Not quite. The big box stores tend to sell lots of pop music. Harder-to-find music tends to get traded on Napster more than pop, which is one of the arguments used to support Napster. Sam's emphasised rare stuff over pop. Now, nobody's discounting WalMart, but Napster was most clearly a contributing factor. When you look at record sales rising, you must ask which records are being sold. Who's superficial now?
So, Internet file swapping does no damage to the music industry, right? Everyone in the music industry is obscenely wealthy and is only interested in squeezing consumers, right?
Just over a week ago, the great Canadian record chain Sam the Record Man filed for bankruptcy. The article notes that the failure was caused, in part, by Sam's being "squeezed by free music downloads".
This is a terrible loss for Canadian music. Sam was a widely known advocate of local music scenes in Canada, especially in Halifax, where bands such as Sloan got their start.
Sam stores across Canada were known for their eclectic stock, not merely the latest top-40 drivel, which probably brought it into direct competition with Napster.
It's time to drop the Robin Hood rhetoric of valiant music traders against big, greedy conglomerates. Unprincipled free music trading is doing real damage to those lesser-known artists it is claiming to help, as well as to smaller music stores.
For years, a private company called United Space Alliance has held the contract for space shuttle operations. USA is a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed-Martin, the contractors responsible for constructing most of the space shuttle hardware.
First there was Civ and unto the world was brought great happiness for the tech-savvy masses
who found it except when they were fired from their job, their wife left them without them even
realizing, and his feet started sprouting moss.
The first Civilization came out just before my freshman year of university. I still remember the die-hard Civ fans in the computer lab, spending hours and hours mesmerized by this game. I also remember discovering the game, and becoming one of them, discovering Robotics at 3 am and unleashing hell on the Mongols with my new artillery units.
I remember the running, clandestine battles we fought with the sysadmins to keep the game installed on their systems (and whenever we lost, the game could be reinstalled from two 3.5 inch floppies). I remember playing into the wee hours of the morning the night before a physics final... it seems to me that most of us did poorly that year.
Here's to a new generation of freshmen, taking up the latest incarnation of the beautiful game. All you need to remember is: first year doesn't count,
"D" means Degree,
and everything important you need to learn in University, you can learn from Civilization.
How is this significantly different from getting a kick-ass sound card (for around $200) and a 40g hard drive (for around $150) in my computer (which I already own) and hooking it up to my stereo? I can't think of a good reason to spend $999 for dedicated hardware.
NASA is no different from any other sci/tech organization. However, they have the combined disadvantages of very high risk projects and intense public scrutiny.
Example:
NASA engineer writes a bug in code: $300 million spacecraft pancakes into the Martian plains; elected officials demand answers; public wonders why NASA is full of buffoons who can't do something as "simple" as launching a spacecraft into orbit around another heavenly body on a shoestring budget.
Microsoft engineer writes a bug in code: Another MS engineer is assigned to write a Service Release; yet another engineer is assigned to correct the bugs in the Service Release. Resulting security holes lead to viruses costing billions in lost productivity, according to some estimates. Elected officials defend free enterprise; public doesn't care.
Linuk kernel hacker writes a bug: Another hacker finds and corrects the bug; elected officials and public don't give a rat's ass.
The NASA people talk about the "great galactic ghoul" which lurks somewhere between Earth and Mars, which eats Mars-bound spaceprobes. It's their tongue-in-cheek attempt to explain why roughly half of all Mars probes fail -- some for apparently no reason.
When the spacecraft first goes into orbit, you want a reliable, simple telemetry signal to indicate the basics of what is happening with the spacecraft. This means a low-gain, wide-beam transmitting antenna. The high-gain antenna will provide higher rates, but must be aimed much more carefully; such a system would not be robust if something went slightly wrong during orbit insertion.
From the Where is Mars Odyssey Right Now? page, the spacecraft is currently 1.53e+11 meters from Earth. Even with a directional antenna, signal power drops with distance squared, so the path loss is on the order of 200 dB. That is, if the transmitter power is (say) 50 watts/m^2 at 1 meter away from the spacecraft, as measured from Earth it would be something like 10^-20 watts/m^2, not counting antenna gains. At those powers you'd be lucky to get 40 bits/s, simply by running into Shannon's limit. (Somebody check my math, I haven't had coffee this morning.) Imagine the communications challenge for Voyager 2, which is now heading out of the solar system at a range of billions of kilometers; or Galileo, which lost its high-gain antenna at Jupiter...
