My mistake - you're absolutely right, how depressing.
Re:This is an excellent case for free software
on
Spyware in Audio Galaxy
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Something you might have missed: the Audiogalaxy Sattelite software IS open source - GPL'ed, in fact. They produce their own compiled binary with an installer avec spyware, but anyone's free to roll their own.
And as all good cooking show viewers will know, here's one prepared earlier... I hope you find this useful.
From an embarrassed Windows user
on
Wired Talks Wine
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Submitter comment: "...WINE version 1.0 may be just what Linux needs to get users to migrate from Windows to Linux"
I felt the article dealt mainly with removing the need for dual-booting for more and more existing Linux users. Why would a Windows user go to the trouble of installing Linux+WINE just to get what they already have (working Win32 apps and games)?
I (and probably other Windows users) will switch when Linux outperforms Windows where it counts - when it does what they have come to expect a PC to do: when it installs without much hassle, when their hardware works immediately or with minimal driver hunting, when they are almost guaranteed a supply of games (remember the success of Commodore 64s?) and when the applications are simple to install and use, and are compatible with files made by colleagues and friends.
I love the idea of WINE. I love the idea of Linux. I've tried Linux. Unfortunately though, I still use Windows because near-enough isn't really good enough. WINE is handy, but a 'Killer App' needs to be something more than simply matching the competition - it has to be the one thing you don't get anywhere else.
Setting a world-realistic problem as an entrance/scholarship test is fair enough, but the implementation here sounds pretty unfair.
The article states that New Scientist took 30 minutes to decode it - since the scholarship went to the first person to email a correct answer to the university, I fail to see how this differs substantially from "first post" trolling.
Yeah, but your volume allowance is 500 megabytes per month. That's not as useful to many potential customers; I suspect paying ~US$60 a month for 500mb would send a shiver down the spine of many/. readers.
Interesting footnote - the company director of XIS, one of only two companies in.au offering realistic competition to Telstra, is still a teenager. I hope he's up to the task, launching a broadband service nationwide the same week that Telstra raise their prices!!
Sorry to be a stickler for detail, but it's a different.gov.au department responsible for Film and Literature Classification (the Office of F and L C, funnily enough!).
Point is still valid - even LOTR:FOTR wasn't given a classification the day I went to see it - the second day after it was released. Matter o fact, it's STILL not classified, if you believe their database. (Navigate from here for the IP-wary)
This isn't simply a case of bureaucratic weirdness. The reason this story is news, is that the law in Australia requires ISPs to restrict access by end-users to banned Internet content.
If ISPs can't access a government-compiled list of what-is-banned, then to absolutely comply with the law they have to manually (ie. with a human) proxy every request from their customers, determine whether those requests will return <jellobiafra>HARMFUL MATTER</jellobiafra>, or expose themselves to possible prosecution.
It's a bit like keeping a secret list of banned foods, then busting a grocer for ordering in a special type of mushroom for a customer.
Much noise was made at the time against the leglisation because it's stoopid. I remember reading about six months ago (sorry, no link) that, despite all the fuss, only half a dozen complaints against ISPs had actually been received by the Aust. Broadcasting Authority. No prosecutions ever eventuated.
Although it's a Very Bad Thing, since nobody's (so far) gotten in trouble because of this legislation, the real danger of ignoring this might be that you teach politicians they can be ignorant and stupid all the time and get away with it.
Not sure if you meant it, but your comment supports what I said - The US blamed the Taliban because they were aiding and abetting bin Laden. They had no mechanism to simply walk into another country other than picking a fight with a nation-state.
(disclaimer: War is not simple, nor do we get all the facts. Probably only about a dozen, fully briefed people worldwide are "in the know" enough to be qualified to judge whether what's going on is "moral" and "just". I am an Australian with access to the same media as you - hence my "rightly or wrongly" comment.)
Q. Why is it that it's the Napsters, KaZaAs and Morpheii of this world that seem to get squashed by courts, rather than, say, Gnutella?
A. Courts squash what they can define.
Just like America turned (rightly or wrongly) a non-nation-state terrorism incident into an old-fashioned "my country vs. yours" war, courts/governments will try and shut down companies with business models that (they argue) are based on piracy and individuals that write "harmful code".
