A reading of the bill shows that what it does is allow copyright holders to determine who is in violation of Federal Copyright Law, and to take actions against that violator.
In short, the copyright holders become judge, jury, and executioner in regards to a section of Federal Law. And if you want to dispute the judgement, you can in some unspecified manner get a notification after the fact from a copyright holder that is unknown to you.
As a matter of law, this bill is terrible. Write your congressman! This is an attack on the basic principles of government sovereignty, not an attack on p2p networks!
There are plenty free and commercial version control systems out there. Unless you're a total egoist, there's no reason to write one from scratch. Instead, fork out some bucks and just get one.
If it is, then one option would be just to make a web/mesh/fabric that sits a few hundred meters away, on the upstream side, of the object you want to protect. If everything's coming mostly the same way, the web acts as a wall, temporarily and cheaply shielding the protected object from harm.
It could be radar and visible-light transparent as well. And it could be pulled in when it's not needed anymore.
George Lucas couldn't direct a paper bag - and now we're stuck with poorly renderd films made with wooden dialog and an unfortunate tendency towards lame melodrama.
Look instead at Saving Private Ryan and Minority Report. Spielberg has gotten better as he's gotten older; the movies have a flow and coherency that Lucas never had, even in the early Lucas. Heck, even the early Spielberg movies are put together better than the early Lucas films.
Maybe Lucas just got lucky once, and has been living off that franchise for decades. Spielberg has been humping it out for decades, doing different things, experimenting, and taking risks.
Plus, Lucas has already demonstrated, with episode 1 and 2, that he's incapable of bringing the franchise where it needs to go. 'Nuff said.
Buying a president sure did a lot for Arthur Anderson and Enron. Maybe every corporation in the world should take slashdotters advice. Then eveyone can be unemployed or work for the post office, like good Democrats.
Most mac software is well designed, and just plain works. That's because most Mac developers actually care about the user experience their product affords.
And move into management. As a manager one said, "Details don't matter."
Learn how technology applies to businesses, then make that your business. In the world of business, people that understand technology and business issues are rare, valuable commodities. Managers who've got tech and business cred are more valuable that you'd ever understand.
Think of it this way: would you rather be the guy that hand-coded the unified password repository, or the guy who's team of people defined and implemented company-wide technology standards, and created a stable computing base for the next 10 years?
The answer, of course, is the first one!
But still, it's a much different feeling to say "Wal-Mart kicked the cr*p out of everyone because of the logistics system we came up with is the sh*t." than it is to say "I single-handedly delivered a php-based dynamic website in 2 weeks."
In short, ignore the technology, and concentrate on the business end. You'll be more useful, and you won't worry that your skills are eroding.
I've tried to download movies off kazaa - my broadband connection can get up to 500k/sec (that's k, not kb) when downloading linux isos off fast providers.
I've never gotten a fat pipe out of any of the kazaa sharers. And plus, nobody in their right mind would wait that long for a real movie (15 hours?) if they could afford the real thing. Lastly, who wants to watch the movie on a PC?
These ominous rumblings of geeks really don't matter much in the Real World. "eToys will revolutionize buying, and retail stores are doomed." Yeah, right. "Broadband means that people will steal movies instead of buy them." Yeah, right. Get off the horse and smell some reality. How many DVDs to -you- own?
But not as hard as you'd imagine. I use AIX, Solaris, and HP-UX on a weekly basis, as well as MacOS, MacOSX, and w2k (workstation and server).
The biggest problem with a mixed environment is keeping it up to date with patches etc. Keeping track of that stuff is a complete PITA; I can't imagine how much more difficult it is in Linux, where the patches aren't on the vendor site (are they?).
Besides that, the big thing that you'll need to do is make sure everything is sort of in the same directory structure. For apps that you install, put them in the -exact- same directory. For example, all my unix boxes have the same layout:
That way, it doesn't matter as much which box I'm on, and I don't have to remember exceptional cases. It also makes maintenance easier, because all the exciting stuff (non base operating system) is in a known structure. That means you can write scripts, etc to monitor everything and you don't have to change them on a per-host basis. It also means you can just copy the config.status from box to box (or directory to directory) and build without reconfiguring everything.
"Our model of technology and development is completely counter to the natural cycles and principles that worked for millions of years to create the environment we so cleverly manipulate."
Yes exactly! Those principles include such hits as "survival of the fittest," "kill or be killed," "the weak must die unless they are useful as slaves," "you are either food or mating material," and the ever-popular "hey, don't mess with my women."
