Good thing my HDTV has HDMI. Unfortunately I bought my receiver before HDMI was common on them and I only have one HDMI interface. I will end up replacing my pre-amp later when the cable box, the HD-DVD player and the Blu-Ray player all want to use HDMI, but then that's why I went cheap on that unit and dumped the money in to some amplifiers that won't need to be replaced until they break and are no longer fixable.
I may also consider a video only switch box instead because regardless of what you buy now for video there will be another standard down the road.
Fortunately for the average consumer pre-amps/receivers are coming with at least a couple of HDMI inputs standard these days.
More than surround sound the rush to Digital everything is what's making home theater complex. If we all would stick to component video and receivers had several 8 channel direct inputs things would be easier and monster cable could make a small fortune (that's 11 wires per device). As it is there's 6 ways to do video and three ways to do audio and the current digital audio standards don't have the bandwidth to handle some of the high resolution audio formats so there's bound to be more. When video goes 1080p and 1660i/p we will need new digital video connectors too. Considering my computer regularly does 1536 it can't be too far down the road (granted it's 2048x1536, not whatever the 16:9 version would be) but I guess that's 10 years down the road.
The author of this article needs to get his head checked. 6.1 and 7.1 surround sound wasn't created and isn't intended for most of the content out today. There are a few that do use matrix to use the rear channels it's not what it's intended for.
What it is intended for is Blu-Ray and HD-DVD where there will be 7 discrete tracks and audio engineers will be properly mixing soundtracks for such setups. That's why you buy a good 7.1 setup today, so you don't have to replace your receiver next year.
He says clipping is a fact of life in all but the most lavish home theater systems. I've got news for him, it's not.
I've never had my amplifier up much above 2 watts on a transient. Granted I've got decently efficient speakers (which despite not being Klipsch sound great). I'd have to go to speakers that were 85 dB @ 1 watt @ 1 meter to hit the limits on a transient. The speakers that come to mind that are that inefficient cost 5k per pair. That's not average home theater setup. If you spend 5k on your front speakers alone you're not going to buy a low-mid range receiver that's only "actually" 35 watts/channel. You're going to buy something with a good amplifier or separates.
When I bought my home theater system I went 7.1. The reason? It added less than 5% to the cost of the audio equipment to add two more surround speakers. Do I use them much now? Nope, but when discrete 7.1 audio tracks are more common in the next year I've got surround speakers that are matched up and ready to go.
Where has the market really outwitted itself? In the electronics stores. By not requiring that the stores have sales staffs that know what they are talking about too many people are buying bad equipment that ultimately they aren't getting value out of. The equipment isn't big enough for the space, the mains and surrounds aren't capable of matching up with each other at all, the customer doesn't know what they need to do to set it up right, etc. Bad sales hurts the industry more than anything else. The electronics stores have been paying less and less attention to their sales staffs over the years and it shows. If the industry wants people to keep buying new audio equipment they need to make sure that people are getting the "wow" factor every time they buy gear.
Neal's last answer about the book industry makes a point that the Music industry has been missing, and more to the point the "downloadable music" industry is missing. The internet will not destroy the music industry because they do more than make and distribute CDs. They promote. They are the ones who get you air time on the radio stations (those playlists come from somehwere). They get the concert tours together. They get you gigs at the festivals. They make things happen that all have the end result of people buying a CD they otherwise wouldn't. That's called Marketing (cynically, it's making you buy something you don't want to).
But blogs, but user communities, but but but! you say!
The average person on the street doesn't do all those things. If you want someone to buy your book or buy your CD you have to get to them where they live, not make them come to you. In the book industry this may be done with reviews in well read magazines and getting your book on Oprah. With music it's done through Clearchannel and MTV.
Dual monitors do little to increase production these days because even with the extra real estate you still have way to many applications running. I found between 4 and 8 to be idea depending on the task.
Consider a typical power user
3 instant message applications 1 IRC 1000000 web browser windows, each with their own set of tabs 2 office applications 1 iTunes (because really, it just rocks) 3 local system monitors such as task manager or a temp and fan speed monitor 1 email 4 login windows (or Remote Desktop Connections)
I use 1 monitor for my MP3 player, that gives me the width to see all information and depth to see many songs to move on to something better when I don't want to listen to whatever's on now
1 monitor for all my IM applications. In my case it's a bit low res (all used monitors). If I had a higher res monitor I'd include irc here
1 monitor for IRC, because really, one channel isn't enough
1 monitor for various status screens about local system operation
1 monitor for a DVD or TV
1 monitor for my email
1 monitor for my "current work", that is whatever I'm doing now
I use whatever is left or not being used for various browser windows, usually with system or network status screens for work.