<pessimism> The day someone anonymously builds a true peer2peer network that scales well and people choose it ahead of something with advertising in it, the genie really will be out of the bottle. Sadly, that's when governments will decide that "anti-supply" laws we're talking about now are useless, and the "anti-demand" laws will get tougher - in essence, they'll start going after 'users' rather than 'dealers'. </pessimism>
The only way that they can prevent copying is if they were to replace every TV in the world with TVs that can decode an encrypted signal *after* it enters the TV.
Sure they can prevent it - all they have to do is stop radiating unencrypted UHF and VHF signals, so old TVs will be come expensive paperweights, unless you buy their decoder set-top-box.
I don't like it, but nobody's forcing them to continue providing advertising-subsidised, free content to the masses, as has been the case for fifty years. "They" control everything we can view and record because "they" are sending it to us in the first place. Don't think it won't happen - how many of you still use analog cellphones?
It's still about new features. "Security features" exist in Microsoft products - it's just that there's not enough of them, they work poorly and more often than not, they default to "I'm naked and alone" - see my sig.
From the sound of the article, MS have simply realised that security is a very fashionable feature to promote nowadays, just like "streaming multimedia" was in about 1997.
Maybe they should have thought of this BEFORE they rewrote the OS?
I'm sure they did consider it when they were designing XP a couple of years back - but they realised that they'd profit more by re-skinning Win2K. They had no way of knowing that both Sept. 11 and Code Red would occur, and now they're reacting to the environment like any savvy business would.
Well, you've got to find all of the album tracks, then download them, then re-download all the ones that were corrupted or timed out. Then, assuming that you're really trying to displace a CD purchase, you'll spend time uncompressing the songs, and burning a CD.
This is all true, but won't last forever. Automating this, and therefore removing the obstacle, is easily conceivable - at least as conceivable as p2p networks evolving in the first place. Consider:
An evolution of/replacement for the ID3 tag system to support "ripped by rippersoftwarev2.0" information
Discographic databases that include filesizes when ripped by rippersoftwarev2.0 at x bitrate.
A p2p client that generates metadata for each music collection noting normalisation and ID3-type info, or perhaps as a product of the ripping process.
Interfaces to abovementioned discographic databases that support "select all tracks from this album".
Scriptable client to find exact matches using the above, manages the downloads, then output an ISO or binary CD image.
Add cover art jpgs, if you want - it's not a big extra, and voila - primary obstacle removed and we're back to convenience outweighing cost. I'm certainly not saying your comment isn't valid, but only that one needs to remember that such arguments apply to a specific time and place in history, with specific tecnological constraints. Any business model that assumes it's not worth the hassle to leech music might be invalid in a couple of years' time, just as the business model for selling CDs seemed anachronistic the first day we ever heard of Napseter in the first place.
I think we're coverging. I suggest that infrastructure isn't a sector -- that it is removed from the market and becomes a common entity, like weather.
Taxes and tolls are the same trick played at different speeds... Big cable rollouts for example, could be levied or taxed separately as and when required:)
to transfer that [existing infrastructure] to the private sector...every operator would have to lay their own cable infrastructure.
What do you mean exactly?
Here in Australia, we have a large company named Telstra. The Government spun off Telstra as a private company a few yeara ago and plans to completely sell off its remaining 51% in the near future.
The question is - why didn't the Government swallow the national infrastructure of bandwidth through cables, phone copper lines, exchanges, the whole lot -- and just sell off the operational company? Such an arrangement would mean that the government could restrict the possibility of monopolistic or oligopolistic behaviour should it ever emerge, while leaving the market to decide how it was going to self-assemble when competitors were introduced?
Those companies could then fund the collective growth and maintenance of the underlying infrastructure through public works. Bandwidth supply and demand would truly then be controlled by the market and the general affluence of the population.
Trucking and other transport companies work this way by paying taxes to the Government that maintains roads. Nobody minds that. What's so bad about transport as an industry model, that corporations need to own their own permanent copper cabling?
Bandwidth is NOT a fossil fuel that can be used once and then it's gone. It's created when people build and install computers and pipes according to a logical plan. Of course, that's oversimplifying it - bandwidth is actually created by the application of lots of money and cooperation - at one time, the government's money and universities' money - now increasingly corporate money. Bulk bandwidth where I come from (.au) is almost completely owned by telcos.
Growing multimedia demand isn't causing bandwidth problems - the lack of purposeful infrastructure scaling (supply) to suit the Net's current capabilities and societal requirements (demand) are manipulated for profit first and foremost.
