When I started my first BBS back in 1981, virtually all of the callers (the small handful there was) were using 300bps modems with acoustic couplers.
The system was written in Pascal MT+ and ran on an Epson QX-10 using the CPM operating system (anyone remember any of these names?)
I remember getting my first 1200bps modem and thinking "wow -- this is so fast!"
However, things were so slow at 300 and 1200bps that I ended up writing a "smart terminal" program and BBS support module which borrowed the 20,000-word spelling dictionary from Wordstar (more names from the distant past) and replaced words longer than 3 characters with a two-character lookup key and added error correction.
This significantly improved the throughput of plain-text messages -- and forced people to make sure their spelling was up to scratch.
A couple of years later I got a 2400bps modem and thought "wow -- this is so fast" (again).
In 1985 I wrote and ran a multi-user BBS that operated under MSDOS and was written in Modula 2. It supported three simultaneous users -- woo-hoo!
In 1989 I switched to using the QNX OS and wrote a BBS system in C that supported 12 concurrent users on a lowly 386 box while also providing fax-gateway capabilities.
Then the Internet came along and it's all history now;-)
I've always wondered what exactly the purchase of a music CD represents.
Is it a single-user license for that intellectual property -- much like that granted when you buy software on CD?
It seems not.
For instance -- if I buy a software title on CD and that CD gets damaged, the vendor will, virtually without exception (including Microsoft) replace the CD for the cost of the media and handling.
Now -- if your favorite Sugar Babes (guffaw!) CD gets scratched and you front up to the recording company demanding a replacement -- they'll laugh you out of the building.
Yes, you'll have to go and pay full price for another CD if you want your music back.
Therefore it seems you're not buying a *license* for the music -- so maybe you're actually buying a copy of the music (rather than a license to use)?
Or are you just buying the media itself and the music is incidental -- insomuch as if/when it disappears because of damage or whatever, there's no obligation to fix the problem.
What I want to know is... if a company sells CDR/CDRW drives that have bit-level copying and reading included in the firmware, would they be prosecuted under the DMCA -- even if they made such devices without any intent to defeat such copy-protection?
Are those drives which are already capable of DAO ripping and writing now in breach of the DMCA because they can copy some weakly protected disks?
What's going to happen in Germany where vendors of CDR/RW drives are already paying a "copyright tax" because the drives are said to be costing the recording industry money. Will the introduction of copy-protected CDs mean that this tax will now be dropped?
And now we have the suggestion that CDs that have copy protected audio tracks may also ship with the music provided in Windows Media format (complete with digital rights control) for those who want to play it on their PCs.
What about those who have spent good money on portable MP3 players? What about those who are smart enough to use non-Windows computers?
This is not a simple issue and for the past two years the recording industry have shown that they simply don't have a clue.
They're way out of their depth and don't seem to realize that every time they try to tighten the thumbscrews they're simply making their predicament worse!
He learned this his first day in Afghanistan when he entered a family's hut. The poverty was more than he could fathom. There was no furniture. No light. The only object inside was a copy of the Koran, tucked into an alcove
The level of materialism I was refering to was that of having a pot in which to cook, a jug with which to carry water and clean clothes to wear.
It's a far cry from walkmans, DVD players, fast cars and Nike sneakers I'll grant - but it is related to the posession of material objects.
That's a nice idea -- but don't forget who you're dealing with.
The terrorists will exploit the kindness by infiltrating these safe zones (how do you tell a terrorist from a bonafide Afghani victim?) and kill/maime not only those who provide the kindness, but also those who they feel have sold-out to the Western defilers.
You are right in one respect though -- the USA and allies need to establish a beachhead within Afghanistan that can be adequately defended and used as a staging post for the deployment of ground-troops.
Don't forget that, as the LA Times article points out, these people do not yearn for worldly goods so the lure of (comparitive) luxury and posessions is of no value.
Trying to come up with a simple solution to this problem is somewhat akin to describing exactly how all the systems onboard the space shuttle work in 20 words or less -- it's impossible.
