Surely the G5 itself should be banned for public safety. Any computer that can blow you through the walls of your house and into a tree should not be allowed!
Oh wait. You mean I am supposed to use my judgement and work out what bits are the truth and what bits are advertsing hyperbole.
Silly me! I though every part of every ad on TV was literal truth.
I actually went to the site that is the cause of all this: www.mp3s4free.net and found that it doesn't even appear to be hosting pirated music. It is simply searchable database of mp3 files that are hosted elsewhere on the Internet. It looks primarily like the site is profiting from capturing email addresses and advertising rather than from the music itself.
What I was quite impressed about was that the site is still up. Many ISPs would have killed the site straight away - assuming guilt rather than innocence. My site is also hosted with Comcen and they seem to be a good bunch.
You can probably do what you want, but it isn't as nice as it should be -
Your iTunes library is available in XML format, have a look in
C:\Documents and Settings\username\My Documents\My Music\iTunes
It would be pretty simple to write some code to generate static playlists based on the contents of other playlists, but it would be nice if Apple provided it "out of the box". Feel free to request it here - if enough people want it, it may happen.
This is my favourite story of something overhead in a Hi Fi store.
A was salesman trying to sell a customer a CD player. The CD player in question had a platter like a turntable rather than a tray. You placed the CD on the platter upside down. The idea was that the higher inertia of the platter help playback. The quote that made me turn around and walk right out of the store was:
Customer: I don't understand how the turntable can make a CD sound better.
Salesperson: Well, you might not be able to hear the difference but it does sound better!
Of course this argument didn't work when Apple (successfully) sued a pre-paid telephone card provider in Australia that called itself "Apple". There is much less similarity between pre-paid long distance and computer hardware/software than between Tibco's Rendezvous (multicast based messaging) and Apple's Rendezvous (multicast based messaging).
I am an Apple fan, and I doubt that anyone would confuse Apple's Rendezvous with enterprise integration software that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, but it does seem to be a classic case of "reap what you sow".
I run the website that was linked in the story, and I did receive an email with the same question around the same time as the story went up. I cannot confirm whether my correspondant and Bri3D are one and the same, but to me it looks genuine.
I suspect that it might use a thermal transfer ribbon like some electric typewriters and labelers. That way there is no ink to leak.
Also, based on the fact that it won't ship until 2005 and all of the "articles" on the printer actually seem to be press releases from the company itself (articles on at least two different web sites have the same text) it may not leak by virtue of being "vapour":-).
($1999 for an entry level G5? I love Macs, but Jesus tapdancing Christ...)
I know. And can you believe Porsche want $47000 for an entry level Boxster. I love Porsche, but really. I can get a Geo for much less.
Seriously, I will admit that Apple has a price premium compared to your average clone, but the article compares an entry level clone (ie. Shared Ram video etc) with an entry level high-performance workstation. Yes, they are both entry-level but entry to different markets.
A fairer comparison would be against the eMac at $799. You still pay more but it is up to the consumer to decide whether the ease of use & support is worth the money.
Australia also suffers from this problem (as do many parts of the rural U.S. I believe). Unfortunately this isn't directly the fault of the Telcos. xDSL is actually a pretty crummy technology - it is a "hack" designed to make copper wires carry more bandwidth than they were originally intended to. As a result is suffers from distance limitations and is dependent on line quality.
It would be good, however, if the governments applied more pressure for the Telcos to use money they get charging city dwellers much more than it costs to provide a service to subsidise internet in the country areas. (This has happend with voic e lines for years).
Telstra does have to provide access to the local loop to other DSL providers, however there is some evidence that they are playing dirty - telling the alternate providers that a particular line does not meet specs for DSL but telling the customer that they CAN get Telstra DSL on the same line. The alternate ISPs also claim that the charges for access to the local loop make it difficult to compete with Telstra.
Cable TV rollout in Australia is pretty small due to the low density of population - satellite is cheaper. Cable modems are available where cable has been rolled out, but that service is also provided by Telstra! (Some areas have cable from another company, whose cable modem charges and terms seem more reasonable, but it is not widely available).
The problem stems from the way that the government de-regulated the comms industry a number of years ago. They should have split Telstra into two components - one to own and manage the actual network of copper and fibre and one to sell services on top of this network. The solution we ended up with has the biggest retail provider, Telstra, also being the main wholesale provider. This makes it almost impossible for new service providers to get a fair deal.