I'd love for the next NASA administrator to press for a man on Mars, probes to the outer planets, interstellar probes,... the list goes on.
Let's be realistic though; with recent events NASA's spending priority will be falling.
(Too bad the Afghans aren't trying to beat us to the Moon.)
The next NASA administrator should invest heavily in high-risk engineering projects that could lower launch costs. This is the role of NASA as a research center; commercial launch companies are already efficiently launching satellites, while the Shuttle and ISS projects are already well in hand. If the Venture Star (or some related SSTO vehicle) could actually work, it would cut launch costs by an order of magnitude, thus reducing the cost of a manned Mars mission from $100 billion to $10 billion. That way, a mission to Mars would no longer require the complete dedication of a nation's technology infrastructure, which is hard to justify for any goal short of war.
What about the fact that every major news site in the U.S. and Canada collapsed under the load of Sept. 11? It was several hours before CNN was back up, and then in a bandwidth-limited form. I got most of my info from the BBC and Australian sites, and even those were very heavily loaded. Meanwhile, anywhere that there was a TV on Sept. 11 was tuned to CNN, which provided the breaking news as it happened -- and since that date, the principals have all appeared on television to describe their positions, not the internet.
It seems premature to proclaim a new era of Internet news reporting.
Check out
Steve Mann's web page, which has a picture of him wearing his display sunglasses. Not shown in the scene is the waist pack which holds the hardware, and the clever one-hand "keyboard" he uses for data entry. I've seen him walking around campus wearing it; he even teaches a graduate course at the University of Toronto on the subject. Very cool.
At least when I attended college as long as you weren't being disruptive it was your choice to
pay attention or not.
It depends on your definition of "disruptive". As a grad student I've instructed my share of classes, and I can definitely tell the difference between a class that is largely paying attention and one that is not. It's tough to teach a class that is disinterested; there's no give-and-take between the lecturer and the students. It's difficult to quantify, but there is a definite relationship between the instructor and students such that a more interactive class leads to a better teaching environment for everyone.
Further, although they're indispensible in labs, I dispute the usefulness of an internet-connected computer in a lecture. Even if it can be used to display instructional material, in my opinion it's a rather sterile way to teach (and learn). Of all the instructional aids I have seen, nothing beats the chalkboard. There's something about the pacing and flow of a chalkboard lecture that's impossible to capture using transparencies, PowerPoint, or the Internet -- probably because a lecturer using the chalkboard is proceeding at the same pace that the students are writing notes, so the students have time to absorb.
Besides, if you're going to be surfing the web anyway, why do it in class? Why not skip and do it from your dorm room or wherever?
From the article:
Anti-Virus: Not required with Linux, according to the experts.
Bullshit!! What experts would these be? Just because Linux viruses are less prevalent than Windows viruses doesn't mean that the Linux platform is invulnerable.
In fact, because the Linux networking suite is far more capable than the Windows suite, the average Linux user must be more vigilant in protecting his/her computer against worm attacks.
Then again, now that I think about it I can't think of a major anti-virus application for Linux. Can anyone suggest one?
Some of Glass' critiques seem a little silly - they're intended goals of the license, not flaws.
That's not a bug, that's a feature!
To claim that a critique is "silly" because you disagree with the author's point of view is rather condescending, and does not contribute to meaningful debate. Is the purpose of this license to create a moral imperative to release music for free (much as RMS uses GNU as a platform to argue the immorality of commercial software)? If so, the issues Glass raises merit serious discussion.
When will ad companies realize that your not going to have alot of positive interest in the product
when all you do is annoy the userbase?
Firstly, most ads are designed simply to be memorable, whether the memory is positive or not. Irritation is one method for achieving this in a negative way. As annoyed as we all are at those wireless camera ads, we won't easily forget them, will we?
Secondly, I'm old enough some of the original hype over e-business. In particular, it was supposed to make comparison shopping quick, easy, and more beneficial to the consumer, by automatically requesting the lowest competing prices from every supplier (and, potentially, having them bid against each other for your business). As long as these technologies are opt-in rather than opt-out (i.e., I have to actively choose to enable these competing ads), I don't see the problem. In fact the consumer may benefit in the end.
