To most people, and really, most of the people in the world don't read/., DRM is something like RAM, but maybe more like ROM if they're an old timer. Or maybe it's like.ASP, or a.crm. They don't know what it is. For one thing, it's not right there in front of them. They can't see it. In other words, it's invisible.
As much as I liked El Reg back in the day, I know some of its reporters have stern anti-DRM bents. Orlowski in particular seems to hate it. He's not predicting the death of DRM, as he says. Nor should he. FOX News loves to say "Some people say" as a way of projecting their reality on the world. Some people say DRM is on its last legs. Could it be? We'll see.
Now, on DRM: I've been dreading it ever since I first read about it on The Register back in 2001 or '02. It was more terrifying than 9/11. Microsoft, controlling the flow of our data! No, say it's not so!
Well, it's taken longer than anticipated then for DRM to spread, and I'm not sure if anyone expected it to be coming up in places such as the Apple Music Store. But until it intrudes in people's lives, it won't be a major turnoff to the average consumer. Remember, in America, the less you know, the better off you'll be.
Yup. If you're in Albuquerque's west side (near the Rio Grande) and looking west, this panorama looks a fair bit like the volcanoes atop the west mesa. cool. it was such a different place than Wisconsin that to this midwestern boy, living there was almost like being on Mars.
::insert family drama of years ago::;-)
that said, i visit and climb the volcanoes as often as i can, which is not nearly enough.
might be a bit before some current Slashdotters time...
given how much more common people yapping on their cell phones appears even than drunk driving, I'd say we do have a problem here. I am not anxiously awaiting a teenager drilling into me because they were too busy on their cell phone to pay attention to the road. I fear what they may do when I'm on my bicycle. But that's part of the challenge, and the thrill when you survive it.
My VW Jetta TDI got the five-star rating on all counts, and it gets about five times the mileage of a Hummer. Why whould I get a Hummer if I can have superb mileage and good safety? (And I don't want to intimidate the fuck out of people in smaller cars. Just do a search on here for "Jason Haas Car Crash Update" to see what an SUV can do to a person.)
I noticed some time ago that the PowerPC Linux version of ApplixWare had been dropped. Getting them to port to LinuxPPC was a point of pride for me, and the product of my work with ApplixWare's Richard Manly. (Where are you, brother?) It sold fairly well by our standards, and assuming you've still got a LinuxPPC box, ApplixWare 4 is still a very usable package. (I don't know why you would, but you could.;-)
Much to my surprise, my old comrade señor Carro declared PowerPC dead after our little adventure collapsed, which happened after I left, leaving him alone on the sinking ship. In realistic terms, with Apple's switch to Intel processors, he's right. There's still lots to do with embedded and server PPC, though. Good luck whoever's still working on it; nods to Cort, Ben H, Paul M, Gary T, Dan B and K.S.
This article and a conversation I had today got me thinking: Are there Professors of Computer History? It's an awfully new thing, being less than 100 years old, but computers have had such a remarkable impact on society and the world, and it's not going to stop. It bears studying. I've been part of the making of this history for twenty years now, be it as a user, a reporter, or working with developers and trying to wear pants too big to fit. Is there a future job for me in this?
To be clear on one point: growing crops for biodiesel does not have to compete with food crops. The wise and time-honored tradition of crop rotation has farmers growing a crop in a field one year, then growing a different batch the next in order to help the soil recover and be better able to grow food again the next year. Farmers could use the soybeans they raise on the land one year, sell it for a profit (soybean prices are currently rising thanks to the growing demand for biodiesel), and raise corn or wheat the next.
You're correct about everything else. And yes, soybeans are not the most efficient crop to use for fuels. Canola oil would be better. And I wonder, how would hemp do?
I recently splurged and bought a VW Jetta TDI simply because the highway mileage is so good (~50 mpg) and it can run at least partially on biodiesel. My old newspaper The Wisconsinite ran a story on biodiesel (b.d.) in 2004, and I've been excited about it ever since. My Jetta seems to run a little more smoothly with it, and it doesn't smell bad in cold weather like dino diesel does.