In Australia, EMI has started using copy protection on all new releases. It is clearly labelled on the CD cover. The labelling indicates that the CD can only be played on Windows 95 & above.
The CD is actually a data/music disc. Computers see the data portion which contains (allegedly low bit-rate)wma files.
Too bad if you have Linux, or a Mac, or one of several new stereos and DVD/CD players that are really computers (ie. pretty much anything that can play MP3 cds)...
In addition to the data files, the standard SCMS copy protection is changed from the normal "allow 1 digital copy" to "allow no copies". This means that you cannot copy the CD digitally to a minidisc or DAT.
I haven't purchased any of these CDs on principle. All of the information above was gained from reading a message board on EMI Australia's web site (which has now been taken down because people were describing how to circumvent the technology).
Voice traffic doesn't use as much bandwidth as you would think. One full-rate PCM voice channel is 56Kbits/sec (in North America) or 64Kbits/sec (Europe/Australia etc). IP telephones typically use compression so that the actual bandwith required can be as low as 8Kbits/sec. So even 3Mbit/sec wireless is plenty of bandwidth for these sorts of devices.
If bandwidth does become a problem in a particular area, simply take a leaf out of the mobile phone providers book - deploy more cells in that area, with the added advantage that an 802.11 base station is much cheaper than a GSM/PCS/CDMA/Whatever microcell
These phones are typically used in a "campus" type environment such as a University, large hotel or hospital where staff need to be mobile in a limited environment. Unlike standard digital cordless phones these phones can roam from base-station to base-station, so they have a greater effective range. And unlike cell phones they are simply an extension of the PBX so there are no airtime charges.
Many PBX vendors provide DECT options but these require you to install special purpose DECT base stations around your campus while 802.11 base stations can be used for both IP telephony and data.
I can't help but admire the irony of the spam messages I receive offering to "remove pop-ups for ever!!!". I am just waiting for the first spam that offers to "eliminate spam today!!!"
One of the nice things about misterhouse is that it is written in PERL and is very expandable. The auhor, Bruce Boyes, is also very active in supporting the project as is the Misterhouse user community.
As long as your chosen HA technology has a serial port or an IP interface you can interface it with Misterhouse.
For example, a module has been written to support the high-end C-BUS system that is available in Australia.
Spam, after all, is perfectly legal in most places -- as long as it isn't fraudulent.
Spammers say the combination of anonymity, volume and extremely low cost makes it worthwhile.
Spammers seem to focus on the message content not being fraudulent (and I am doubtful about claims to enlarge certain body parts...) and ignore their fraudulent behaviour - which is the reason that spam is anonymous and low cost.
If I forged a letter on a company's letterhead, snuck into their building, duplicated millions of copies on one of their photocopiers and dumped them into an out tray, so that the company would pay the postage I would probably be guilty of trespass, grand theft and fraud. But these guys are
(Disclaimer: I am not defending insane IP patents so don't flame me:-) ) They may be logical, even obvious extensions but if they were the first to think of them then they can get a patent. This patent was filed in 1998 and packet filtering at the time was quite restricted because of the latency that it introduced (packets needed to be processed by a CPU rather than by a switching chip). The issue of the variable field was quite important at them time. More than just allowing an arbitrary offset it allowed you to filter if a value appeared anywhere in a variable length field (ie. if the list of numbers (1,4,5,2) contains a '5' in it anywhere. As the patent explains this was important in token-ring source-route bridging. Good thing they have 20 years of patent protection for that vitally important token ring filtering capability;-)
The patent actually acknowledges that there is "related art" in the are of packet filtering. This patent claims four improvements:
Directing data to multiple ports (obviously very oriented towards LAN switching)
Filtering on variable length fields
Jumping between rules rather than sequential processing
Less than/greater than comparisons in addition to equals/not equals
I am not too familiar with IPFilter, but a quick read of the web page indicates that it doesn't support these features, although NAT may come close in some ways to the first (IANAL).
I also suspect that some bigger fish, such as Cisco, may infringe on this patent if IPFilter does
Here are the relevent piecesof the related art section:
prior art techniques also allow filtering on an arbitrary offset within a packet. However, these techniques do not allow filtering on the contents of well known variable length fields, e.g., the routing information field (RIF) of an IEEE 802.5 token ring data packet.
