced that educating the masses is the proper route to solving the problem. Quite frankly, how many times in history has this approach worked- and don't say the car. People are licenced to not hit eachother with the car, not to be able to fix a starter with a piece of aluminum foil when it does its weekly breakdown on the freeway.
Computers don't have to be complex, nasty monsters. I used to bring big files between computers by unplugging my trusty scsi drive, dragging it across town, and plugging it into the machine that I wanted it to work with. Thanks to some well-thought-out drivers, there were no settings, no adding hda6 to an ini list and restarting, no need to determine a master and a slave and changing dipswitches. All of this functionality came from a 1992 computer. We need to demand better, and pay for it when it comes around.
While sitting here in this lab, writing this post, someone has come up to me trying to run Netscape. Apparently the shortcuts have inexplicably broken on her machine.
How does this relate to tech support? People get frustrated with Tech support when they can't get an unnecessarily complex product to work. (And it is unnecessarily complex. What, we can't integrate SMTP server information as a standard handshake on log-in? Give me a #&*%ing break.) Sometimes it doesn't work because it was quickly made and rushed out the door. Sometimes it doesn't work because it is interfacing strangely with something else, one or both of whom decided functionality was more important than interoperatability. Sometimes it doesn't work because it is a nasty mess requiring too much specialized knowledge for people who just want to use it to do something else.
There is no evidence that we have matured computers to the point that the people calling tech support are all idiots. Sure, my tech support friends spend their days telling people how to configure Outlook, but that in and of itself doesn't make them idiots. Likewise, when they can't help the people any more than telling them that something must be conflicting: restart and try again, that doesn't make tech support idiots. Of course, the end user feels that the tech support *should* know and therefore blames tham, when in fact nobody in that particular chain really can know. Why companies haven't realized that they can save millions on tech support with well-designed software standards is beyond me.
Of course I shouldn't defend tech support too highly. I did have to try for three weeks to get a second IP from Roadrunner, and the bureaucracy around the process sure did make them seem like idiots.
Slashdot Mirror
Consumers have a large library of MP3's that are currently free to encode, use, and share. They access the free CDDB to get information for ripping their CD's, and they share them for free on Kazaa, Napster, et. al. Life is perfect.
How many more of these conditions do you see surviving the next two years? Let's be realistic. MP3's eventually won't be free. Period. There will come a time once it has become an entrenched standard in the commercial world that group behind the MPEG codec start behaving in the way best fitting their stockholders. We've seen it with CDDB, we've seen it with GIF, we'll see it with MP3s. Ogg Vorbis, on the other hand, is a freely available alternative for streaming or downloading audio. While the idea of a non-recordable Ogg Vorbis stream may be as palatable to most slashdotters as having to pay Microsoft every time someone wants to print from word (don't get any ideas now), such a proposition could serve as a very appealing alternative to many broadcasters. If the end-to-end solution is in place, who cares what format it comes over? It can find a home there, especially if it can reduce both software and bandwidth costs.
Let's not forget that if you can reduce file size by 30% for the same audio quality, you can reduce your data costs by 30%. This will be a non-negligable issue to most large providers, and may become a non-negligable one to the average user as broadband companys start enforcing bandwidth caps.
There is no reason to go through your music collection and delete all of the WMA files you may find. There is no reason to convert all the GIF's on your website into JPG's. There is no reason that OVA's have to entirely supplant MP3's. There's no reason it has to happen right away.
Being open-source *should* also make it easier to build audio applications around it, though we all know how that can go.
The mind and wallet of the consumer is *not* the most important place to make changes. The mind and wallet of providers is (In the case of Gnutella, that is also the consumer. Que sera.) We don't need everyone to come on board for Ogg to survive, we just need some forward-thinking companies that realize the bottom line they should care about is theirs.
P.S. the majority of people on Gnutella are still dialup. Tell them that 30% faster transfers are unimportant.
Between .25 and 1 (according to the mac site) percent of all web surfing computers are linux-based. Boo hoo? Quite a low number?
.25% is a paultry million and a half (or so) people. 1% is five million people. These numbers don't seem that far off to me.