Idealized representations of a nonexistent past should be avoided at all costs.
robin williams' character was a crime novelist. Why would he have gone and tried to kill Swank at the end? It's silly - he got away with murder and successfully blackmailed pacino. why'd he want to go and kill off the female cop? He could have taken her out later.
It was set up that way so pacino's character could redeem himself, which was pretty cheezy IMO. IRL, corrupt cops just deal with it and go on.
the original movie was much, much better - no hollywood-style ending, just...lack of sleep.
Also, the pacino character in the original was much more interesting - it was he that tried to seduce (or well, grope) the best friend, not the other way around. It illustrated that he was losing it due to insomnia, instead of showing that her best friend wasn't really.
. It was OK, but no great shakes. It's interesting to see the two movies side-by-side, because they're close enough to see how different they really are.
As someone who works in the space, let me tell you why List Prices exist. They exist so the contracts/purchasing person at a customer can abuse the sales guy down to a 65% discount, and feel like they accomplished something.
Corporate purchasing is about getting discounts, and that's the game. The win for the customer is they get something that provides value, and a price/discount level that makes the bean counters happy. You have to make those guys happy, because they're the ones who actually distribute the money. If MSRP is $2m and they get it for $1.2, well, everyone's got a boner and goes away happy.
The reason is costs so much is because when it comes to corporate/enterprise level stuff, it's a low-volume business, relatively speaking. Trying to find a support person who understands the issues that occur in a 50,000 endpoint customer base is hard, as is writing software and creating hardware that can deal with that kind of environment. Belive me, it's different than writing software for joe wanker's desktop.
a single executive does -not- mean that one person makes all the decisions; it means that one person has the authority to make all the decisions. It's naive to assume that any of the emperors in the Roman system made all the decisions - in that system, or any single-executive system, the person at the top can arbiter any decision how they see fit. There's a subtle, but big difference there.
Also, the Republic did not fall because of corruption - it fell because of conflicting views of the balance of power, along with poor political performance on the part of the Senate. As long as everyone is committed to a form of government it will not fail. When enough of the elites bail from the program, a governmental change is in store. This is in no way inevitable.
Lastly, anarchy really doesn't mean "no government." It means that everyone dies or gets killed by competing factions until a charismatic despotism is formed.
After flailing around for the last few years, now she has an excuse for her poor performance, both in the past and moving forwards: "Walter Hewlett!"
Her big goal has been to buy something, anything, to distract the street from her poor performance. First it was PWC, but PWC was a bit too intelligent. So she went and bought a computer has-been, Compaq, the inheritor of the DEC assets and the DEC dysfunction.
Heck, she couldn't afford Dell.
So much for HP. In a few more years, it'll crater just like Compaq would have.
There are only two real technical responses to this article:
* I tried it, and it doesn't work * I tried it, and it works
Everything else is just the typical slash-snot: "I can't belive it, these people are id10ts for believing it!"
Geez people, your opinion on whether the earth is round or not won't affect the fact that the earth is round (or not). Likewise just because you don't believe something is possible makes no difference to whether something is possible or not.
If anything, it just goes to show how closed-minded most of the posters about really new tech are. If it's outside the model, most posties are like "no way, it won't work." But do they actually try and see if it does work? Nope!
There's only one way to disprove something in a scientific way: try and repeat it, and fail. Thought experiments are useful tools, but stopping at thought experiments is the sign of a lazy mind. Your model may be wrong!
Heck, if everyone on/. followed this advice, maybe we'd have more system uptime ("it's a network problem").
I can create two graphs, one with sunspot activity and the other mapping the frequency of my erections. They both match. How about that? There must be some kind of unknown force acting on me coincidentally.
Just as an FYI, this naming scheme scales very well, though there should be a provision for an escape code of some sort. It's unclear why you'd need one, but that's exactly why an escape code should be there.
For management reasons and to ease automation, the scheme must be very, very regular and normalized. Don't worry about people not being able to remember the server name, users will remember the most amazingly bizarre naming conventions if they're normalized. You can also alias servers if people really are bothered.
The goal, of course, is so that by looking at the hostname, you can tell where the server is and what it does.
The problem is what happens when you have a box doing more than one thing. That's where those escape codes come in...
Does anyone know what the existing ordinance says? Is it a VAT kind of thing, or what? How do they measure the value of the software created?