I found the ATI video cards work great for this. Pop in a 9700 AIW Pro and as many 7500s as I need running two monitors each and blam-o! Monitor madness.
You also depend on your roommate keeping the door locked which doesn't happen. You rely on your roommate keeping track of your posessions when their friends are in your room, which doesn't happen. You rely on people not picking the lock, which doesn't happen. If you've got something worth taking someone's going to target it and they are going to find a way around simple security measures like locking the door.
If you are using a laptop the best solution is to keep it on you as much as possible. As for the rest of the stuff accept the fact that things are going to happen to some of it. Check on insurance. You might be able to get a renters policy.
I've been in some of the dirtholes of the US. The Mission in San Fran after midnight, down N street in DC getting lost after a show at the old 930, Alphabet city in NYC (best noodle shops), Hollywood (lived there), The Combat Zone (okay, that's not so bad anymore) and I've never been close to mugged. The worst is some guy tried to pick me up off the street.
The secret? Be aware of what's going on around you, who's around you and walk with confidence.
Toys aren't what attract a mugger. It's ease of target. Plus toys aren't what a mugger really wants most of the time unless you have something they really want. It's cash. Your $2k laptop is worth much less hot. Cash is always worth cash.
While not true for everyone a lot of people can't deal with the side affects of drugs. Especially the subtle mental ones. Psychologists are also able to deal with a lot more issues than drugs can.
For a lot of people taking drugs is like replacing the entire engine when all the car needs is to have it's timing checked.
I've used fvwm, enlightenment, Windows, OS X and to a lesser extent OS 9, the Amiga and GEOS and I don't recall ever seeing the preview they describe in 0008 under Summary of the invention. Can anyone point me to prior art on that one?
What if a machine is zombied through Game Spy software and used to hack another machine. Game Spy's negligence was instrumental to the owner of the hacked machines loss I would think.
If users computers are broken in to as a result of not fixing known vulnerabilities I wonder what kind of liability GameSpy would have under US Tort law for being negligent.
Actually there are systems where everything is encrypted. The admins can't see the data on the systems they manage. The problem is that it requires key management, which is great for a large company/government/military group, but not for the home user, presuming you don't want government mandated key management.
As I said in another reply, I don't expect things to be perfect. People still die in car accidents all the time, but the cars don't blow up in low speed collisions anymore. We have expectations that cars should meet safety and reliability requirements. They shouldn't tip over if I turn, they shouldn't blow up if I'm in an accident, they should do things to protect the users. They shouldn't break easily. Where they do wear out and need repair and replacement the costs and timing are well known and published. While a car owner can do the repairs them selves they can get the work done to the car easily and at a resonable cost. There are warranties on the car. Try putting a five or six year warranty on a computer system (software included)!
Actually in every appartment I've lived in but one the doors are locked from the outside all the time.
When I talk about security flaws I'm not talking about options that make the system insecure, but software that is not designed or implemented correctly. Homebuilders do not deliver doors that can not be locked and windows that can not be closed. The home owner doesn't have to install a windows upgrade to their house because the windows don't work after a week or a month or even a year.
Houses and cars do need to be repaired because they use movable parts and parts exposed to the elements, which software is not. In addition a broken window is an easily and well understood problem. Fixing a window doesn't cause other parts of your house to break.
A 7 yr old can close the windows and lock the doors. A 7 yr old can not understand the complex nature of software security vulnerabilities and make smart choices on installing a program or not. They don't know how to update their computer without breaking other parts of it. That is a fundamental difference.
Despite the fact that computers are technical, and currently require some technical knowledge to run well, they are being marketed and sold to people who are not. They are being marketed and sold to the general public. They should function the way the general public expects. Even if you could accomplish the cultural shift in awareness similar to something like AIDS awareness there still isnt' an easy solution to the problem, and that's the fundamental difference. Anyone can lock doors and windows, anyone can get cheap and easy to use home security systems. Anyone can use a condom. The general public can't pay $20 to $40 US per month to have someone monitor my computer system 24/7 and take care of any problems that happen. The general public can't click on a button and say "my computer is locked down now, no one can get in".