According to the first site I could lazily pull off of Google, http://www.nua.ie/surveys/how_many_online/, roughly 500 million people are hooked up to the net. If we ignore that many people have multiple computers and multiple OS's,
Think of the number of people you know that own a mac, love a mac, and are basically normal, non-technical people. Think of the number of non-techie musicians you know that run Linux. I could easily see 10 times more people running macs than struggling to download and compile their graphics drivers into their kernel (and don't tell me it doesn't happen).
Likewise, I'm writing this on a Win 98 thinkpad because the Linux box sitting next to me is having X issues again (and the Mac next to me isn't multitasking, the Win ME box is lacking ethernet drivers, the Win 2k box is out on loan, and the other Mandrake box has been stripped to solve the X issue. Oh, and the NeXT stations aren't plugged in, the NeXT cube is noisy and slow, and the Sparc Station was never designed for this sort of thing.) Even if you *have* a linux box, which isn't the sort of thing that most people can have yet, it doesn't count unless you are actually bothering to boot the thing to just read ZDnet. I'm sure a lot of dual-booters surf on the dark side at least some of the time.
So, if we accept that the macintosh has about a 4% marketshare, and that linux users get the shaft when it comes to dual-boot counting, a 1 in 400 rating for the number of linux boxes doens't seem all that far-fetched.
To clarify, the artists in this case want
Their music to no longer be classified as a "work for hire," aka a pointless industrial design owned by the system... such as the look of a car, the shape of a replica statue of liberty, or N' Sync. There isn't much money to be made creating "works for hire," nor is there many legislated rights associated with them.
Compulsory licencing for online music content with compulsory compensation for artists. Much in the same way that radio was working up until Clear Channel, compulsory licencing would mean increased online distribution and competition and with a per-song fee paid to artists. Artists would also like to have the option of licencing "their" music to free services like limewire and napster, in the hopes of making more on concert sales and merchandising.
An end to long-term contracts. This makes sense, as artists don't have much barganing power with their labels when they first sign that 10 year piece of paper. At the time it looks like a much better prospect than returning to Mc Donalds.
All of these things are aimed at making more money for the existing, successful (and unsuccessful but signed) artist, but with little real attempt to reduce the grip of the Recording Industry from the musical world.
I know a dozen musicians, all of whom have in-house recording studios capable of producing some truly professional quality audio and burning it to disk. And I know dozens of people who run sites, some of which involve payment authentication systems. Add a buck for postage, a few downloadable sample MP3's, and make the artists do all the legwork and you have a replacement for the traditional music distribution system. Why, then, do we not have benefit concerts to startup alternatives like this? (Hint - look at the dinner tables of the artists throwing this concert... )
While the tweaks to the system advocated by these artists are by and large good ideas (lord knows we could use a compulsory licencing scheme for online music), they are not in reality as revolutionary as some people here seem to think.
"And for those that are wonderi ng, the RAC's site, ArtistsAgainstPiracy.com, is actually an anti-RIAA and somewhat pro-Napster site, not what you would immediately expect it to be."
Hmm... Pirates used to come storming into small villages, give people the choice of becoming their slaves or dying, and then exploited them as thoroughly as possible while dragging them around the world to steal ritches from other poor saps. Of course, except for the lucky few who went on to head their own pirate ships, these slaves were pushed off the boat to die when they became too old to rob from the middle class.
What else would you call the RIAA?
Hmm... A large group of people who know how to get what they want for free and who have enough time to sit through dozens of failed and / or remotely disconnected transfers in order to watch a movie without just paying the $1.50 rental fee. That sounds like the perfect target market for my product... Where does my company sign up for one of those banner ads?
I can't seriously see anyone jumping at the potential to advertise to this group of people. Don't get me wrong... I've limed a few episodes of Tenchi Muyo in my day. But quite frankly I wouldn't bother pitching to me either.
The spyware should steal the user's address, e-mail, and telephone number and send it straight to the "don't bother" list. That alone could save companies hundreds of thousands in telemarketer fees.
-Chris
"An ad for the Shrek DVD? I should go download that."