Prior art filtering mechanisms allow for the application of multiple filters to the same data packet; however, the filters are applied in sequential order--no skipping to other filters is allowed. As soon as a match is found, no further filters are considered and the packet is processed according to the filter for which a match occurred. The only processing provided is to either permit the packet to be forwarded or drop the packet. There is no mechanism by which the data packet may be redirected to a port of the network device other than the normal destination port to which the packet is forwarded in the absence of an access list or filter, nor is a packet redirected to multiple destination ports.
and
Moreover, a filter cannot jump to another filter, rather, filters are applied according to the order in which they are configured in the network device. Furthermore, prior art filtering systems do not allow forwarding of a data packet to an alternative port or an additional port. The packets may only be forwarded to the normal destination port or dropped. Finally, filters heretofore have only allowed the logical operators equal and not equal in determining whether a value specified by the filter matches or fails to match the contents of a data packet at the location in the packet specified by the filter. The additional logical operators of less than, less than or equal to, greater than, and greater than or equal to, have not been permissible
The ISP does not have to do anything special to support this. In fact, each connection could be to a different ISP.
It should be noted however, that this router cannot load balance a single TCP session across both links, so the maximum you can get for a single TCP session is the speed of a single link. (I think that you possibly could get more outbound speed if the router used source address spoofing, but this may cause problems if the ISP has anti-spoofing filters so they probably don't do this.)
As each link will have a different source IP address packets for a given session will always have to be transferred on the same link. This also means that if a link fails some sessions will drop. The router will be able to re-establish them over the second link but it will not be seamless as it would with a true BGP connection (but hey, the price is a lot less!)
As several other posters have pointed out, "official" support for Linux doesn't really matter. If a machine is popular (which Thinkpads are) then the community will work out how to get Linux running on it. IBM can help by releasing hardware information where required.
Like it or not, Linux is still fundamentaly a "geek platform". Joe Public is not going to buy Linux instead of Windows. If he is interested in trying it , he will probably get an experienced friend to help him. Linux will not increase in popularity because mainstream vendors offer it as an option. However, if the grassroots movement can increase the popularity of Linux, then the mainstream vendors will offer it as an option - supply will follow demand.
IMHO the issue is the ability to purchase machines without the Microsoft Tax. Creating a Linux pre-installed version of a Thinkpad costs IBM more per machine than Windows because the sales are lower.
Creating a no-OS installed machine requires only omitting one step in the manufacturing process - the drive image. This machine would then be cheaper for two reasons:
There is no need to amortize the image development cost
There is no operaing system license fee
This at least provides an opportunity for customers that want to install Linux to use the hardware they like without supporting a company that they don't.
Perhaps. I think the fundamental issue is "Is it the laws duty to prevent people from committing crimes if we have the technology to do so or" (Not that I beleive that what the CBDTPA proposes is necessarily technically feasible).
To use another example, the banning of firearms is often proposed to prevent/reduce crime however the gun lobby maintains "guns don't kill people - people do". In this case "computers don't breach copyright - people do".
Let's examine the "traffic cop" analogy further. We have laws that regulate how we should act on the roads and the police enforce those laws when they catch people breaking them. This is the current copyright regime - you can copy but if you get caught you are in trouble.
Now, let's look at the CBDTPA approach - prevent copyright infringement.
Conintuing the traffic laws analogy, a law could be passed that required vehicles be fitted with speed limiters - this would prevent people from breaking the speed laws. If this law was suggested I don't think debate would get very far before community outrage forced its abandonment - people would claim that it unfairly infringed upon their freedom. The problem is that the vast majority don't realise what they would be giving up with the CBDTPA, but they are being told that without this law there will be no more music, TV or Movies!
Also have a look at the MP3elf This is an open source hardware and software project that I am involved with. We have just released our second revision board. The system consists of an embedded java computer in the mp3elf device itself and server side software, also written in java. The server can work with the JReceiver software that has been mentioned elsewhere. This gives it the ability to play back Ogg via JReceiver's transcoding support
Slashdot Mirror
...the Poma wearable PC still looks dorky!
Oh wait. You mean I am supposed to use my judgement and work out what bits are the truth and what bits are advertsing hyperbole.
Silly me! I though every part of every ad on TV was literal truth.
I actually went to the site that is the cause of all this: www.mp3s4free.net and found that it doesn't even appear to be hosting pirated music. It is simply searchable database of mp3 files that are hosted elsewhere on the Internet. It looks primarily like the site is profiting from capturing email addresses and advertising rather than from the music itself.