Your comment shows what's wrong with the mindset of developers and other IT people. End users shouldn't have to think about these things. While I understand that security is a dificult problem to solve, it's a problem that needs to be solved for the personal computer because people never will think about computer security.
Arguments that it can't be done remind me all to much of the arguments about how cars can't be manufactured to the quality that people wanted in the early part of the century.
We know how to write good code, but we don't know how to get teams of developers to write it. It's all going to be in the process, and the process costs money and takes time, but the process of how we develop software needs to change so these things don't happen. There needs to be an expectation of quality, the kind of expectation that exists for the auto industry with respect to safety.
When I saw the Cannon Cat demonstrated I finally groked a concept. It's the data stupid! Users want a device to manipulate their data, be it emails, letters, spreadsheets, videos, music. You can even shoe horn playing video games in to this concept, or you can say It's the data and playing video games stupid! depending on how you prefer it, but the point is the same. People don't care about which operating system, browser, or other application they are using. They want a platform for doing what they want to do, and none of it has to do with keeping their computers up to date. It never will. While we are like the auto mechanic who likes to tinker with their own car and trick it out, the vast majority of people will never look under the hood of their own car or update thier operating system. They view their computer the same as their car, their television, or their toaster. They just want it to work, and if it fails in an unsafe way, who's responsible? Not the user.
You could argue from this that the future is going to happen no matter what we do now. The big plot lines are already written from our past. You can change the minor details but there will be a skynet, there will be a rise of the machines, there will be a resistance.
Before there was a T-1 there was going to be something that created skynet in the first place. Technology and inovation move on.
A Paradox can't happen in the past, otherwise it would have happened.
The whole series is about "can you change the future, and how does it change the past" and the result is, no matter how hard we try to change the past or the future, it still happens.
You do realize that the 'fem' guy is a character from previous movies, and that the mocking him kinda fills you in to what happened to him over the past 10 years
I have heard that Logitech makes Microsoft hardware which would explain it's quality. I've been using a Microsoft Natural keyboard for ages, and just love them. Now that Logitech sells them under their own name I buy them.
What gets me is the new layout of the keys above the arrow keys, and the arrow keys. Some things shouldn't be messed with, and they are my insert and my arrow keys!
First, the court already did the do, they already refused to hear it.
Second, this case isn't about reverse engineering, it's about contract law and copyright protection. While the issue on the surface was reverse engineering, the case was about allowing state contract law to overule the protections given to consumers in copyrights. Copyrights assign a number of rights to consumers. It was created so information would be shared. Once the information is published the publisher gets rights to the form of presentation (ie. a book) and the public gets to use the information presented. Reverse engineering is a way to understand the information given to the consumer. You are "reading" the "software". Apparently there are some books that if we read them we can't use that information. In fact, a publisher could publish a book, sell it in a shrink wrap, and place terms on what you can and can not do with the information in that book. By removing the shrinkwrap you agree to the terms!
What happens when someone gets a list of everyone who's had an abortion and posts it somewhere so that others can go and shoot them all, or (this is less of an issue now, but would have been) a list of people taking AZT, so the gay bashers can go beat them up.
The ability to access and share information to help the world would be great, it if wasn't for selfish people who will use that information to their own advantage and the disadvantage of the people who the information is about.
Or how about the government monitoring everyone who reads 'Leaving the 21st Century' (not the book about music), 'The Anarchists Cookbook', '2600' or any number of other books.
Here's the thing about privacy, it's yours to give up. You are or will be a responsible adult who can make desicions about how your personal information is distributed and used. You can publish all the facts if you like.
You do need someone to protect your privacy, because you can't get it back once the cat is out of the bag, therefore you need to make the responsible choice about it's use. You can't do that if it's not protected, the desicion is made for you.
What happens when someone who takes Catherine McKinnon's thinking a little to far and decides to shoot people who look at porn (I don't think Catherine would ever do or suguest that).