It depends on who's paying the bills. If you're an individual looking for a PC, even to play the hottest and newest games, you probably don't need and can't afford the newest processors. If you're a government or well-funded university lab, writing your own software, where the fastest results are critical, then you probably can't afford not to stay ahead of the processor curve.
Although the article you refer to appeared on
Slashdot, it was basically uninformed, hysterical speculation. MS doesn't have sufficient inroads on the Internet to impose a proprietary protocol. If any company does, it's
Cisco, but they're happy to use open standards anyway, for obvious reasons. Furthermore, Sun owns a large portion of the server market, and they don't exactly get along with MS after the Java deal.
TCP/IP is on its way out the door anyway, with IPv6 promising to provide an open standard that implements most of what was claimed for "TCP/MS" in the article.
Well, I'm frankly surprised that I haven't been modded into oblivion yet. Must be the JonKatz article keeping everyone busy.
I disagree that the parent post makes any intelligent argument about the motivation of IP protectors.
My intention was to point out (somewhat bluntly) that while it's possible to stereotype the motivation of authors to protect their IP as "greed" and "gluttony", it's equally possible to stereotype the anti-IP community as a bunch of pirates who just want free stuff. Seems I struck a nerve somewhere.
I don't usually respond to trolls, but I couldn't resist this one. Since the anti-IP movement is all about envy (I want my free MP3s! I want my free software!), I guess it's par for the course that IP should be all about greed.
Linux, by definition, can't be pirated, and I have spent essentially $0 on Linux. However, I know plenty of people who install Windows with all its bells and whistles, including Office, etc., who also spend $0. Of course these people aren't doint it legally.
I will reiterate a previously raised point... MS's decision to crack down on piracy opens a window for Linux, since these people will be looking for a new free (as in beer) OS.
unless, perhaps, they are taking advantage of security
holes to alter your settings in destructive ways.
Exactly. We're talking about the potential for someone inspecting or modifying data stored on your computer without permission, explicit or implicit. Although the browser manufacturers are partially responsible, in my opinion it would be an easy sell to have lawmakers consider this in the same way as cracking. Especially if you embellish it a bit for your congressperson: "Just think -- one of these could pop up and change your homepage to pr0n! Or Ralph Nader's homepage! Think of the children!"
Slashdot Mirror
Not quite. The big box stores tend to sell lots of pop music. Harder-to-find music tends to get traded on Napster more than pop, which is one of the arguments used to support Napster. Sam's emphasised rare stuff over pop. Now, nobody's discounting WalMart, but Napster was most clearly a contributing factor. When you look at record sales rising, you must ask which records are being sold. Who's superficial now?
So, Internet file swapping does no damage to the music industry, right? Everyone in the music industry is obscenely wealthy and is only interested in squeezing consumers, right?
Just over a week ago, the great Canadian record chain Sam the Record Man filed for bankruptcy. The article notes that the failure was caused, in part, by Sam's being "squeezed by free music downloads".
This is a terrible loss for Canadian music. Sam was a widely known advocate of local music scenes in Canada, especially in Halifax, where bands such as Sloan got their start. Sam stores across Canada were known for their eclectic stock, not merely the latest top-40 drivel, which probably brought it into direct competition with Napster.
It's time to drop the Robin Hood rhetoric of valiant music traders against big, greedy conglomerates. Unprincipled free music trading is doing real damage to those lesser-known artists it is claiming to help, as well as to smaller music stores.
For years, a private company called United Space Alliance has held the contract for space shuttle operations. USA is a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed-Martin, the contractors responsible for constructing most of the space shuttle hardware.
First there was Civ and unto the world was brought great happiness for the tech-savvy masses who found it except when they were fired from their job, their wife left them without them even realizing, and his feet started sprouting moss.
The first Civilization came out just before my freshman year of university. I still remember the die-hard Civ fans in the computer lab, spending hours and hours mesmerized by this game. I also remember discovering the game, and becoming one of them, discovering Robotics at 3 am and unleashing hell on the Mongols with my new artillery units. I remember the running, clandestine battles we fought with the sysadmins to keep the game installed on their systems (and whenever we lost, the game could be reinstalled from two 3.5 inch floppies). I remember playing into the wee hours of the morning the night before a physics final ... it seems to me that most of us did poorly that year.