The problem currently I have with it is trying to find it in great quantities. I fill up at a CENEX agricultural co-op gas station. They have B2, which is 98% dino diesel, 2% bio. It's still mostly dino diesel, of course, which annoys me. But it's better than nothing. What I really want is B20, which is 20% bio, 80% dino. And during the summer, I want to try progressively higher ratios of bio to dino diesel. Volkswagen officially approves using B5. I'm pretty sure then it can take a higher grade biodiesel.
The problem of availability will be overcome in good time. There are b.d. production centers opening up around the country, everywhere from Oklahoma to Nevada, and one coming soon near Madison, Wisconsin (which is near to me).
I'm contemplating opening a biodiesel fueling station in Milwaukee. Anyone interested? I regularly post about b.d./alt.energy on my blog; you can easily reach me through there.
Indeed, that's what my "mission" with LinuxPPC was. To fill in the many people who don't know what I'm talking about, I was the #2 in a cool software startup that made a version of Linux for the Mac and other PowerPC hardware. I had been using UNIX since 1995, which definitely makes me a newbie, and I had a dream of merging the power of UNIX, shell and all, with the ease of the Mac. As it turned out, a few years later I met this guy who was doing Linux development on nothing other than the Mac and PPC hardware. We got to talking, and I wound up helping him launch LinuxPPC Relase 4, the most acclaimed release of Linux for the Mac to date.
Over time, we did a lot of great things, including:
- First bootable CD - first "live" CD - First graphical OS installer - First distribution with booting from Mac OS, and later native booting - Sponsorship of two Mac OS emulation projects - crack.linuxppc.org in response to Microsoft's server security challenge - and free parties in San Francisco, some of which we didn't even attend!
Of course, lairs and life intervened... I'd say that we got UNIX perhaps 40-60% of the way melded to the Mac, but it would have taken far more effort than we would have been able to do to take it the final 40-60% of the way to true integration. Fortunately, Steve Jobs, with his millions of dollars and thousands of paid programmers could take it the final 40%. Hats off to that.
I'd thought of this, but I know of know possible way to suggest it to sympathetic ears, much less make it happen. Glad to see it come up in other, more authoritative circles.
True. I thought of it from the perspective of, If my Honda Civic had this sort of windshield, I wouldn't have lost much of the use of my left eye when a drunk driver hit me. In that case, I'd be happy to have such armor. But then, what would have happened when my head hit it? Would that have worsened the brain injury, or not? Hmm. Rhetorical questions at this point.:)
iTunes and the iPod+Video will not succeed until we can download and watch The Daily Show With Jon Stewart. Only then, will it succeed.
Seriously. I would pay cash money for TDS if I could watch it on my Mac at home. And my girlfriend already records it on her DVR. That's not the point -- TDS is worth it.
Second, and slightly more seriously, I don't think people realize that it's now all high-end iPods, formerly the plain iPod and later the iPod Photo, have both the photo and video playback capability built in. That gives Apple a very diverse product iPod product line: iPod shuffle, iPod nano, and "plain" iPod. The former is really the deluxe iPod, featuring a larger color screen and 15 or 30 times storage capacity of the iPod nano. Anyone who gets one and uses iTunes will automatically have music, photo, video, and removable storage capabilities unrivaled by any other product short of a laptop computer. [Insert token arguments on screens, batteries, OS, DRM, WTF, etc.]
While I have no interest in downloading videos or the two initially offered TV shows, there is much opportunity to expand on the offerings. This may turn out like the first iPod, which I dismissed as a curious but useless toy. Instead, it turned out to be a product of entertainment culture revolution. Adding video capability to iTunes may be another stroke of genius that alters consumer culture.
Oh yeah. I worked for a while as an IP relay operator. "Our friends from Nigeria" were for real -- I was complicit in the execution of thousands of dollars of fraud using stolen credit card numbers. My employer -- now known as Verizon -- actually had implemented an anti-fraud policy that enabled our supervisors to inform the call recipient that (paraphrasing) "management believes this call is of a fraudulent nature" and gave them the option to hang up. Most did, wisely, although at least one I handled continued, even accepted a sale. Their loss... but this is a real problem. That and the bored teenagers, but they're not using stolen credit card numbers, merely hormones.
Congressman McDoof: "You see here in this site, which is at h-t-t-p colon backslash backslash..."