We all have things to hide. Sure, we would all like to work somewhere were we are wanted for what we can do and not who we are, but the reality of the situation is some of us need to have jobs and we can't pick and choose. In Florida your employer could fire you for the fact that you look at porn in the privacy of your own home. Some companies have fired everyone in the company who was gay or lesbian. Even with protected status clauses often times you get fired for one reason, but they wanted you gone for another. Privacy protects that.
People say your information wants to be free, but I'm still waiting for them to free their credit card numbers and enough bank details to give me access to them.
Whatever happened to writing software because the software was there to be written?
I'm reminded of Robert Fripp (Guitarist for King Crimson) who said that when the music was there to be played and the players were there who could play it, there would be King Crimson......or something of that sort.
The problem with something like the LRP is that there aren't often people there to write the code. I've had a million good ideas, and some of them I turned in to code, which was GPL'ed and went no where. I wrote the code because the program was there to be written.
The difference is that the good ideas I've had that I've completed were easy. One (a program to put a different signature in.signature every time it's read) was done in something like 40 lines of C. The LRP is not 40 lines of code, it's a project. The place for projects like this are universities, where things like this get done. Universities are not where a lot of us want to be. They have their own issues, but for those who can deal with it, you end up working on something like BSD. Once the project grows beyond the University then you no longer need it, but to get large projects going without one is dificult.
Should there be people who get paid to code for the benefit of everyone else? Sure! Is there an easy way to setup a find and responsibily distribute funds to thousands of people who have good ideas, a way that's not called a research grant? No.
The problem becomes how to fund these kinds of projects and get the right funds to the right people. It seems we need more patrons of the arts and sciences. I don't see the richest man in the world taking anyone in to let them work on something like the LRP.:)
In the mean time, we write software that's there to be written and for whom we have the right people to write it. This leaves a lot of good ideas on the shelf.
I wonder how much of their problems are online music as opposed to the fact that Best Buy, Circuit City and various other retailers have been selling CDs well below retail for many years now, and people are buying them there.
Companies like these sell CDs as loss leaders to get people in their stores. If your at Best Buy once every few weeks guess where your going to think of going to buy your next TV and sterio.
Slashdot Mirror
Good thing my HDTV has HDMI. Unfortunately I bought my receiver before HDMI was common on them and I only have one HDMI interface. I will end up replacing my pre-amp later when the cable box, the HD-DVD player and the Blu-Ray player all want to use HDMI, but then that's why I went cheap on that unit and dumped the money in to some amplifiers that won't need to be replaced until they break and are no longer fixable.
I may also consider a video only switch box instead because regardless of what you buy now for video there will be another standard down the road.
Fortunately for the average consumer pre-amps/receivers are coming with at least a couple of HDMI inputs standard these days.
More than surround sound the rush to Digital everything is what's making home theater complex. If we all would stick to component video and receivers had several 8 channel direct inputs things would be easier and monster cable could make a small fortune (that's 11 wires per device). As it is there's 6 ways to do video and three ways to do audio and the current digital audio standards don't have the bandwidth to handle some of the high resolution audio formats so there's bound to be more. When video goes 1080p and 1660i/p we will need new digital video connectors too. Considering my computer regularly does 1536 it can't be too far down the road (granted it's 2048x1536, not whatever the 16:9 version would be) but I guess that's 10 years down the road.
The author of this article needs to get his head checked. 6.1 and 7.1 surround sound wasn't created and isn't intended for most of the content out today. There are a few that do use matrix to use the rear channels it's not what it's intended for.
What it is intended for is Blu-Ray and HD-DVD where there will be 7 discrete tracks and audio engineers will be properly mixing soundtracks for such setups. That's why you buy a good 7.1 setup today, so you don't have to replace your receiver next year.
He says clipping is a fact of life in all but the most lavish home theater systems. I've got news for him, it's not.
I've never had my amplifier up much above 2 watts on a transient. Granted I've got decently efficient speakers (which despite not being Klipsch sound great). I'd have to go to speakers that were 85 dB @ 1 watt @ 1 meter to hit the limits on a transient. The speakers that come to mind that are that inefficient cost 5k per pair. That's not average home theater setup. If you spend 5k on your front speakers alone you're not going to buy a low-mid range receiver that's only "actually" 35 watts/channel. You're going to buy something with a good amplifier or separates.
When I bought my home theater system I went 7.1. The reason? It added less than 5% to the cost of the audio equipment to add two more surround speakers. Do I use them much now? Nope, but when discrete 7.1 audio tracks are more common in the next year I've got surround speakers that are matched up and ready to go.