What I was quite impressed about was that the site is still up. Many ISPs would have killed the site straight away - assuming guilt rather than innocence. My site is also hosted with Comcen and they seem to be a good bunch.
Your iTunes library is available in XML format, have a look in It would be pretty simple to write some code to generate static playlists based on the contents of other playlists, but it would be nice if Apple provided it "out of the box". Feel free to request it here - if enough people want it, it may happen.
A was salesman trying to sell a customer a CD player. The CD player in question had a platter like a turntable rather than a tray. You placed the CD on the platter upside down. The idea was that the higher inertia of the platter help playback. The quote that made me turn around and walk right out of the store was:
Of course this argument didn't work when Apple (successfully) sued a pre-paid telephone card provider in Australia that called itself "Apple". There is much less similarity between pre-paid long distance and computer hardware/software than between Tibco's Rendezvous (multicast based messaging) and Apple's Rendezvous (multicast based messaging).
I am an Apple fan, and I doubt that anyone would confuse Apple's Rendezvous with enterprise integration software that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, but it does seem to be a classic case of "reap what you sow".
I run the website that was linked in the story, and I did receive an email with the same question around the same time as the story went up. I cannot confirm whether my correspondant and Bri3D are one and the same, but to me it looks genuine.
I suspect that it might use a thermal transfer ribbon like some electric typewriters and labelers. That way there is no ink to leak.
:-).
Also, based on the fact that it won't ship until 2005 and all of the "articles" on the printer actually seem to be press releases from the company itself (articles on at least two different web sites have the same text) it may not leak by virtue of being "vapour"
Seriously, I will admit that Apple has a price premium compared to your average clone, but the article compares an entry level clone (ie. Shared Ram video etc) with an entry level high-performance workstation. Yes, they are both entry-level but entry to different markets.
A fairer comparison would be against the eMac at $799. You still pay more but it is up to the consumer to decide whether the ease of use & support is worth the money.
It would be good, however, if the governments applied more pressure for the Telcos to use money they get charging city dwellers much more than it costs to provide a service to subsidise internet in the country areas. (This has happend with voic e lines for years).
Cable TV rollout in Australia is pretty small due to the low density of population - satellite is cheaper. Cable modems are available where cable has been rolled out, but that service is also provided by Telstra! (Some areas have cable from another company, whose cable modem charges and terms seem more reasonable, but it is not widely available).
The problem stems from the way that the government de-regulated the comms industry a number of years ago. They should have split Telstra into two components - one to own and manage the actual network of copper and fibre and one to sell services on top of this network. The solution we ended up with has the biggest retail provider, Telstra, also being the main wholesale provider. This makes it almost impossible for new service providers to get a fair deal.
The CD is actually a data/music disc. Computers see the data portion which contains (allegedly low bit-rate)wma files.
Too bad if you have Linux, or a Mac, or one of several new stereos and DVD/CD players that are really computers (ie. pretty much anything that can play MP3 cds)...
In addition to the data files, the standard SCMS copy protection is changed from the normal "allow 1 digital copy" to "allow no copies". This means that you cannot copy the CD digitally to a minidisc or DAT.
I haven't purchased any of these CDs on principle. All of the information above was gained from reading a message board on EMI Australia's web site (which has now been taken down because people were describing how to circumvent the technology).
Voice traffic doesn't use as much bandwidth as you would think. One full-rate PCM voice channel is 56Kbits/sec (in North America) or 64Kbits/sec (Europe/Australia etc). IP telephones typically use compression so that the actual bandwith required can be as low as 8Kbits/sec. So even 3Mbit/sec wireless is plenty of bandwidth for these sorts of devices.
If bandwidth does become a problem in a particular area, simply take a leaf out of the mobile phone providers book - deploy more cells in that area, with the added advantage that an 802.11 base station is much cheaper than a GSM/PCS/CDMA/Whatever microcell
These phones are typically used in a "campus" type environment such as a University, large hotel or hospital where staff need to be mobile in a limited environment. Unlike standard digital cordless phones these phones can roam from base-station to base-station, so they have a greater effective range. And unlike cell phones they are simply an extension of the PBX so there are no airtime charges.
Many PBX vendors provide DECT options but these require you to install special purpose DECT base stations around your campus while 802.11 base stations can be used for both IP telephony and data.
I can't help but admire the irony of the spam messages I receive offering to "remove pop-ups for ever!!!". I am just waiting for the first spam that offers to "eliminate spam today!!!"