Hmm... Hack a 99$ I-opener. Connect it as an ftp server, and have it ftp to a directory used by one of those ever popular picture-displaying screen savers. Mount the moniter on the wall, mount the box in a closet or with the rest fo the servers in your house, problem solved. (for I-opener info, visit linux-hacker.org)
. ht ml (too lazy to html at this time of morning)
If you get tired of cutting holes in the wall (and who doesn't?) there is a less geeky solution. Just buy one. Kensington has out a 640x480 7" solution that is in the 150 range. The USB connection won't let you remotely manage your photograph collection from a motel in kenya, but this will actually work and with minimal effort.
http://shop.store.yahoo.com/cfarr/kendigphotal1
The inherint problem with any controller of this type is that you have to radically change hand position when going from chatting to movement, both of which should be common in an online rpg. It has to be rested upon something to type, but movement requires that you hands be wrapped around the sides and back. Even mice are manipulated from the top like a keyboard, and yet all online rpg'ers find the transition annoying. This new controller is the aesthetic and gameplay equivalent of gluing a controller and a keyboard together with Elmer's white. While that might have some post-modern artistic appeal, I doubt it will be anything but kludgy in practice. Why didn't ascii design something that could be controlled entirely from the top, designed specifically for pso?
the reason .com is the only game in town is because it has become as integral to the functioning of the internet from an end-user level as "http://". It would be as taxing for both new and experienced users to remember cocacolainc.com as it would be to remember cocacola.inc. To find out information about fords people go to Ford.com. It might as well not have the .com at the end at all, and be just Ford. Ford.info, however, has to be remembered with the ending. Even slashdot gets a huge percentage of users coming to slashdot.com. It will be a long time before people automatically go to xxx.museum to look for a museum piece, or xxx.biz to look for a business that isn't a .com.
There are only so many combinations of letters in the alphabet. [company_name][qualifier].com is just as easy to remember as [company_name].[qualifier] but is a whole lot more flexible.
So... Is it OK for me to use the software if my company is losing gobs of money?
How many software applications are refocused and redesigned every iteration? For that matter how many software applications have you see that have been designed to not only not annoy the heck out of the user, but to make the process of learning the application genuinely pleasant? Of course Games are going to lead the pack in "humanized" interfaces, they are the only area of software development whose bread and butter is humanized interfaces. This is why in the late 80's, games had adopted iconized interfaces long before Windows existed. This is why Black and White is using mouse gestures, a feature followed by Opera and hopefully soon everyone else. While clarity of menus is important in, say, Microsoft Word, no medium is as frequently organized, focused, and edited as gaming menus. Unlike in word processors that may continue to support everything from DOS printing to ROT-13 encryption, Game designers know that clarity of interface is more important than the ability to sort a contact list by last letter of their middle name.
Yes, gaming interfaces are specific to game situations. But as they are the only truly experimentive medium in computing specifically designed for human satisfaction and completely re-done every six months (much like in the early days of the web), gaming is quite a learning ground for what works when interacting with human beings and what doesn't.
It's like how soap operas are a form of training for actors. UI developers should be game developers for a year. Maybe then we would never have been given that accursed "windows" key.
-Chris Canfield
GoldenEye and PerfectDark were developed by the same team.
-Chris
Ah, perhaps now with a stronger long-term memory Video Gaming will be able to be classified as an art form along the lines of that which gave us the Great Train Robbery and Mario Brothers the Movie. It's always been hard to share classic gaming experiences because no modern system would stoop to playing Gauntlet or Crossed Swords. Now, perhaps with a system powerful and compatible enough to run MAME, and probably NESticle, GenSX, and the rest of the modern emulators, classic gaming won't be relegated to simply those computer users who don't mind using keyboards instead of joypads and scavaging the web for viable rom download sites. Now classic gaming can be extended to all people with connections in Hong Kong or friends willing to burn copies of compliation CD's, along with the mod chips required to play them. Which, unfortunately, is not exactly a sizable portion of the population at large. While the idea is fun, this is not exactly going to change the gaming world.
How much do you suppose it would cost to buy licences from older gaming companies for their titles, get a Microsoft developer's licence, and sell the results to a publisher?
"When asked about Mundie's warning of the risks associated with Linux, Laudati said: 'I'm not sure what he meant. Linux goes through a lot of testing before we use it.'"
If I had a dime for every occasion I've uttered similar words at a Microsoft press release, I could buy Linux an infinite number of times.
Make that http://www.geocities.com/satsuke1/webserver.html geocites.com seems to be a cybersquatter group.