Me: "No, Congressman, that's NOT a backslash. A backslash points backwards. That's a forward slash. Just call it a slash."
. . .
If Russ Feingold, one of my Senators from Wisconsin, is involved with this in any way, I know I can talk to him about it. Not because I'm anyone special -- although I do know him -- Russ is just great like that.
Clearly, as has been the case for years now, Apple will be out of business in two weeks, if not a year. You can bet on it. If you're a damn fool...
While the pundits have been saying this for so long that people might think it's just got to come true some day, even the end of the world as we know it won't stop them. Recall the novel "War Day" by Whitley Streiber and James Kunetka. It's about a fictional journey around the U.S. after a limited nuclear war. California was somehow un-nuked, and apparently out of the paths of much of the fallout. And Apple Computer still exists, with their latest desktop computer appearing on someone's desk. If a fictitious limited nuclear war couldn't stop Apple, what will?
Perhaps the video of fat man hitting his computer?
on
10 Computer Mishaps
·
· Score: 1
That was classic viewing -- so classic a song includes a mention of it.
I know this is redundant, but please don't call it the "Dvorak prophecy". It gives him more credit than he's worth, as does this very post. If the so called "Dvorak prophecy" were true, Apple would be another PC clone maker that went out of business in the late 1980s after struggling to introduce a unique flavor to the x86 clone market.
I'm so used to the Apple of Old (that is, the 1980s) that I expected it to cost well over $100. Not $50! That is just freakin' awesome. They'll sell another million of these, I'm sure. And I wonder, could they be integrated with USB iPods?...
Quoting the article, "Smith, who police said admitted to using Dinon's Wi-Fi, has been charged with unauthorized access to a computer network, a third-degree felony. A pretrial hearing is set for July 11."
Wow. Where else is this illegal? What are the implications for municpial wireless networks?
Slashdot Mirror
But you already asked it. Thanks. -1 for redundant commenting. ;->
FWIW, I'm helping to start a biodiesel co-op here in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Get in touch if A) you see this, and B) care.
To most people, and really, most of the people in the world don't read /., DRM is something like RAM, but maybe more like ROM if they're an old timer. Or maybe it's like .ASP, or a .crm. They don't know what it is. For one thing, it's not right there in front of them. They can't see it. In other words, it's invisible.
As much as I liked El Reg back in the day, I know some of its reporters have stern anti-DRM bents. Orlowski in particular seems to hate it. He's not predicting the death of DRM, as he says. Nor should he. FOX News loves to say "Some people say" as a way of projecting their reality on the world. Some people say DRM is on its last legs. Could it be? We'll see.
Now, on DRM: I've been dreading it ever since I first read about it on The Register back in 2001 or '02. It was more terrifying than 9/11. Microsoft, controlling the flow of our data! No, say it's not so!
Well, it's taken longer than anticipated then for DRM to spread, and I'm not sure if anyone expected it to be coming up in places such as the Apple Music Store. But until it intrudes in people's lives, it won't be a major turnoff to the average consumer. Remember, in America, the less you know, the better off you'll be.
Yup. If you're in Albuquerque's west side (near the Rio Grande) and looking west, this panorama looks a fair bit like the volcanoes atop the west mesa. cool. it was such a different place than Wisconsin that to this midwestern boy, living there was almost like being on Mars.
::insert family drama of years ago:: ;-)
that said, i visit and climb the volcanoes as often as i can, which is not nearly enough.
Person: "Uhh.. go to.. uh.... h-t-t-p-colon-backslash-backslash..."
:::stabbing pencil into my head:::
Me:
hells yes. Frontalot has root on my nerdcore boxes!
remember this?
might be a bit before some current Slashdotters time...
given how much more common people yapping on their cell phones appears even than drunk driving, I'd say we do have a problem here. I am not anxiously awaiting a teenager drilling into me because they were too busy on their cell phone to pay attention to the road. I fear what they may do when I'm on my bicycle. But that's part of the challenge, and the thrill when you survive it.
My VW Jetta TDI got the five-star rating on all counts, and it gets about five times the mileage of a Hummer. Why whould I get a Hummer if I can have superb mileage and good safety? (And I don't want to intimidate the fuck out of people in smaller cars. Just do a search on here for "Jason Haas Car Crash Update" to see what an SUV can do to a person.)