Where has the market really outwitted itself? In the electronics stores. By not requiring that the stores have sales staffs that know what they are talking about too many people are buying bad equipment that ultimately they aren't getting value out of. The equipment isn't big enough for the space, the mains and surrounds aren't capable of matching up with each other at all, the customer doesn't know what they need to do to set it up right, etc. Bad sales hurts the industry more than anything else. The electronics stores have been paying less and less attention to their sales staffs over the years and it shows. If the industry wants people to keep buying new audio equipment they need to make sure that people are getting the "wow" factor every time they buy gear.
You roll an 18 in Dex and see if you don't end up with a girlfriend.
Neal's last answer about the book industry makes a point that the Music industry has been missing, and more to the point the "downloadable music" industry is missing. The internet will not destroy the music industry because they do more than make and distribute CDs. They promote. They are the ones who get you air time on the radio stations (those playlists come from somehwere). They get the concert tours together. They get you gigs at the festivals. They make things happen that all have the end result of people buying a CD they otherwise wouldn't. That's called Marketing (cynically, it's making you buy something you don't want to).
But blogs, but user communities, but but but! you say!
The average person on the street doesn't do all those things. If you want someone to buy your book or buy your CD you have to get to them where they live, not make them come to you. In the book industry this may be done with reviews in well read magazines and getting your book on Oprah. With music it's done through Clearchannel and MTV.
yea, they aren't anywhere near the window where I'm actually getting work done that I ignore them :)
Dual monitors do little to increase production these days because even with the extra real estate you still have way to many applications running. I found between 4 and 8 to be idea depending on the task.
Consider a typical power user
3 instant message applications
1 IRC
1000000 web browser windows, each with their own set of tabs
2 office applications
1 iTunes (because really, it just rocks)
3 local system monitors such as task manager or a temp and fan speed monitor
1 email
4 login windows (or Remote Desktop Connections)
I use 1 monitor for my MP3 player, that gives me the width to see all information and depth to see many songs to move on to something better when I don't want to listen to whatever's on now
1 monitor for all my IM applications. In my case it's a bit low res (all used monitors). If I had a higher res monitor I'd include irc here
1 monitor for IRC, because really, one channel isn't enough
1 monitor for various status screens about local system operation
1 monitor for a DVD or TV
1 monitor for my email
1 monitor for my "current work", that is whatever I'm doing now
I use whatever is left or not being used for various browser windows, usually with system or network status screens for work.
I found the ATI video cards work great for this. Pop in a 9700 AIW Pro and as many 7500s as I need running two monitors each and blam-o! Monitor madness.
You also depend on your roommate keeping the door locked which doesn't happen. You rely on your roommate keeping track of your posessions when their friends are in your room, which doesn't happen. You rely on people not picking the lock, which doesn't happen. If you've got something worth taking someone's going to target it and they are going to find a way around simple security measures like locking the door.
If you are using a laptop the best solution is to keep it on you as much as possible. As for the rest of the stuff accept the fact that things are going to happen to some of it. Check on insurance. You might be able to get a renters policy.
I've been in some of the dirtholes of the US. The Mission in San Fran after midnight, down N street in DC getting lost after a show at the old 930, Alphabet city in NYC (best noodle shops), Hollywood (lived there), The Combat Zone (okay, that's not so bad anymore) and I've never been close to mugged. The worst is some guy tried to pick me up off the street.
The secret? Be aware of what's going on around you, who's around you and walk with confidence.
Toys aren't what attract a mugger. It's ease of target. Plus toys aren't what a mugger really wants most of the time unless you have something they really want. It's cash. Your $2k laptop is worth much less hot. Cash is always worth cash.
While not true for everyone a lot of people can't deal with the side affects of drugs. Especially the subtle mental ones. Psychologists are also able to deal with a lot more issues than drugs can.
For a lot of people taking drugs is like replacing the entire engine when all the car needs is to have it's timing checked.
See my article at http://obfuscated.net/archives/000080.php
What do you see as the largest gaps and the largest overreaches in current criminal law with respect to computer technology.
I've used fvwm, enlightenment, Windows, OS X and to a lesser extent OS 9, the Amiga and GEOS and I don't recall ever seeing the preview they describe in 0008 under Summary of the invention. Can anyone point me to prior art on that one?