---
It seems that the washington software alliance kind of screwed up when it was working with Seattle legislature to come up with this; it would have been better if they had said "no way" and walked.
M-I-C: see your profits plunge K-E-Y: why? Because you are overcharging your customers G-R-O-U-S-E
Maybe it's time to adjust the business models of the record companies. If only 2% of the artists subsidize the whole industry, it means that talent identification is poor, and cost controls don't exist. If other businesses relied on 2% of their products for the bulk of their sales, they'd be out of business.
The internal continuity of the Mac is due somewhat to the UI Guidelines that apple spews out, but it's mainly because most of the Mac developers are users too, and tend to have bought in to the ideas behind how interfaces work.
Think of the way most CLIs can accept stdin as input and spew output out to stdout; it's that kind of thing that happens on the Mac, except at a much higher level.
At a lower level, the MacOS APIs (at least in classic) were well-designed, so conceptually you could figure out what the structure of the API was and how to use it by reading it once or twice. The API designs tend to reflect how the UI layers worked, which makes it much, much easier to do things.
Basically, there was a cohesive perspective that was used to design the system, and that perspective pervades the design (to a greater or lesser extent) at all levels. This made (or makes) it harder to not follow the design of the system.
The only way to get this kind of thing to happen in Linux is to have awards, etc for really bad and really good interfaces. One of the nice things about developing Mac software is that it's a technical and aesthetic product. If that can be recreated somehow, then linux could have apps that are as nice as Office.X, which is probably one of the more amazing pieces of software ever written.
The major problem that quicktime solved was "how do you represent time streams in an indpendent manner." Reading through the QuickTime 1.0 docs was pretty amazing; you see lots of API calls about codecs, but most of it (or at least most of it for me) was about TimeBases, TimeBase conversion, TimeBase representations, etc.
The reason that QuickTime was chosen for MPEG-4 and will survive into the future, is that QuickTime at its core models time, not audio, video, or other media.
Slashdot Mirror
A reading of the bill shows that what it does is allow copyright holders to determine who is in violation of Federal Copyright Law, and to take actions against that violator.
In short, the copyright holders become judge, jury, and executioner in regards to a section of Federal Law. And if you want to dispute the judgement, you can in some unspecified manner get a notification after the fact from a copyright holder that is unknown to you.
As a matter of law, this bill is terrible. Write your congressman! This is an attack on the basic principles of government sovereignty, not an attack on p2p networks!
Well, orwell may have been wrong for now, but the tools are there. What's missing is the will to use the tools in the ways specified.
There are plenty free and commercial version control systems out there. Unless you're a total egoist, there's no reason to write one from scratch. Instead, fork out some bucks and just get one.
Maybe that detector is showing positives on your response?
What is acceptible? What is not acceptible?
Is all the junk going the same general direction?
If it is, then one option would be just to make a web/mesh/fabric that sits a few hundred meters away, on the upstream side, of the object you want to protect. If everything's coming mostly the same way, the web acts as a wall, temporarily and cheaply shielding the protected object from harm.
It could be radar and visible-light transparent as well. And it could be pulled in when it's not needed anymore.
George Lucas couldn't direct a paper bag - and now we're stuck with poorly renderd films made with wooden dialog and an unfortunate tendency towards lame melodrama.
Look instead at Saving Private Ryan and Minority Report. Spielberg has gotten better as he's gotten older; the movies have a flow and coherency that Lucas never had, even in the early Lucas. Heck, even the early Spielberg movies are put together better than the early Lucas films.
Maybe Lucas just got lucky once, and has been living off that franchise for decades. Spielberg has been humping it out for decades, doing different things, experimenting, and taking risks.
Plus, Lucas has already demonstrated, with episode 1 and 2, that he's incapable of bringing the franchise where it needs to go. 'Nuff said.
How do you roll out patches, new versions of software, etc? How do you make sure that stuff is running?
Buying a president sure did a lot for Arthur Anderson and Enron. Maybe every corporation in the world should take slashdotters advice. Then eveyone can be unemployed or work for the post office, like good Democrats.
Most mac software is well designed, and just plain works. That's because most Mac developers actually care about the user experience their product affords.
Don't complain, vote with your dollars!
And move into management. As a manager one said, "Details don't matter."
Learn how technology applies to businesses, then make that your business. In the world of business, people that understand technology and business issues are rare, valuable commodities. Managers who've got tech and business cred are more valuable that you'd ever understand.