Amazingly, I never thought of that! :D
I noticed some time ago that the PowerPC Linux version of ApplixWare had been dropped. Getting them to port to LinuxPPC was a point of pride for me, and the product of my work with ApplixWare's Richard Manly. (Where are you, brother?) It sold fairly well by our standards, and assuming you've still got a LinuxPPC box, ApplixWare 4 is still a very usable package. (I don't know why you would, but you could. ;-)
Much to my surprise, my old comrade señor Carro declared PowerPC dead after our little adventure collapsed, which happened after I left, leaving him alone on the sinking ship. In realistic terms, with Apple's switch to Intel processors, he's right. There's still lots to do with embedded and server PPC, though. Good luck whoever's still working on it; nods to Cort, Ben H, Paul M, Gary T, Dan B and K.S.
This article and a conversation I had today got me thinking: Are there Professors of Computer History? It's an awfully new thing, being less than 100 years old, but computers have had such a remarkable impact on society and the world, and it's not going to stop. It bears studying. I've been part of the making of this history for twenty years now, be it as a user, a reporter, or working with developers and trying to wear pants too big to fit. Is there a future job for me in this?
thinking different(ly) as always,
haaz.
To be clear on one point: growing crops for biodiesel does not have to compete with food crops. The wise and time-honored tradition of crop rotation has farmers growing a crop in a field one year, then growing a different batch the next in order to help the soil recover and be better able to grow food again the next year. Farmers could use the soybeans they raise on the land one year, sell it for a profit (soybean prices are currently rising thanks to the growing demand for biodiesel), and raise corn or wheat the next.
You're correct about everything else. And yes, soybeans are not the most efficient crop to use for fuels. Canola oil would be better. And I wonder, how would hemp do?
He's been right on Apple going out of business so many times before. How could he be wrong this time?
That's all I have to say.
I recently splurged and bought a VW Jetta TDI simply because the highway mileage is so good (~50 mpg) and it can run at least partially on biodiesel. My old newspaper The Wisconsinite ran a story on biodiesel (b.d.) in 2004, and I've been excited about it ever since. My Jetta seems to run a little more smoothly with it, and it doesn't smell bad in cold weather like dino diesel does.
The problem currently I have with it is trying to find it in great quantities. I fill up at a CENEX agricultural co-op gas station. They have B2, which is 98% dino diesel, 2% bio. It's still mostly dino diesel, of course, which annoys me. But it's better than nothing. What I really want is B20, which is 20% bio, 80% dino. And during the summer, I want to try progressively higher ratios of bio to dino diesel. Volkswagen officially approves using B5. I'm pretty sure then it can take a higher grade biodiesel.
The problem of availability will be overcome in good time. There are b.d. production centers opening up around the country, everywhere from Oklahoma to Nevada, and one coming soon near Madison, Wisconsin (which is near to me). I'm contemplating opening a biodiesel fueling station in Milwaukee. Anyone interested? I regularly post about b.d./alt.energy on my blog; you can easily reach me through there.
Indeed, that's what my "mission" with LinuxPPC was. To fill in the many people who don't know what I'm talking about, I was the #2 in a cool software startup that made a version of Linux for the Mac and other PowerPC hardware. I had been using UNIX since 1995, which definitely makes me a newbie, and I had a dream of merging the power of UNIX, shell and all, with the ease of the Mac. As it turned out, a few years later I met this guy who was doing Linux development on nothing other than the Mac and PPC hardware. We got to talking, and I wound up helping him launch LinuxPPC Relase 4, the most acclaimed release of Linux for the Mac to date.
Over time, we did a lot of great things, including:
- First bootable CD
- first "live" CD
- First graphical OS installer
- First distribution with booting from Mac OS, and later native booting
- Sponsorship of two Mac OS emulation projects
- crack.linuxppc.org in response to Microsoft's server security challenge
- and free parties in San Francisco, some of which we didn't even attend!