As long as your chosen HA technology has a serial port or an IP interface you can interface it with Misterhouse.
For example, a module has been written to support the high-end C-BUS system that is available in Australia.
If I forged a letter on a company's letterhead, snuck into their building, duplicated millions of copies on one of their photocopiers and dumped them into an out tray, so that the company would pay the postage I would probably be guilty of trespass, grand theft and fraud. But these guys are
(Disclaimer: I am not defending insane IP patents so don't flame me :-) ) ;-)
They may be logical, even obvious extensions but if they were the first to think of them then they can get a patent.
This patent was filed in 1998 and packet filtering at the time was quite restricted because of the latency that it introduced (packets needed to be processed by a CPU rather than by a switching chip).
The issue of the variable field was quite important at them time. More than just allowing an arbitrary offset it allowed you to filter if a value appeared anywhere in a variable length field (ie. if the list of numbers (1,4,5,2) contains a '5' in it anywhere. As the patent explains this was important in token-ring source-route bridging. Good thing they have 20 years of patent protection for that vitally important token ring filtering capability
- Directing data to multiple ports (obviously very oriented towards LAN switching)
- Filtering on variable length fields
- Jumping between rules rather than sequential processing
- Less than/greater than comparisons in addition to equals/not equals
I am not too familiar with IPFilter, but a quick read of the web page indicates that it doesn't support these features, although NAT may come close in some ways to the first (IANAL).I also suspect that some bigger fish, such as Cisco, may infringe on this patent if IPFilter does
Here are the relevent piecesof the related art section:
andThe ISP does not have to do anything special to support this. In fact, each connection could be to a different ISP.
It should be noted however, that this router cannot load balance a single TCP session across both links, so the maximum you can get for a single TCP session is the speed of a single link. (I think that you possibly could get more outbound speed if the router used source address spoofing, but this may cause problems if the ISP has anti-spoofing filters so they probably don't do this.)
As each link will have a different source IP address packets for a given session will always have to be transferred on the same link.
This also means that if a link fails some sessions will drop. The router will be able to re-establish them over the second link but it will not be seamless as it would with a true BGP connection (but hey, the price is a lot less!)
Like it or not, Linux is still fundamentaly a "geek platform". Joe Public is not going to buy Linux instead of Windows. If he is interested in trying it , he will probably get an experienced friend to help him. Linux will not increase in popularity because mainstream vendors offer it as an option. However, if the grassroots movement can increase the popularity of Linux, then the mainstream vendors will offer it as an option - supply will follow demand.
IMHO the issue is the ability to purchase machines without the Microsoft Tax. Creating a Linux pre-installed version of a Thinkpad costs IBM more per machine than Windows because the sales are lower.
Creating a no-OS installed machine requires only omitting one step in the manufacturing process - the drive image. This machine would then be cheaper for two reasons:
- There is no need to amortize the image development cost
- There is no operaing system license fee
This at least provides an opportunity for customers that want to install Linux to use the hardware they like without supporting a company that they don't.Does this also mean that black markers and Post-It Notes are anti-cirumvention devices that must be banned?
Perhaps.
I think the fundamental issue is "Is it the laws duty to prevent people from committing crimes if we have the technology to do so or" (Not that I beleive that what the CBDTPA proposes is necessarily technically feasible).
To use another example, the banning of firearms is often proposed to prevent/reduce crime however the gun lobby maintains "guns don't kill people - people do". In this case "computers don't breach copyright - people do".
Let's examine the "traffic cop" analogy further. We have laws that regulate how we should act on the roads and the police enforce those laws when they catch people breaking them. This is the current copyright regime - you can copy but if you get caught you are in trouble.
Now, let's look at the CBDTPA approach - prevent copyright infringement.
Conintuing the traffic laws analogy, a law could be passed that required vehicles be fitted with speed limiters - this would prevent people from breaking the speed laws. If this law was suggested I don't think debate would get very far before community outrage forced its abandonment - people would claim that it unfairly infringed upon their freedom. The problem is that the vast majority don't realise what they would be giving up with the CBDTPA, but they are being told that without this law there will be no more music, TV or Movies!
Also have a look at the MP3elf
This is an open source hardware and software project that I am involved with.
We have just released our second revision board.
The system consists of an embedded java computer in the mp3elf device itself and server side software, also written in java.
The server can work with the JReceiver software that has been mentioned elsewhere. This gives it the ability to play back Ogg via JReceiver's transcoding support