Question I have is this: if you search and can't find the document then do you get a refund?
You start charging for content -- searches, text, whatever -- you suddenly raise the bar. You can't expect people to "pay for searching" if the success rate isn't incredibly high.
Besides -- with very few exceptions -- does anyone actually buy into the idea of "premium content?" Lately, I see a lot of sites charging for premium content. But when you actually poke around and try to figure out the content, you discover a lot of lame videos, lame games, and generally uninspired content. (I'm thinking here of some of Real.com's "premium" offerings.)
True, the Wall Street Journal -- and other content specific sites like it -- are exceptions, but a *search engine?*
Cripes, you're not even paying for the content, as I understand this -- you're paying for some sort of advanced search algorithm. I mean, if you're paying for the content -- and they actually know where the content is -- then why not simply offer up the content and skip the whole "premium search" idea?
I don't get it. But I do know this: whenever most websites start talking about "premium" stuff, it usually means that they're close to going bankrupt.
Another example:
Salon.com. I went ahead and signed up a one-month subscription. I figued it'd be nice to get all of Salon in a single PDF file. Well, it *was* nice. But now I realize that size of "Salon Daily" in PDF is shrinking -- drastically. Yesterday, I think it was down to about 8 pages -- and not even all the stories on their website were actually in the PDF. (And the formatting for interviews is non-existent, so there's no way to distinguish the question from the answer -- which, in the case of last week's Noam Chomsky interview, was incredibly disconcerting (since Noam sounded as though he'd drunk a six-pack of Pabst and was spouting off any old shit that zipped through his head. One of the weirdest interviews I've ever read. But I digress...)
And yet another example of screwed up premium content:
Tivo. I hear now Tivo has partnered up with Real (I thought it was a joke, too, but then I read the press release) and see that they're going to recycle the stale videos and stale audio on Real's site into my Tivo. Wonderful. And then -- as if that wasn't enough to make you lose all faith in Tivo -- they've partnered up with (drum roll) some company that makes the 'You Don't Know Jack' game. Please. Like I want some 5 year old game being pumped down my wires just so Tivo can say they've conquered the living room?
It's interesting, but the real premium content -- the stuff that would actually make "premium" worth a premium price, IMHO -- is nowhere near being available -- and that's the "jukebox in the sky" idea (any song, on any computer, anywhere) or the "any concert, anytime, anywhere" idea. I'd gladly pay 10 bucks a month to see quality concerts streamed on-line. But not stale old recycled stuff. Up-to-the-minute stuff. Like being able to catch Dylan from the night before. Or whoever. Concert-at-glance type stuff. That's interesting. It's not worth a *lot* of money, but it'd be compelling content.
Ditto for the jukebox-in-the-sky.
But paying for some search engine?
Please. I bet even the Yahoo suits are scratching their heads and wondering how, exactly, to deliver "premium searching." I mean, maybe someone tries it out once because they're looking for a specific document -- like I coulda used a premium search not long ago when I was looking to compare miniDV cameras and wanted to see all the PDF manuals of my top-3 wishlist cameras -- but that's about it. (Of course, I couldn't find any of the manuals on-line.)
Or maybe to find some old on-line manual for the garbage disposal underneath your sink that has that little button on the bottom of the disposal unit and you wonder what the hell that button is for because it doesn't seem to do anything when you press it.
One thing I don't understand: why keep harping about "sharing?" As I read this -- the new Napster FAQ -- you no longer share music, right?
You simply connect to Napster, Inc and grab your limited tracks? So this is essentially a crippled version of the "jukebox in the sky" model that everyone has been talking about but no one can implement?
I mean, this is like MP3.com back before they got bitch-slapped by the RIAA, right? When you stored your music in a "locker" and could access it anywhere? (Which remains an interesting idea, although I have no idea how it works now on MP3.com. Last time I checked, all but two of my songs were "locked down" and a pop-up let me know that MP3.com were "working diligently" to restore the music in my locker. Sorta like the same lame rhetoric that Napster has: "We're working as fast as we can to get you MP3s to play on your MP3 player.")
Now, okay, maybe someone can explain this to me. I don't mean this to be a troll or flamebait. I'm actually curious about this: why in the world would I *pay* Napster simply to get a crippled version of (take your pick) Morpheus?
Granted, it's nice to see that artists are going to get paid. But -- again -- maybe I'm missing something here -- but if the RIAA four years had foresight enough to deal with the MP3 onslaught in a shrewd, savvy way, we'd (a) have the great big jukebox in the sky at this point and (b) the artists (at this point) *would* be getting paid.
So by supporting Napster -- or MusicNet or PressPlay -- what I'm essentially doing is two things: (1) paying protection so as not to get fingered by the RIAA and (2) supporting the RIAA in their quest to *litigate* technology out of the marketplace.