Here's to a new generation of freshmen, taking up the latest incarnation of the beautiful game. All you need to remember is: first year doesn't count, "D" means Degree, and everything important you need to learn in University, you can learn from Civilization.
How is this significantly different from getting a kick-ass sound card (for around $200) and a 40g hard drive (for around $150) in my computer (which I already own) and hooking it up to my stereo? I can't think of a good reason to spend $999 for dedicated hardware.
In short, NASA is a wreck.
NASA is no different from any other sci/tech organization. However, they have the combined disadvantages of very high risk projects and intense public scrutiny.
Example:
NASA engineer writes a bug in code: $300 million spacecraft pancakes into the Martian plains; elected officials demand answers; public wonders why NASA is full of buffoons who can't do something as "simple" as launching a spacecraft into orbit around another heavenly body on a shoestring budget.
Microsoft engineer writes a bug in code: Another MS engineer is assigned to write a Service Release; yet another engineer is assigned to correct the bugs in the Service Release. Resulting security holes lead to viruses costing billions in lost productivity, according to some estimates. Elected officials defend free enterprise; public doesn't care.
Linuk kernel hacker writes a bug: Another hacker finds and corrects the bug; elected officials and public don't give a rat's ass.
The NASA people talk about the "great galactic ghoul" which lurks somewhere between Earth and Mars, which eats Mars-bound spaceprobes. It's their tongue-in-cheek attempt to explain why roughly half of all Mars probes fail -- some for apparently no reason.
Do we really need another secret, unaccountable court?
Lisa: It's a rhetorical question! ... Do you know what rhetorical means?
Homer: Do _I_ know what _rhetorical_ means?
I'd love for the next NASA administrator to press for a man on Mars, probes to the outer planets, interstellar probes, ... the list goes on.
Let's be realistic though; with recent events NASA's spending priority will be falling.
(Too bad the Afghans aren't trying to beat us to the Moon.)
The next NASA administrator should invest heavily in high-risk engineering projects that could lower launch costs. This is the role of NASA as a research center; commercial launch companies are already efficiently launching satellites, while the Shuttle and ISS projects are already well in hand. If the Venture Star (or some related SSTO vehicle) could actually work, it would cut launch costs by an order of magnitude, thus reducing the cost of a manned Mars mission from $100 billion to $10 billion. That way, a mission to Mars would no longer require the complete dedication of a nation's technology infrastructure, which is hard to justify for any goal short of war.
HURD -- a testament to the never-give-up and never-think-things-through spirit of GNU.
"Linux is nothing, work on the HURD" -- Stallman
What about the fact that every major news site in the U.S. and Canada collapsed under the load of Sept. 11? It was several hours before CNN was back up, and then in a bandwidth-limited form. I got most of my info from the BBC and Australian sites, and even those were very heavily loaded. Meanwhile, anywhere that there was a TV on Sept. 11 was tuned to CNN, which provided the breaking news as it happened -- and since that date, the principals have all appeared on television to describe their positions, not the internet. It seems premature to proclaim a new era of Internet news reporting.
Also see this paper at wearcam.org.
At least when I attended college as long as you weren't being disruptive it was your choice to pay attention or not.
It depends on your definition of "disruptive". As a grad student I've instructed my share of classes, and I can definitely tell the difference between a class that is largely paying attention and one that is not. It's tough to teach a class that is disinterested; there's no give-and-take between the lecturer and the students. It's difficult to quantify, but there is a definite relationship between the instructor and students such that a more interactive class leads to a better teaching environment for everyone.
Further, although they're indispensible in labs, I dispute the usefulness of an internet-connected computer in a lecture. Even if it can be used to display instructional material, in my opinion it's a rather sterile way to teach (and learn). Of all the instructional aids I have seen, nothing beats the chalkboard. There's something about the pacing and flow of a chalkboard lecture that's impossible to capture using transparencies, PowerPoint, or the Internet -- probably because a lecturer using the chalkboard is proceeding at the same pace that the students are writing notes, so the students have time to absorb.