Perhaps the best thing that any military action can be is highly adaptive and reactive to whatever it finds. That's something that I don't know the US (or any Western) military is adequately structured to cope with. It is however, exactly why guerrilla fighters are so damned hard to deal with. They're taught to think on their feet and not to constantly rely on reporting to and receiving orders from some central administration which isn't actually there on the front line.
How else do you think a handful of Afghani rebels managed to fend off the might of the former Soviet Union?
How else do you think the VC fended off the might of the post-WWII US military in Vietnam?
This report has been dismissed by some other sources.
An up-to-the-minute running report on the whole story can be found on
7amNews.com -- it's been going since 9am this morning and is pretty concise for those with limited time.
Another suggestion worth a look is that offered part way down
this page which suggests that Microsoft's Flight Simulator might be the new terrorist training tool.
So true -- I bought my first copy of QNX in the mid 1980's and I think it was launched several years before that.
It's one heap-cool OS -- just a shame that they didn't have the marketing muscle to launch it into the mainstream before MS took over.
Mind you -- I suspect that if they'd tried to make it "yet another desktop OS" it wouldn't be the excellent product that it is today. They focused on the product's strengths and didn't sell out to the marketing droids -- and it shows.
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We are having problems with our database, please come back at a later time.
Anyone who wastes their life watching a passive medium like TV deserves to have their arse kicked anyway -- whether they're paying for the service or not.
Come on guys, life's too short -- don't waste your time watching -- get out and start doing!
TV is for people who don't have lives of their own -- surely that can't be anyone who uses/. ???
In my experience, anyone who uses their email address in the header or body of a usenet posting is putting up a virtual "Spam Me" sign -- it is (or was) the primary source of email addresses for spammers.
Second in line is the "mailto:" tags that so many people (especially business sites) are stupid enough to put on their webpages.
My servers get about 8-10 spambot trawls a day from bots looking for mailto: tags and their associated email addresses.
Then there are those who really are dumb enough to believe a spammer whem they say "click to unsubscribe" -- oh yeah, for sure!
There are effective ways to avoid spam -- check out
Memo.to.
My firewall is getting it about once every four or five minutes with probes coming mainly from servers based in countries along the Asian rim (Japan, Korea, etc).
Fortunately, a trace of the sources indicate that the servers involved are being shut down pretty quickly by their admins.
One alarming aspect is the number of these probes that are obviously coming from servers connected through PPP dial-up accounts.
I wonder how many people have installed IIS on PCs running IIS and don't even know it's running?
Originally, radio licensing authorities were set up to ensure that there was no conflict in respect to RF spectrum use -- then governments found that it was really a cash-cow.
Just look at the 3GL wireless spectrum auctions in Europe for example.
Does it really cost the European governments billions of dollars to issue those licenses and police the spectrum ? -- Hell no! It's just (yet another) convenient way to tax a natural resource that costs them nothing to produce (because it's been there since the start of time) and piss-all to police.
Coming soon -- an oxygen tax on the air you breathe?
Hey, all this stuff becomes redundant as soon as we figure out how to squeeze Schrodinger's cat into a cellphone.
The recent experiments performed in Europe which effectively supported the theory that quantum effects could be used to communicate at faster-than-light speeds show that at least this is possible.
Of course it's not practical yet -- but then again, neither was laser technology until we found ways to produce a coherent beam of light eh?
The technology being discussed in this thread is really just another form of time-division multiplexing isn't it?
Nothing new about the theory -- just a novel implementation.
As
a commentator and publisher, I get dozens of press releases floating across my screen every day and most of them take a pretty quick trip to/dev/null
You have to appreciate the fact that there are literally hundreds of new products, services and companies launched every week -- and if journalists were to publish a story on every PR they received then the newswires would become flooded with the stuff and readers would complain.
The secret to getting a PR turned into a story is to wait until you've got something truly newsworthy before you issue a PR.