Artificial scarcity is the oldest trick in the (economic) book - I'm sure you're familiar with the De Beers diamond story.
We don't need workarounds to solve these problems. Short of outright economic reform, we need widespread connection sharing, the empowerment of local-level ISPs to network and form their own infrastructure and peer-to-peer to become the norm, especially for heavy things like LOTR trailers, Counter-Strike releases and such.
"Compared to conventional chemical propulsion systems, antimatter energy would slash the travel time to Mars and back from roughly two years to a few weeks. "
Since I am the only geek I know to have failed high school maths, I ask this in all seriousness.
Given that the minimum distance between the Earth and Mars is 54.5 x 10^6 kilometres, are the acceleration pressures (G's) that humans would be subjected to in such a quick trip going to make us black out and/or die before we get there? Do we need to develop some kind of technology -- I hesitate to use the Trek term 'inertial dampeners';) -- before it can be of practical use, except for automated probes?
Few people complained about "head-down time" when all you could do in your car was change the volume or find another radio station (I'm ignoring HDT activities that involve a passenger and a front bench seat, obviously!).
Why not integrate the dash PC with the car's gearbox, or the car's own computer -- locking off all but the semi-autonomic interface options (eg. volume, radio pre-set, play, stop) unless the car isn't moving?
Sure it could get hacked, but the majority wouldn't bother, especially if it involved opening the case (once it's installed, Joe Sixpack won't want to pull it out again).
Australia makes good sense for a large, ground-based telescopic array - clear skies, low elevations, few people and ancient, seismically stable geology. Plenty of people (but not many Australians) want to bury nuclear waste there for much the same reasons - but I digress...
There's one limitation with ground-based arrays that might be avoidable in space (or on water for that matter) - being stuck with an array covering a fixed area, once you've spent your money.
Could a space-based array be designed so that once it reaches its target location, it spreads itself out, gradually increasing the distance between its elements in a coherent manner, thereby increasing the effective size of the array over time? I would assume that a space-borne array would already be designed with plenty of fuel/rocketry for compensating for massive objects passing nearby and tugging on its corners... The same principle might be handy for adjusting/balacing the spacing between elements if an asteroid hits the jackpot, or a failure is detected.
A scary proportion of the (admittedly early) comments I've read here seem to come from people willing to dismiss a lot of this science as bunkum, perhaps because they feel they need to "defend" being geek.
Many doctors and teachers are diagnosing kids at ADHD because they have too many kids in a class to manage properly.
...
why not just accept a few things, first, everyone learns diffrent.
...
Doctors are quick to put some name on somenoe whos just not the norm.
I'll probably get tarred as flamebait for this, but seriously you people need to look beyond your own nose.
Whether you realise it or not, there are talented and dedicated scientists at work figuring out the things that you seem to be already quite certain about. Declaring that you know all the answers isn't going to help anybody figure out what's behind autism. There seems to be a case for more research. Well-meaning attitudes like yours can have the effect of reducing funding, if enough people think they "already know what's going on".
Duke3D was banned in Australia until 3DRealms patched it so the Adult lock couldn't be deactivated; it took a few hours at least before it was cracked, if memory serves.
We'll ban anything you like over here, it seems...
Slashdot Mirror
Ah HAH!
You've just given me a great idea on how to upgrade from cattle class to business class!
Or the option for supporting .NET???
My mistake - you're absolutely right, how depressing.
And as all good cooking show viewers will know, here's one prepared earlier... I hope you find this useful.
I felt the article dealt mainly with removing the need for dual-booting for more and more existing Linux users. Why would a Windows user go to the trouble of installing Linux+WINE just to get what they already have (working Win32 apps and games)?
I (and probably other Windows users) will switch when Linux outperforms Windows where it counts - when it does what they have come to expect a PC to do: when it installs without much hassle, when their hardware works immediately or with minimal driver hunting, when they are almost guaranteed a supply of games (remember the success of Commodore 64s?) and when the applications are simple to install and use, and are compatible with files made by colleagues and friends.
I love the idea of WINE. I love the idea of Linux. I've tried Linux. Unfortunately though, I still use Windows because near-enough isn't really good enough. WINE is handy, but a 'Killer App' needs to be something more than simply matching the competition - it has to be the one thing you don't get anywhere else.