Of course, lairs and life intervened... I'd say that we got UNIX perhaps 40-60% of the way melded to the Mac, but it would have taken far more effort than we would have been able to do to take it the final 40-60% of the way to true integration. Fortunately, Steve Jobs, with his millions of dollars and thousands of paid programmers could take it the final 40%. Hats off to that.
I'd thought of this, but I know of know possible way to suggest it to sympathetic ears, much less make it happen. Glad to see it come up in other, more authoritative circles.
True. I thought of it from the perspective of, If my Honda Civic had this sort of windshield, I wouldn't have lost much of the use of my left eye when a drunk driver hit me. In that case, I'd be happy to have such armor. But then, what would have happened when my head hit it? Would that have worsened the brain injury, or not? Hmm. Rhetorical questions at this point. :)
iTunes and the iPod+Video will not succeed until we can download and watch The Daily Show With Jon Stewart. Only then, will it succeed.
Seriously. I would pay cash money for TDS if I could watch it on my Mac at home. And my girlfriend already records it on her DVR. That's not the point -- TDS is worth it.
Second, and slightly more seriously, I don't think people realize that it's now all high-end iPods, formerly the plain iPod and later the iPod Photo, have both the photo and video playback capability built in. That gives Apple a very diverse product iPod product line: iPod shuffle, iPod nano, and "plain" iPod. The former is really the deluxe iPod, featuring a larger color screen and 15 or 30 times storage capacity of the iPod nano. Anyone who gets one and uses iTunes will automatically have music, photo, video, and removable storage capabilities unrivaled by any other product short of a laptop computer. [Insert token arguments on screens, batteries, OS, DRM, WTF, etc.]
While I have no interest in downloading videos or the two initially offered TV shows, there is much opportunity to expand on the offerings. This may turn out like the first iPod, which I dismissed as a curious but useless toy. Instead, it turned out to be a product of entertainment culture revolution. Adding video capability to iTunes may be another stroke of genius that alters consumer culture.
Oh yeah. I worked for a while as an IP relay operator. "Our friends from Nigeria" were for real -- I was complicit in the execution of thousands of dollars of fraud using stolen credit card numbers. My employer -- now known as Verizon -- actually had implemented an anti-fraud policy that enabled our supervisors to inform the call recipient that (paraphrasing) "management believes this call is of a fraudulent nature" and gave them the option to hang up. Most did, wisely, although at least one I handled continued, even accepted a sale. Their loss... but this is a real problem. That and the bored teenagers, but they're not using stolen credit card numbers, merely hormones.
Congressman McDoof: "You see here in this site, which is at h-t-t-p colon backslash backslash..."
Me: "No, Congressman, that's NOT a backslash. A backslash points backwards. That's a forward slash. Just call it a slash."
. . .
If Russ Feingold, one of my Senators from Wisconsin, is involved with this in any way, I know I can talk to him about it. Not because I'm anyone special -- although I do know him -- Russ is just great like that.
Clearly, as has been the case for years now, Apple will be out of business in two weeks, if not a year. You can bet on it. If you're a damn fool...
While the pundits have been saying this for so long that people might think it's just got to come true some day, even the end of the world as we know it won't stop them. Recall the novel "War Day" by Whitley Streiber and James Kunetka. It's about a fictional journey around the U.S. after a limited nuclear war. California was somehow un-nuked, and apparently out of the paths of much of the fallout. And Apple Computer still exists, with their latest desktop computer appearing on someone's desk. If a fictitious limited nuclear war couldn't stop Apple, what will?
That was classic viewing -- so classic a song includes a mention of it.
I know this is redundant, but please don't call it the "Dvorak prophecy". It gives him more credit than he's worth, as does this very post. If the so called "Dvorak prophecy" were true, Apple would be another PC clone maker that went out of business in the late 1980s after struggling to introduce a unique flavor to the x86 clone market.
I'm so used to the Apple of Old (that is, the 1980s) that I expected it to cost well over $100. Not $50! That is just freakin' awesome. They'll sell another million of these, I'm sure. And I wonder, could they be integrated with USB iPods?...
Quoting the article, "Smith, who police said admitted to using Dinon's Wi-Fi, has been charged with unauthorized access to a computer network, a third-degree felony. A pretrial hearing is set for July 11."
Wow. Where else is this illegal? What are the implications for municpial wireless networks?