There are some companies whose PRs automatically get fined in/deve/null because they send out two or three a day announcing the most mundane and trivial things: "Our website is now listed in Yahoo's dierctory", "Our new sales manager is wearing a brown tie today", etc, etc.
Unfortunately for them, even if they come up with the answer to life, the universe and everything, I doubt anyone will be listening.
The secret to good PR is to figure out ways to become newsworthy. When you do something that is truly of interest to the wider industry (or world) the the journos will beat your door down trying to get a story.
Also -- pick your timing carefully. Every editor and reporter knows (and hates) slow-news days. There are some days when absolutely nothing is happening out there and those are the days when we tend to reluctantly start paying more attention to the PRs that come across our screens.
What's not newsworthy on a day when Yahoo buys the NY Times and Dell files for Chapter 13 might well be a lead-story on another day when yours is the only story happening.
Of course achieving this eye-catching status is not easy - or everyone would be doing it -- right?
As far as PR companies go -- it's been my experience that they're really good at spending your money but don't gain you a lot of ground. Let's face it, if you're not newsworthy then no amount of PR-spend is going to get your stories run in a reputable publication.
And as for the format of a PR -- keep it very, very short. If you haven't convinced the editor/reporter that you're newsworthy within the first paragraph they'll never read the rest anyway.
If you've sparked their interest -- they'll contact you for more information anyway. Best to leave them a little curious than drop a weighty tombe on their desk that tells them the whole story.
The claims made in the
7amNews story referred to in the Salon article seems to have been verified by
this story currently running on CNet.
It looks like the recording industry is saving itself time and money by forcing ISPs to block file-swappers that the Media Tracker system has identified.
There's also some extra stuff on the 7amNews.com site that
answers more questions
that are being asked.
Slashdot Mirror
When I started my first BBS back in 1981, virtually all of the callers (the small handful there was) were using 300bps modems with acoustic couplers.
;-)
The system was written in Pascal MT+ and ran on an Epson QX-10 using the CPM operating system (anyone remember any of these names?)
I remember getting my first 1200bps modem and thinking "wow -- this is so fast!"
However, things were so slow at 300 and 1200bps that I ended up writing a "smart terminal" program and BBS support module which borrowed the 20,000-word spelling dictionary from Wordstar (more names from the distant past) and replaced words longer than 3 characters with a two-character lookup key and added error correction.
This significantly improved the throughput of plain-text messages -- and forced people to make sure their spelling was up to scratch.
A couple of years later I got a 2400bps modem and thought "wow -- this is so fast" (again).
In 1985 I wrote and ran a multi-user BBS that operated under MSDOS and was written in Modula 2. It supported three simultaneous users -- woo-hoo!
In 1989 I switched to using the QNX OS and wrote a BBS system in C that supported 12 concurrent users on a lowly 386 box while also providing fax-gateway capabilities.
Then the Internet came along and it's all history now
Geeze I feel old!
I've always wondered what exactly the purchase of a music CD represents.
... if a company sells CDR/CDRW drives that have bit-level copying and reading included in the firmware, would they be prosecuted under the DMCA -- even if they made such devices without any intent to defeat such copy-protection?
Is it a single-user license for that intellectual property -- much like that granted when you buy software on CD?
It seems not.
For instance -- if I buy a software title on CD and that CD gets damaged, the vendor will, virtually without exception (including Microsoft) replace the CD for the cost of the media and handling.
Now -- if your favorite Sugar Babes (guffaw!) CD gets scratched and you front up to the recording company demanding a replacement -- they'll laugh you out of the building.
Yes, you'll have to go and pay full price for another CD if you want your music back.
Therefore it seems you're not buying a *license* for the music -- so maybe you're actually buying a copy of the music (rather than a license to use)?
Or are you just buying the media itself and the music is incidental -- insomuch as if/when it disappears because of damage or whatever, there's no obligation to fix the problem.