What if a machine is zombied through Game Spy software and used to hack another machine. Game Spy's negligence was instrumental to the owner of the hacked machines loss I would think.
If users computers are broken in to as a result of not fixing known vulnerabilities I wonder what kind of liability GameSpy would have under US Tort law for being negligent.
Actually there are systems where everything is encrypted. The admins can't see the data on the systems they manage. The problem is that it requires key management, which is great for a large company/government/military group, but not for the home user, presuming you don't want government mandated key management.
As I said in another reply, I don't expect things to be perfect. People still die in car accidents all the time, but the cars don't blow up in low speed collisions anymore. We have expectations that cars should meet safety and reliability requirements. They shouldn't tip over if I turn, they shouldn't blow up if I'm in an accident, they should do things to protect the users. They shouldn't break easily. Where they do wear out and need repair and replacement the costs and timing are well known and published. While a car owner can do the repairs them selves they can get the work done to the car easily and at a resonable cost. There are warranties on the car. Try putting a five or six year warranty on a computer system (software included)!
Actually in every appartment I've lived in but one the doors are locked from the outside all the time.
When I talk about security flaws I'm not talking about options that make the system insecure, but software that is not designed or implemented correctly. Homebuilders do not deliver doors that can not be locked and windows that can not be closed. The home owner doesn't have to install a windows upgrade to their house because the windows don't work after a week or a month or even a year.
Houses and cars do need to be repaired because they use movable parts and parts exposed to the elements, which software is not. In addition a broken window is an easily and well understood problem. Fixing a window doesn't cause other parts of your house to break.
A 7 yr old can close the windows and lock the doors. A 7 yr old can not understand the complex nature of software security vulnerabilities and make smart choices on installing a program or not. They don't know how to update their computer without breaking other parts of it. That is a fundamental difference.
Despite the fact that computers are technical, and currently require some technical knowledge to run well, they are being marketed and sold to people who are not. They are being marketed and sold to the general public. They should function the way the general public expects. Even if you could accomplish the cultural shift in awareness similar to something like AIDS awareness there still isnt' an easy solution to the problem, and that's the fundamental difference. Anyone can lock doors and windows, anyone can get cheap and easy to use home security systems. Anyone can use a condom. The general public can't pay $20 to $40 US per month to have someone monitor my computer system 24/7 and take care of any problems that happen. The general public can't click on a button and say "my computer is locked down now, no one can get in".
Your comment shows what's wrong with the mindset of developers and other IT people. End users shouldn't have to think about these things. While I understand that security is a dificult problem to solve, it's a problem that needs to be solved for the personal computer because people never will think about computer security.
Arguments that it can't be done remind me all to much of the arguments about how cars can't be manufactured to the quality that people wanted in the early part of the century.
We know how to write good code, but we don't know how to get teams of developers to write it. It's all going to be in the process, and the process costs money and takes time, but the process of how we develop software needs to change so these things don't happen. There needs to be an expectation of quality, the kind of expectation that exists for the auto industry with respect to safety.
When I saw the Cannon Cat demonstrated I finally groked a concept. It's the data stupid! Users want a device to manipulate their data, be it emails, letters, spreadsheets, videos, music. You can even shoe horn playing video games in to this concept, or you can say It's the data and playing video games stupid! depending on how you prefer it, but the point is the same. People don't care about which operating system, browser, or other application they are using. They want a platform for doing what they want to do, and none of it has to do with keeping their computers up to date. It never will. While we are like the auto mechanic who likes to tinker with their own car and trick it out, the vast majority of people will never look under the hood of their own car or update thier operating system. They view their computer the same as their car, their television, or their toaster. They just want it to work, and if it fails in an unsafe way, who's responsible? Not the user.
From T1 and T2.
You could argue from this that the future is going to happen no matter what we do now. The big plot lines are already written from our past. You can change the minor details but there will be a skynet, there will be a rise of the machines, there will be a resistance.
Before there was a T-1 there was going to be something that created skynet in the first place. Technology and inovation move on.
A Paradox can't happen in the past, otherwise it would have happened.
The whole series is about "can you change the future, and how does it change the past" and the result is, no matter how hard we try to change the past or the future, it still happens.