Besides, if you're going to be surfing the web anyway, why do it in class? Why not skip and do it from your dorm room or wherever?
From the article: Anti-Virus: Not required with Linux, according to the experts.
Bullshit!! What experts would these be? Just because Linux viruses are less prevalent than Windows viruses doesn't mean that the Linux platform is invulnerable. In fact, because the Linux networking suite is far more capable than the Windows suite, the average Linux user must be more vigilant in protecting his/her computer against worm attacks.
Then again, now that I think about it I can't think of a major anti-virus application for Linux. Can anyone suggest one?
Poll: Should Lego Sue?
No: -------------------%95
Don't Know ---------%3.7
Yes ------------------%1.3
CowboyNeal: ---------------%100
Conclusion: Lego should sue CowboyNeal. Why? ... Why not.
Some of Glass' critiques seem a little silly - they're intended goals of the license, not flaws.
That's not a bug, that's a feature!
To claim that a critique is "silly" because you disagree with the author's point of view is rather condescending, and does not contribute to meaningful debate. Is the purpose of this license to create a moral imperative to release music for free (much as RMS uses GNU as a platform to argue the immorality of commercial software)? If so, the issues Glass raises merit serious discussion.
When will ad companies realize that your not going to have alot of positive interest in the product when all you do is annoy the userbase?
Firstly, most ads are designed simply to be memorable, whether the memory is positive or not. Irritation is one method for achieving this in a negative way. As annoyed as we all are at those wireless camera ads, we won't easily forget them, will we?
Secondly, I'm old enough some of the original hype over e-business. In particular, it was supposed to make comparison shopping quick, easy, and more beneficial to the consumer, by automatically requesting the lowest competing prices from every supplier (and, potentially, having them bid against each other for your business). As long as these technologies are opt-in rather than opt-out (i.e., I have to actively choose to enable these competing ads), I don't see the problem. In fact the consumer may benefit in the end.
It depends on who's paying the bills. If you're an individual looking for a PC, even to play the hottest and newest games, you probably don't need and can't afford the newest processors. If you're a government or well-funded university lab, writing your own software, where the fastest results are critical, then you probably can't afford not to stay ahead of the processor curve.
Although the article you refer to appeared on Slashdot, it was basically uninformed, hysterical speculation. MS doesn't have sufficient inroads on the Internet to impose a proprietary protocol. If any company does, it's Cisco, but they're happy to use open standards anyway, for obvious reasons. Furthermore, Sun owns a large portion of the server market, and they don't exactly get along with MS after the Java deal.
TCP/IP is on its way out the door anyway, with IPv6 promising to provide an open standard that implements most of what was claimed for "TCP/MS" in the article.
Well, I'm frankly surprised that I haven't been modded into oblivion yet. Must be the JonKatz article keeping everyone busy.
I disagree that the parent post makes any intelligent argument about the motivation of IP protectors. My intention was to point out (somewhat bluntly) that while it's possible to stereotype the motivation of authors to protect their IP as "greed" and "gluttony", it's equally possible to stereotype the anti-IP community as a bunch of pirates who just want free stuff. Seems I struck a nerve somewhere.
I don't usually respond to trolls, but I couldn't resist this one. Since the anti-IP movement is all about envy (I want my free MP3s! I want my free software!), I guess it's par for the course that IP should be all about greed.
Linux, by definition, can't be pirated, and I have spent essentially $0 on Linux. However, I know plenty of people who install Windows with all its bells and whistles, including Office, etc., who also spend $0. Of course these people aren't doint it legally.
I will reiterate a previously raised point ... MS's decision to crack down on piracy opens a window for Linux, since these people will be looking for a new free (as in beer) OS.
How soon until we get the pop-under ads with attractive models offering to sell me a swallow-cam? See Your Lunch -- Again!
unless, perhaps, they are taking advantage of security holes to alter your settings in destructive ways.
Exactly. We're talking about the potential for someone inspecting or modifying data stored on your computer without permission, explicit or implicit. Although the browser manufacturers are partially responsible, in my opinion it would be an easy sell to have lawmakers consider this in the same way as cracking. Especially if you embellish it a bit for your congressperson: "Just think -- one of these could pop up and change your homepage to pr0n! Or Ralph Nader's homepage! Think of the children!"