What I want to know is
Are those drives which are already capable of DAO ripping and writing now in breach of the DMCA because they can copy some weakly protected disks?
What's going to happen in Germany where vendors of CDR/RW drives are already paying a "copyright tax" because the drives are said to be costing the recording industry money. Will the introduction of copy-protected CDs mean that this tax will now be dropped?
And now we have the suggestion that CDs that have copy protected audio tracks may also ship with the music provided in Windows Media format (complete with digital rights control) for those who want to play it on their PCs.
What about those who have spent good money on portable MP3 players? What about those who are smart enough to use non-Windows computers?
This is not a simple issue and for the past two years the recording industry have shown that they simply don't have a clue.
They're way out of their depth and don't seem to realize that every time they try to tighten the thumbscrews they're simply making their predicament worse!
But the LA Times article said:
He learned this his first day in Afghanistan when he entered a family's hut. The poverty was more than he could fathom. There was no furniture. No light. The only object inside was a copy of the Koran, tucked into an alcove
The level of materialism I was refering to was that of having a pot in which to cook, a jug with which to carry water and clean clothes to wear.
It's a far cry from walkmans, DVD players, fast cars and Nike sneakers I'll grant - but it is related to the posession of material objects.
The terrorists will exploit the kindness by infiltrating these safe zones (how do you tell a terrorist from a bonafide Afghani victim?) and kill/maime not only those who provide the kindness, but also those who they feel have sold-out to the Western defilers.
You are right in one respect though -- the USA and allies need to establish a beachhead within Afghanistan that can be adequately defended and used as a staging post for the deployment of ground-troops.
Don't forget that, as the LA Times article points out, these people do not yearn for worldly goods so the lure of (comparitive) luxury and posessions is of no value.
Trying to come up with a simple solution to this problem is somewhat akin to describing exactly how all the systems onboard the space shuttle work in 20 words or less -- it's impossible.
Perhaps the best thing that any military action can be is highly adaptive and reactive to whatever it finds. That's something that I don't know the US (or any Western) military is adequately structured to cope with. It is however, exactly why guerrilla fighters are so damned hard to deal with. They're taught to think on their feet and not to constantly rely on reporting to and receiving orders from some central administration which isn't actually there on the front line.
How else do you think a handful of Afghani rebels managed to fend off the might of the former Soviet Union?
How else do you think the VC fended off the might of the post-WWII US military in Vietnam?
This will be a hard one.
An up-to-the-minute running report on the whole story can be found on
7amNews.com -- it's been going since 9am this morning and is pretty concise for those with limited time.
Another suggestion worth a look is that offered part way down
this page which suggests that Microsoft's Flight Simulator might be the new terrorist training tool.
So true -- I bought my first copy of QNX in the mid 1980's and I think it was launched several years before that.
It's one heap-cool OS -- just a shame that they didn't have the marketing muscle to launch it into the mainstream before MS took over.
Mind you -- I suspect that if they'd tried to make it "yet another desktop OS" it wouldn't be the excellent product that it is today. They focused on the product's strengths and didn't sell out to the marketing droids -- and it shows.
Hey, I can compress AND encrypt a full-length movie and DVD quality into just 1 byte!
:-(
However, the decrypt key is 4.5 GB long
Uh-oh, -- the site is Slashdotted already!:
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6
We are having problems with our database, please come back at a later time.
Hey... I want a C/C++ compiler written in Java -- after all, I think my Java compiler is written in C/C++
Hey, make a server system so user-friendly that an idiot can use it -- and only idiots will!
Anyone who wastes their life watching a passive medium like TV deserves to have their arse kicked anyway -- whether they're paying for the service or not.
Come on guys, life's too short -- don't waste your time watching -- get out and start doing!
TV is for people who don't have lives of their own -- surely that can't be anyone who uses /. ???
http://www.danger-island.com/~dav/video/srl/
And this is another late entry ;-)
If you really want to see dangerous -- look at this page !