You do realize that the 'fem' guy is a character from previous movies, and that the mocking him kinda fills you in to what happened to him over the past 10 years
I have heard that Logitech makes Microsoft hardware which would explain it's quality. I've been using a Microsoft Natural keyboard for ages, and just love them. Now that Logitech sells them under their own name I buy them.
What gets me is the new layout of the keys above the arrow keys, and the arrow keys. Some things shouldn't be messed with, and they are my insert and my arrow keys!
First, the court already did the do, they already refused to hear it.
Second, this case isn't about reverse engineering, it's about contract law and copyright protection. While the issue on the surface was reverse engineering, the case was about allowing state contract law to overule the protections given to consumers in copyrights. Copyrights assign a number of rights to consumers. It was created so information would be shared. Once the information is published the publisher gets rights to the form of presentation (ie. a book) and the public gets to use the information presented. Reverse engineering is a way to understand the information given to the consumer. You are "reading" the "software". Apparently there are some books that if we read them we can't use that information. In fact, a publisher could publish a book, sell it in a shrink wrap, and place terms on what you can and can not do with the information in that book. By removing the shrinkwrap you agree to the terms!
What happens when someone gets a list of everyone who's had an abortion and posts it somewhere so that others can go and shoot them all, or (this is less of an issue now, but would have been) a list of people taking AZT, so the gay bashers can go beat them up.
The ability to access and share information to help the world would be great, it if wasn't for selfish people who will use that information to their own advantage and the disadvantage of the people who the information is about.
Or how about the government monitoring everyone who reads 'Leaving the 21st Century' (not the book about music), 'The Anarchists Cookbook', '2600' or any number of other books.
Here's the thing about privacy, it's yours to give up. You are or will be a responsible adult who can make desicions about how your personal information is distributed and used. You can publish all the facts if you like.
You do need someone to protect your privacy, because you can't get it back once the cat is out of the bag, therefore you need to make the responsible choice about it's use. You can't do that if it's not protected, the desicion is made for you.
What happens when someone who takes Catherine McKinnon's thinking a little to far and decides to shoot people who look at porn (I don't think Catherine would ever do or suguest that).
We all have things to hide. Sure, we would all like to work somewhere were we are wanted for what we can do and not who we are, but the reality of the situation is some of us need to have jobs and we can't pick and choose. In Florida your employer could fire you for the fact that you look at porn in the privacy of your own home. Some companies have fired everyone in the company who was gay or lesbian. Even with protected status clauses often times you get fired for one reason, but they wanted you gone for another. Privacy protects that.
People say your information wants to be free, but I'm still waiting for them to free their credit card numbers and enough bank details to give me access to them.
Whatever happened to writing software because the software was there to be written?
...or something of that sort.
.signature every time it's read) was done in something like 40 lines of C. The LRP is not 40 lines of code, it's a project. The place for projects like this are universities, where things like this get done. Universities are not where a lot of us want to be. They have their own issues, but for those who can deal with it, you end up working on something like BSD. Once the project grows beyond the University then you no longer need it, but to get large projects going without one is dificult.
:)
I'm reminded of Robert Fripp (Guitarist for King Crimson) who said that when the music was there to be played and the players were there who could play it, there would be King Crimson...
The problem with something like the LRP is that there aren't often people there to write the code. I've had a million good ideas, and some of them I turned in to code, which was GPL'ed and went no where. I wrote the code because the program was there to be written.
The difference is that the good ideas I've had that I've completed were easy. One (a program to put a different signature in
Should there be people who get paid to code for the benefit of everyone else? Sure! Is there an easy way to setup a find and responsibily distribute funds to thousands of people who have good ideas, a way that's not called a research grant? No.
The problem becomes how to fund these kinds of projects and get the right funds to the right people. It seems we need more patrons of the arts and sciences. I don't see the richest man in the world taking anyone in to let them work on something like the LRP.
In the mean time, we write software that's there to be written and for whom we have the right people to write it. This leaves a lot of good ideas on the shelf.
I wonder how much of their problems are online music as opposed to the fact that Best Buy, Circuit City and various other retailers have been selling CDs well below retail for many years now, and people are buying them there.
Companies like these sell CDs as loss leaders to get people in their stores. If your at Best Buy once every few weeks guess where your going to think of going to buy your next TV and sterio.