Think of it this way: would you rather be the guy that hand-coded the unified password repository, or the guy who's team of people defined and implemented company-wide technology standards, and created a stable computing base for the next 10 years?
The answer, of course, is the first one!
But still, it's a much different feeling to say "Wal-Mart kicked the cr*p out of everyone because of the logistics system we came up with is the sh*t." than it is to say "I single-handedly delivered a php-based dynamic website in 2 weeks."
In short, ignore the technology, and concentrate on the business end. You'll be more useful, and you won't worry that your skills are eroding.
I've tried to download movies off kazaa - my broadband connection can get up to 500k/sec (that's k, not kb) when downloading linux isos off fast providers.
I've never gotten a fat pipe out of any of the kazaa sharers. And plus, nobody in their right mind would wait that long for a real movie (15 hours?) if they could afford the real thing. Lastly, who wants to watch the movie on a PC?
These ominous rumblings of geeks really don't matter much in the Real World. "eToys will revolutionize buying, and retail stores are doomed." Yeah, right. "Broadband means that people will steal movies instead of buy them." Yeah, right. Get off the horse and smell some reality. How many DVDs to -you- own?
But not as hard as you'd imagine. I use AIX, Solaris, and HP-UX on a weekly basis, as well as MacOS, MacOSX, and w2k (workstation and server).
/opt/apps/local
The biggest problem with a mixed environment is keeping it up to date with patches etc. Keeping track of that stuff is a complete PITA; I can't imagine how much more difficult it is in Linux, where the patches aren't on the vendor site (are they?).
Besides that, the big thing that you'll need to do is make sure everything is sort of in the same directory structure. For apps that you install, put them in the -exact- same directory. For example, all my unix boxes have the same layout:
/opt/apps
/opt/servers
/opt/data
/opt/src
/ usr/local ->
That way, it doesn't matter as much which box I'm on, and I don't have to remember exceptional cases. It also makes maintenance easier, because all the exciting stuff (non base operating system) is in a known structure. That means you can write scripts, etc to monitor everything and you don't have to change them on a per-host basis. It also means you can just copy the config.status from box to box (or directory to directory) and build without reconfiguring everything.
'Luck!
"Our model of technology and development is completely counter to the natural cycles and principles that worked for millions of years to create the environment we so cleverly manipulate."
Yes exactly! Those principles include such hits as "survival of the fittest," "kill or be killed," "the weak must die unless they are useful as slaves," "you are either food or mating material," and the ever-popular "hey, don't mess with my women."
Idealized representations of a nonexistent past should be avoided at all costs.
robin williams' character was a crime novelist. Why would he have gone and tried to kill Swank at the end? It's silly - he got away with murder and successfully blackmailed pacino. why'd he want to go and kill off the female cop? He could have taken her out later.
It was set up that way so pacino's character could redeem himself, which was pretty cheezy IMO. IRL, corrupt cops just deal with it and go on.
the original movie was much, much better - no hollywood-style ending, just...lack of sleep.
Also, the pacino character in the original was much more interesting - it was he that tried to seduce (or well, grope) the best friend, not the other way around. It illustrated that he was losing it due to insomnia, instead of showing that her best friend wasn't really.
. It was OK, but no great shakes. It's interesting to see the two movies side-by-side, because they're close enough to see how different they really are.
As someone who works in the space, let me tell you why List Prices exist. They exist so the contracts/purchasing person at a customer can abuse the sales guy down to a 65% discount, and feel like they accomplished something.
Corporate purchasing is about getting discounts, and that's the game. The win for the customer is they get something that provides value, and a price/discount level that makes the bean counters happy. You have to make those guys happy, because they're the ones who actually distribute the money. If MSRP is $2m and they get it for $1.2, well, everyone's got a boner and goes away happy.
The reason is costs so much is because when it comes to corporate/enterprise level stuff, it's a low-volume business, relatively speaking. Trying to find a support person who understands the issues that occur in a 50,000 endpoint customer base is hard, as is writing software and creating hardware that can deal with that kind of environment. Belive me, it's different than writing software for joe wanker's desktop.
Couple of notes:
a single executive does -not- mean that one person makes all the decisions; it means that one person has the authority to make all the decisions. It's naive to assume that any of the emperors in the Roman system made all the decisions - in that system, or any single-executive system, the person at the top can arbiter any decision how they see fit. There's a subtle, but big difference there.