If people are going to be turning to .info to find out actual information about companies and services, shouldn't those companies be excluded from registering that name? In fact, isn't it our moral imperative to register microsoft.info to let people know the actual information about shoddy software and trust violations? I personally see this registering of other companies trademarks as the exact sort of thing which should be encouraged (except for squatting purposes).
If aolsucks.com violates some sort of trademark law against saying anything that could possibly reduce the stock options of the directors, wouldn't a reasoned aol.info site with reasoned news about system outages, social acceptability, and technology lockdowns pass a legal test?
The "Value" of computers.
Some people value their computers as gaming platforms, utilizing the latest Athlon processors and (obviously) reluctantly running windows OS. Polygon-power and compatability are the most valuable things to them.
Some people use them as simple web and word processing boxes. Any box will do, and so choice of Opera, Netscape, IE, KDE, OSX, OS9, Be, 98, NT, etc is purely an aesthetic choice, reflecting tradeoffs between simplicity, conformity, and access. To them, the Computer might as well be a television, and occupies an intimate, relaxing space in the mind where clutter is not acceptable.
Some people run servers, where Linux / Unix / BSD is essential. Some people restart servers, obvious NT users. Bandwidth, ram, requests per second are all valuable.
There are graphics professionals. Some use windows and some use the Macintosh. Many things that previously could only be done on the Mac can now be done under Windows, leveling the playfield quite a bit. Still, though, graphics professionals also appreciate the aesthetic qualities of the internals of the tools they use, and if anyone has opened their windows folder in the past 10 years they know just how unappealing it can be.
Then, of course, there is business or specialized software composed soley to run on a single platform. That user much is buying a system for a killer-ap, so anything that may optimize that (or reduce costs) is essential.
Finally, we have the pundits, ranters, and corporate iconographers who bask in the reflected glory of their chosen OS, and staunchly support it as a lifestyle representation. Their macs, windows PC's, Linux boxes, dusty old OS2 machines are symbols for other people to judge them by. It's distinctly possible that these are the people who say that coke is delicious and pepsi is undrinkable crap, but I haven't done any research into that connection. Scott "Damage" Wasson appears to fall into this category, though I cannot tell if he's a wintel pundit or a disgruntled mac pundit. We here all know that the evidence is in favor of the G4 and Athlon architectures and against the P4 marketing device, so why is this hardware guru ignorant on the subject if not either a sworn enemy or a lover scorned?
Computers have gotten to the point, thankfully, that the question of a single overarching "performance" measurement is irrelevant to most people. Most people have objectives, preferences, skills, and a budget. None of these rubrics have yet to take into account, for example, people's preferences for a quiet computer, or one that doesn't waste a lot of space. People want webcams, DSL, DVD / CDR drives, and big moniters. They want their particular cherished trackball or mouse to work, they want something that gets their work done, and they want it so that it doesn't become obsolete right away. I doubt anyone cares anymore if their cpu is 800 mhz or 900 mhz. Long gone is the day where that is the most important factor.
-Wintel machines would be great if it wasn't for the Win part.
Remember back in the days when we could freely modify systems on the completely undubious grounds that we owned them? Chips could be slipped into playstations, Ms. Pac Man tables could be overclocked, and freaks could weld together Wonderswans and GBA's to the amusement of the world.
From what I've seen of this trick NONE of it falls under the DMCA: no encryption/decryption involved. It can be argued, probably successfully, that getting an image of the software that runs the system is copyright violation. However, estimating the value of the code per copy at less than 100 dollars, a single copy under the non-profit copyright laws would be insufficient for jailtime. Of course, I could be remembering the statute incorrectly: it has been several months since I last looked at the law.
As for a licence... that's a civil matter. Thank goodness that so far no company has managed to convince congress that violation of a click-through or shrink-wrap agreement should result in incarceration.
Someday these companies will realize that what we want is to pay a fair price for a box that works on our terms. In the mean time, let's pay an absurdly undervalued price and hack away.
I don't think the reinforcement of his engine mount is going to matter heads or tails if he gets in an accident and there is nothing holding him into the kart. He is STILL running tests while sitting on a plank of wood. This is not indicative of proper highway safety. In a rollover situation (the most likely accident, it seems, considering his steering and high engine mount) his body will be thrown clear to roll down the highway at 30-60 mph without a helmet, gloves, or braces on all of those joints that could snap in the wrong direction. It appears to have all of the safety of a motorcycle, and you know what THAT means.