Non-exhaustive list:
Adelaide
Brisbane
Gold Coast
Melbourne
Mudgee
Perth
Sydney
Western Sydney
The article states that New Scientist took 30 minutes to decode it - since the scholarship went to the first person to email a correct answer to the university, I fail to see how this differs substantially from "first post" trolling.
Education should not be a gimmick.
Interesting footnote - the company director of XIS, one of only two companies in .au offering realistic competition to Telstra, is still a teenager. I hope he's up to the task, launching a broadband service nationwide the same week that Telstra raise their prices!!
Point is still valid - even LOTR:FOTR wasn't given a classification the day I went to see it - the second day after it was released. Matter o fact, it's STILL not classified, if you believe their database. (Navigate from here for the IP-wary)
If ISPs can't access a government-compiled list of what-is-banned, then to absolutely comply with the law they have to manually (ie. with a human) proxy every request from their customers, determine whether those requests will return <jellobiafra>HARMFUL MATTER</jellobiafra>, or expose themselves to possible prosecution.
It's a bit like keeping a secret list of banned foods, then busting a grocer for ordering in a special type of mushroom for a customer.
Much noise was made at the time against the leglisation because it's stoopid. I remember reading about six months ago (sorry, no link) that, despite all the fuss, only half a dozen complaints against ISPs had actually been received by the Aust. Broadcasting Authority. No prosecutions ever eventuated.
Although it's a Very Bad Thing, since nobody's (so far) gotten in trouble because of this legislation, the real danger of ignoring this might be that you teach politicians they can be ignorant and stupid all the time and get away with it.
[+1 bonus self-removed cos this is OT]
Not sure if you meant it, but your comment supports what I said - The US blamed the Taliban because they were aiding and abetting bin Laden. They had no mechanism to simply walk into another country other than picking a fight with a nation-state.
(disclaimer: War is not simple, nor do we get all the facts. Probably only about a dozen, fully briefed people worldwide are "in the know" enough to be qualified to judge whether what's going on is "moral" and "just". I am an Australian with access to the same media as you - hence my "rightly or wrongly" comment.)
A. Courts squash what they can define.
Just like America turned (rightly or wrongly) a non-nation-state terrorism incident into an old-fashioned "my country vs. yours" war, courts/governments will try and shut down companies with business models that (they argue) are based on piracy and individuals that write "harmful code".
<pessimism>
The day someone anonymously builds a true peer2peer network that scales well and people choose it ahead of something with advertising in it, the genie really will be out of the bottle. Sadly, that's when governments will decide that "anti-supply" laws we're talking about now are useless, and the "anti-demand" laws will get tougher - in essence, they'll start going after 'users' rather than 'dealers'.
</pessimism>
Sure they can prevent it - all they have to do is stop radiating unencrypted UHF and VHF signals, so old TVs will be come expensive paperweights, unless you buy their decoder set-top-box.
I don't like it, but nobody's forcing them to continue providing advertising-subsidised, free content to the masses, as has been the case for fifty years. "They" control everything we can view and record because "they" are sending it to us in the first place. Don't think it won't happen - how many of you still use analog cellphones?
From the sound of the article, MS have simply realised that security is a very fashionable feature to promote nowadays, just like "streaming multimedia" was in about 1997.
Maybe they should have thought of this BEFORE they rewrote the OS?
I'm sure they did consider it when they were designing XP a couple of years back - but they realised that they'd profit more by re-skinning Win2K. They had no way of knowing that both Sept. 11 and Code Red would occur, and now they're reacting to the environment like any savvy business would.
This is all true, but won't last forever. Automating this, and therefore removing the obstacle, is easily conceivable - at least as conceivable as p2p networks evolving in the first place. Consider:
An evolution of/replacement for the ID3 tag system to support "ripped by rippersoftwarev2.0" information
Discographic databases that include filesizes when ripped by rippersoftwarev2.0 at x bitrate.
A p2p client that generates metadata for each music collection noting normalisation and ID3-type info, or perhaps as a product of the ripping process.
Interfaces to abovementioned discographic databases that support "select all tracks from this album".
Scriptable client to find exact matches using the above, manages the downloads, then output an ISO or binary CD image.
Add cover art jpgs, if you want - it's not a big extra, and voila - primary obstacle removed and we're back to convenience outweighing cost. I'm certainly not saying your comment isn't valid, but only that one needs to remember that such arguments apply to a specific time and place in history, with specific tecnological constraints. Any business model that assumes it's not worth the hassle to leech music might be invalid in a couple of years' time, just as the business model for selling CDs seemed anachronistic the first day we ever heard of Napseter in the first place.