Second in line is the "mailto:" tags that so many people (especially business sites) are stupid enough to put on their webpages.
My servers get about 8-10 spambot trawls a day from bots looking for mailto: tags and their associated email addresses.
Then there are those who really are dumb enough to believe a spammer whem they say "click to unsubscribe" -- oh yeah, for sure!
There are effective ways to avoid spam -- check out Memo.to.
Hey.. this is /. -- fixing the link is an IQ test! :-)
What about the new X-Jet design?
What about this guy who has built a gokart with a massive pulsejet attached and plans to build a jet-powered flying platform.
A new candidate for the Dawin Award perhaps?
Fortunately, a trace of the sources indicate that the servers involved are being shut down pretty quickly by their admins.
One alarming aspect is the number of these probes that are obviously coming from servers connected through PPP dial-up accounts.
I wonder how many people have installed IIS on PCs running IIS and don't even know it's running?
News With Attitude
So don't expect to see any sudden support fore more recent versions of Java as a result of this.
Check out the turbine-powered Toyota MR2 and the jet-goped :-)
Originally, radio licensing authorities were set up to ensure that there was no conflict in respect to RF spectrum use -- then governments found that it was really a cash-cow.
Just look at the 3GL wireless spectrum auctions in Europe for example.
Does it really cost the European governments billions of dollars to issue those licenses and police the spectrum ? -- Hell no! It's just (yet another) convenient way to tax a natural resource that costs them nothing to produce (because it's been there since the start of time) and piss-all to police.
Coming soon -- an oxygen tax on the air you breathe?
The recent experiments performed in Europe which effectively supported the theory that quantum effects could be used to communicate at faster-than-light speeds show that at least this is possible.
Of course it's not practical yet -- but then again, neither was laser technology until we found ways to produce a coherent beam of light eh?
The technology being discussed in this thread is really just another form of time-division multiplexing isn't it?
Nothing new about the theory -- just a novel implementation.
You have to appreciate the fact that there are literally hundreds of new products, services and companies launched every week -- and if journalists were to publish a story on every PR they received then the newswires would become flooded with the stuff and readers would complain.
The secret to getting a PR turned into a story is to wait until you've got something truly newsworthy before you issue a PR.
There are some companies whose PRs automatically get fined in /deve/null because they send out two or three a day announcing the most mundane and trivial things: "Our website is now listed in Yahoo's dierctory", "Our new sales manager is wearing a brown tie today", etc, etc.
Unfortunately for them, even if they come up with the answer to life, the universe and everything, I doubt anyone will be listening.
The secret to good PR is to figure out ways to become newsworthy. When you do something that is truly of interest to the wider industry (or world) the the journos will beat your door down trying to get a story.
Also -- pick your timing carefully. Every editor and reporter knows (and hates) slow-news days. There are some days when absolutely nothing is happening out there and those are the days when we tend to reluctantly start paying more attention to the PRs that come across our screens.
What's not newsworthy on a day when Yahoo buys the NY Times and Dell files for Chapter 13 might well be a lead-story on another day when yours is the only story happening.
Of course achieving this eye-catching status is not easy - or everyone would be doing it -- right?
As far as PR companies go -- it's been my experience that they're really good at spending your money but don't gain you a lot of ground. Let's face it, if you're not newsworthy then no amount of PR-spend is going to get your stories run in a reputable publication.
And as for the format of a PR -- keep it very, very short. If you haven't convinced the editor/reporter that you're newsworthy within the first paragraph they'll never read the rest anyway.
If you've sparked their interest -- they'll contact you for more information anyway. Best to leave them a little curious than drop a weighty tombe on their desk that tells them the whole story.
I hope this helps!
The claims made in the 7amNews story referred to in the Salon article seems to have been verified by this story currently running on CNet. It looks like the recording industry is saving itself time and money by forcing ISPs to block file-swappers that the Media Tracker system has identified. There's also some extra stuff on the 7amNews.com site that answers more questions that are being asked.