That means we should start a fund on Slashdot to buy the boy a seatbelt and a helmet.
Not that I'm deriding the project... It actually seems like a really fun, geeky hobby that will create something the neighbors will talk about for years. "My son's Bay-o wolf clu-star? I don't know anything about that, but this guy next door has a freight loader with a jet engine!"
My personal favorite cooler has always been the old camping trick of tying the cans to a rope staked to the ground, then dropping the whole thing into a running river. That makes them either cool down, or break off and go floating. Either way the warm beer is dealt with.
Of course, this works for any flowing material. There is no reason that he couldn't, say, put beer in front of a fan, then pour gasoline on it to get some additional cooling from evaporation. Or use a nice, quiet water pump / radiator combination to get that quick fluid flow.
If, however, one wanted to use decompressing gas to achieve coolness, why not weld a CO2 mini canister holder onto a metal can holder, then insulate the heck out of the outside? You could be using one cartridge per beer (maybe two), and it would be a heck of a lot quicker than the five-minutes it takes him now.
Or perhaps there is a way to put the can inside of a piston or compression chamber, compress it (without crushing the can), let it return to room temperature while stored inside the piston, then De-compress it just before you were planning on drinking.
The irony of all this is that his current design pretty accurately mimics the principles at work in all modern refridgerator compressors, but with the added bonus of a jet turbine. That, of course, would be a nice feature for a modern refridgerator, but you would have antitrust suits from the microwave people in the blink of an eye.
Obviously a cartridge is a more viable format for portable gaming than a CD. CD's get scratched, wobble, and are generally a pain.
But what about a cartridge VS a DataPlay or a MiniDisk? These skip far less often, are far cheaper to produce, have tons of space to spare, and are re-writable. Plus the technology is (relatively) mature and have been designed from day one for small, power-conserving portable devices. The only problem is that a player designed around a DataPlay would probably be roughly 200 dollars. But with the higher capacity and re-writable disks games like Roller Coaster Tycoon, Loom, and Final Fantasy (7+) would be possible.
I really think that another company (Bandai? Sony?) has a chance to release a portable, DataPlay-based system with stronger emphasis on story and audio quality and win the older section of the portable market. If they scored some big-name RPG's from a certain company who Nintendo refuses to deal with, and a linup of EA sports games, I think they could be incredibly successful on both sides of the pond.
(Not that I won't be buying an Advance come June 11, mind you. I just think it is time someone made a credible challenge again.)
Do computers have international rights? The Russians were on US soil, abiding by US law, and were taken down in what I consider a nice and legal little scheme (it's not entrapment unless they ask you specifically for the drugs, so to speak). The extortionists are down, and should get no sympathy cards from white hats anywhere.
However, the computer was compromised on Russian soil and THAT is a real issue. Obviously it is some form of search and seisure, as one needs a warrant to utilize the data. While there is no physical invasion of foreign soil any more than there would be if one accessed gov.uk, using stolen passwords is a violation of most legal systems. The complete lack of any sort of information transfer between the US and Russia is horrible, and a clear violation of both Russian law and the sanctity of their borders. Whether or not the Russians were inept at dealing with crime in their borders, they must be gone through or else militant fundamentalists will have the right to violate US borders because of US ineptitude in dealing with "the abortion problem" or "the satanist problem" or the just general corporate worldwide domination and exploitation problem.
Then again, this action seems to fall directly in line with Bush's policy goal of getting into another really big war.
-Cgenman finds it cute that they were only caught when the tried to get real jobs.
Do terrorist groups have magazines? It's interesting how the MPAA uses language referring to 2600, and specifically Corley, as a terrorist group hell-bent upon illegal activities, and yet Corley's lawyers keep representing himself as a magazine. The MPAA refer to Corley's "abusive misconduct," "electronic civil disobedience," and his "purposeful and intentional linking scheme." But more than that, they go out of their way repeatedly to try and "prove" that 2600 is not (does not run) a magazine, which they don't even give the legitimacy of referring to by name. This is obviously because removing a magazine's ability to publish an article, however illegal that article would be, pushes a lot of first-amendment buttons and definitely requires the highest scrutany clause.