Also, the Republic did not fall because of corruption - it fell because of conflicting views of the balance of power, along with poor political performance on the part of the Senate. As long as everyone is committed to a form of government it will not fail. When enough of the elites bail from the program, a governmental change is in store. This is in no way inevitable.
Lastly, anarchy really doesn't mean "no government." It means that everyone dies or gets killed by competing factions until a charismatic despotism is formed.
After flailing around for the last few years, now she has an excuse for her poor performance, both in the past and moving forwards: "Walter Hewlett!"
Her big goal has been to buy something, anything, to distract the street from her poor performance. First it was PWC, but PWC was a bit too intelligent. So she went and bought a computer has-been, Compaq, the inheritor of the DEC assets and the DEC dysfunction.
Heck, she couldn't afford Dell.
So much for HP. In a few more years, it'll crater just like Compaq would have.
There are only two real technical responses to this article:
/. followed this advice, maybe we'd have more system uptime ("it's a network problem").
* I tried it, and it doesn't work
* I tried it, and it works
Everything else is just the typical slash-snot: "I can't belive it, these people are id10ts for believing it!"
Geez people, your opinion on whether the earth is round or not won't affect the fact that the earth is round (or not). Likewise just because you don't believe something is possible makes no difference to whether something is possible or not.
If anything, it just goes to show how closed-minded most of the posters about really new tech are. If it's outside the model, most posties are like "no way, it won't work." But do they actually try and see if it does work? Nope!
There's only one way to disprove something in a scientific way: try and repeat it, and fail. Thought experiments are useful tools, but stopping at thought experiments is the sign of a lazy mind. Your model may be wrong!
Heck, if everyone on
I can create two graphs, one with sunspot activity and the other mapping the frequency of my erections. They both match. How about that? There must be some kind of unknown force acting on me coincidentally.
Just as an FYI, this naming scheme scales very well, though there should be a provision for an escape code of some sort. It's unclear why you'd need one, but that's exactly why an escape code should be there.
For management reasons and to ease automation, the scheme must be very, very regular and normalized. Don't worry about people not being able to remember the server name, users will remember the most amazingly bizarre naming conventions if they're normalized. You can also alias servers if people really are bothered.
The goal, of course, is so that by looking at the hostname, you can tell where the server is and what it does.
The problem is what happens when you have a box doing more than one thing. That's where those escape codes come in...
Does anyone know what the existing ordinance says? Is it a VAT kind of thing, or what? How do they measure the value of the software created?
---
It seems that the washington software alliance kind of screwed up when it was working with Seattle legislature to come up with this; it would have been better if they had said "no way" and walked.
M-I-C: see your profits plunge
K-E-Y: why? Because you are overcharging your customers
G-R-O-U-S-E
Maybe it's time to adjust the business models of the record companies. If only 2% of the artists subsidize the whole industry, it means that talent identification is poor, and cost controls don't exist. If other businesses relied on 2% of their products for the bulk of their sales, they'd be out of business.
The internal continuity of the Mac is due somewhat to the UI Guidelines that apple spews out, but it's mainly because most of the Mac developers are users too, and tend to have bought in to the ideas behind how interfaces work.
Think of the way most CLIs can accept stdin as input and spew output out to stdout; it's that kind of thing that happens on the Mac, except at a much higher level.
At a lower level, the MacOS APIs (at least in classic) were well-designed, so conceptually you could figure out what the structure of the API was and how to use it by reading it once or twice. The API designs tend to reflect how the UI layers worked, which makes it much, much easier to do things.
Basically, there was a cohesive perspective that was used to design the system, and that perspective pervades the design (to a greater or lesser extent) at all levels. This made (or makes) it harder to not follow the design of the system.
The only way to get this kind of thing to happen in Linux is to have awards, etc for really bad and really good interfaces. One of the nice things about developing Mac software is that it's a technical and aesthetic product. If that can be recreated somehow, then linux could have apps that are as nice as Office.X, which is probably one of the more amazing pieces of software ever written.
The major problem that quicktime solved was "how do you represent time streams in an indpendent manner." Reading through the QuickTime 1.0 docs was pretty amazing; you see lots of API calls about codecs, but most of it (or at least most of it for me) was about TimeBases, TimeBase conversion, TimeBase representations, etc.
The reason that QuickTime was chosen for MPEG-4 and will survive into the future, is that QuickTime at its core models time, not audio, video, or other media.
no infringement there, either. duh.