Taxes and tolls are the same trick played at different speeds... Big cable rollouts for example, could be levied or taxed separately as and when required :)
What do you mean exactly?
Here in Australia, we have a large company named Telstra. The Government spun off Telstra as a private company a few yeara ago and plans to completely sell off its remaining 51% in the near future.
The question is - why didn't the Government swallow the national infrastructure of bandwidth through cables, phone copper lines, exchanges, the whole lot -- and just sell off the operational company? Such an arrangement would mean that the government could restrict the possibility of monopolistic or oligopolistic behaviour should it ever emerge, while leaving the market to decide how it was going to self-assemble when competitors were introduced?
Those companies could then fund the collective growth and maintenance of the underlying infrastructure through public works. Bandwidth supply and demand would truly then be controlled by the market and the general affluence of the population.
Trucking and other transport companies work this way by paying taxes to the Government that maintains roads. Nobody minds that. What's so bad about transport as an industry model, that corporations need to own their own permanent copper cabling?
I am not an economist, I warn you. ;)
50 comments already at +2 and nobody's posted a copy of the actual note. Did they mention a penalty for reproducing that, too??
(for comparison, here's six months ago's effort)
Bandwidth is NOT a fossil fuel that can be used once and then it's gone. It's created when people build and install computers and pipes according to a logical plan. Of course, that's oversimplifying it - bandwidth is actually created by the application of lots of money and cooperation - at one time, the government's money and universities' money - now increasingly corporate money. Bulk bandwidth where I come from (.au) is almost completely owned by telcos.
Growing multimedia demand isn't causing bandwidth problems - the lack of purposeful infrastructure scaling (supply) to suit the Net's current capabilities and societal requirements (demand) are manipulated for profit first and foremost.
Artificial scarcity is the oldest trick in the (economic) book - I'm sure you're familiar with the De Beers diamond story.
We don't need workarounds to solve these problems. Short of outright economic reform, we need widespread connection sharing, the empowerment of local-level ISPs to network and form their own infrastructure and peer-to-peer to become the norm, especially for heavy things like LOTR trailers, Counter-Strike releases and such.
Since I am the only geek I know to have failed high school maths, I ask this in all seriousness.
Given that the minimum distance between the Earth and Mars is 54.5 x 10^6 kilometres, are the acceleration pressures (G's) that humans would be subjected to in such a quick trip going to make us black out and/or die before we get there? Do we need to develop some kind of technology -- I hesitate to use the Trek term 'inertial dampeners' ;) -- before it can be of practical use, except for automated probes?
Few people complained about "head-down time" when all you could do in your car was change the volume or find another radio station (I'm ignoring HDT activities that involve a passenger and a front bench seat, obviously!).
Why not integrate the dash PC with the car's gearbox, or the car's own computer -- locking off all but the semi-autonomic interface options (eg. volume, radio pre-set, play, stop) unless the car isn't moving?
Sure it could get hacked, but the majority wouldn't bother, especially if it involved opening the case (once it's installed, Joe Sixpack won't want to pull it out again).
There's one limitation with ground-based arrays that might be avoidable in space (or on water for that matter) - being stuck with an array covering a fixed area, once you've spent your money.
Could a space-based array be designed so that once it reaches its target location, it spreads itself out, gradually increasing the distance between its elements in a coherent manner, thereby increasing the effective size of the array over time? I would assume that a space-borne array would already be designed with plenty of fuel/rocketry for compensating for massive objects passing nearby and tugging on its corners... The same principle might be handy for adjusting/balacing the spacing between elements if an asteroid hits the jackpot, or a failure is detected.
... ... I'll probably get tarred as flamebait for this, but seriously you people need to look beyond your own nose.
Whether you realise it or not, there are talented and dedicated scientists at work figuring out the things that you seem to be already quite certain about. Declaring that you know all the answers isn't going to help anybody figure out what's behind autism. There seems to be a case for more research. Well-meaning attitudes like yours can have the effect of reducing funding, if enough people think they "already know what's going on".
Duke3D was banned in Australia until 3DRealms patched it so the Adult lock couldn't be deactivated; it took a few hours at least before it was cracked, if memory serves.
We'll ban anything you like over here, it seems...