However, can one really redefine a magazine as a mere solidification of the authors ill will if one does not agree with the content, or that content is socially unacceptable? If Bin Laden published an informative piece on how to make TNT (which has many legal uses), would he be protected under the first Amendment? Is the Anarchist's Handbook protected?
Do we really want to venture into the realm where socially unacceptable knowledge is deemed through inference to be not knowledge?
Aside - It's interesting how the MPAA keeps referring to DeCSS as a way of opening a museum with a crowbar. If I bought the museum, can't I open it any way I want? Furthermore, aren't crowbars legal?
-Cgenman
...seems a little like trying to marry a global distribution of pet food and a toaster.
If you have studied any history of gaming, you know that network access over consoles has ranged from a moderate to tremendous failure, from the early NES-enabled modems to the Dreamcast web. Obviously this is not what they plan to use SSL for, as Sony has a lot of corporate resources to do at least a little research with.
What SSL can be to them is an extension of their "set top box" theory of gaming (whose benefits we won't go into... *cough* 3D0 *cough*). This is their first step to being able to sell movies, music, or other traditional media that corporate-types understand, as well as the rather odd proposition by Square of selling character upgrades and new levels.
None of this seems likely, yet, to take off. Can you imagine typing in a credit card number with a dual-shock controller? It's heinous enough as is with a qwerty. And trying to stuff a DVD quality movie through even the most modern Cable modem is like trying to haul the Statue of liberty with the latest Dodge Durango and being surprised that it still doesn't fit.
Even things like character upgrades in traditional media have to be given away for free (without requiring a secure connection) or else must be so substantial as to consider it an expensive add-on and a separate purchase. None of this, of course, has any sort of real gameplay use or reason.
I guess the real story here is how Sony is paying all of its attention to the doomed convergence of paid movies, e-commerce, and consoles and how little attention it is paying the things that will matter in the coming console wars: good second and third party support and a wealth of fun, exclusive games.
You know, one has to be a little taken aback when one combines the words "NASA," "Safety," and "Canary." It makes me wonder if they also have tasters down here on the planet discovering if the food is poisonous or if the command screens cause permanent eye damage.
It also makes me wonder if these people are required to smell the astronauts.
I'm not at all convinced that educating the masses is the proper route to solving the problem. Quite frankly, how many times in history has this approach worked- and don't say the car. People are licenced to not hit eachother with the car, not to be able to fix a starter with a piece of aluminum foil when it does its weekly breakdown on the freeway.
Computers don't have to be complex, nasty monsters. I used to bring big files between computers by unplugging my trusty scsi drive, dragging it across town, and plugging it into the machine that I wanted it to work with. Thanks to some well-thought-out drivers, there were no settings, no adding hda6 to an ini list and restarting, no need to determine a master and a slave and changing dipswitches. All of this functionality came from a 1992 computer. We need to demand better, and pay for it when it comes around.
While sitting here in this lab, writing this post, someone has come up to me trying to run Netscape. Apparently the shortcuts have inexplicably broken on her machine.
How does this relate to tech support? People get frustrated with Tech support when they can't get an unnecessarily complex product to work. (And it is unnecessarily complex. What, we can't integrate SMTP server information as a standard handshake on log-in? Give me a #&*%ing break.) Sometimes it doesn't work because it was quickly made and rushed out the door. Sometimes it doesn't work because it is interfacing strangely with something else, one or both of whom decided functionality was more important than interoperatability. Sometimes it doesn't work because it is a nasty mess requiring too much specialized knowledge for people who just want to use it to do something else.
There is no evidence that we have matured computers to the point that the people calling tech support are all idiots. Sure, my tech support friends spend their days telling people how to configure Outlook, but that in and of itself doesn't make them idiots. Likewise, when they can't help the people any more than telling them that something must be conflicting: restart and try again, that doesn't make tech support idiots. Of course, the end user feels that the tech support *should* know and therefore blames tham, when in fact nobody in that particular chain really can know. Why companies haven't realized that they can save millions on tech support with well-designed software standards is beyond me.
Of course I shouldn't defend tech support too highly. I did have to try for three weeks to get a second IP from Roadrunner, and the bureaucracy around the process sure did make them seem like idiots.