This new Napster is "approved" technology where the old technologies are maverick technologies, unapproved, and therefore illegal?
I get the sense that Napster will become some sort of litmus test for the RIAA. It's going to be one of the incubators (MusicNet and PressPlay being the others) to see how profit can be derived from on-line music.
And again, I got no problem with giving artists their fair-share, but I'm very uncomfortable with the RIAA being in the middle.
What I'd like to see is a Napster that takes the RIAA out of the equation. I'd like to be able to give Bob Dylan or whomever my five cent listening fee and know that it's going into Dylan's pockets. I don't want some fat-cat exec skimming 4.5 cents from that nickel in order to support his Lexus habit or the fact that he or she has to pay rent on his overbig house in the Hamptons.
Wait, let me get this straight: $1499 for (1) a 40 gig hard drive and (2) a sleek looking case that fits into my home stereo system?
What are these guys smoking?
Two weeks agao, they come out with the obscenely priced PVR.
Last week, they sue Tivo.
This week, they have an obscenely priced hard drive/case that doesn't even play DVDs! Heck, even the ZapStation -- lame as it is -- has DVD capabilities.
I realize this stuff comes down in price once it establishes its niche in the market place. And I realize -- to some extent, at least -- you gotta give SonicBlue credit for some forward-thinking in a pretty stagnant consumer-digital-recorder marketplace.
But this price -- $1499 -- for a hard drive in a pretty case is beyond outrageous. It's beyond even "obscene." I mean, they're testing the waters here, I realize -- but come on!
Now, if they'd *combine* their new DVR with this digital audio receiver -- and then drop the price to around 699 -- they *might* have an interesting product -- a Tivo, in other words, that can record sound and video onto a CDR or DVD-R (or whatever the format is). Sorta like a DVD version of the Terrapin video recorder that can not only record in every known format -- CDR, VCD, SVCD, DVD -- but can also output digitally (optical or coax) and also send video out across a home LAN --this might be interesting -- especially if the hard drive is upgradable.
40 gigs is nothing these days. Yeah, it holds a lot of music -- 650 hours or whatever -- but what these people oftentimes don't realize is that once you have your 40 gigger filled, you don't stop. I mean, you keep getting *more* music. So 40 gig might be your "basic" music collection, but without any way to expand the 40 to over a 100 or so gigs -- or a way to swap out the filled hard drive for an empty one -- it doesn't make much sense.
Even for those folks who have hundreds of CDs -- and who eschew the MP3 scene -- 40 gigs won't even hold a good amount of CDs. It'll hold a lot, sure, but then what are you supposed to use to digitize the rest of your collection? Spend another $1499 for another measly 40 gigs?
LOL. How about just go into Best Buy, snag the latest and greatest Maxtor/Seagate hard drive for $129 and slap it into your computer.
Assuming $129 is the current price of, say, a 40 gigger -- $1499 ought to buy, well, close to 12 40 gig drives. Which gives a total -- right? -- of around 480 gigs. Now, this is approaching a size that most folks would feel pretty comfortable with -- 480 gigs is a good sized chunk of storage.
And -- finally -- why the hell doesn't some guy start making cool looking PC cases that fit in with stereo racks? I know there's the BookPC cases, but I gotta admit: the SonicBlue case looks pretty cool. I'd easily pay $199 or even $399 for a really, really cool looking case that I could line up with all of my other components -- my amp, DVD, CD, DirecTivo -- that looked like it was actually a component instead of a crappy looking PC case masquerading as a poor-man's SonicBlue digital audio receiver.
I second this: Covad DSL seems -- at this point, at least -- much better than nearly any alternative.
I've got a 1500/384 pipe, absolutely *no* restrictions on servers or bandwidth, up to 10 IP addresses, no funky PPPoE, and access to a shell account. (Plus I'm going through Speakeasy's Chicago POP, so my pings are -- and have remained -- remarkably low for stuff like Quake.)
Yeah, it's a little pricey -- 75+ bucks a month (more because I have several IP addresses) -- but I'd always said that I'd be willing to pay a bit more for decent service, and so far Covad has given me superb service.
Kudos to Covad. As a former Telocity/Rhythms customer, I'm glad to see that out of the Rhythms/Northpoint/Covad group there appears to be at least one (possible) survivor.
Besides, there's no way in hell I'd give another penney to AT&T or Ameritech. I'd go back to a 56K if AT&T or Ameritech were my only DSL/Cable choices. (Although I'm worried about the DirecTV/EchoStar proposed merger, but that's another thread, another day...)
Keep in mind, there are a number of ways to access the full on-line OED for free. If you really want access, you can find a way. For example:
- Most colleges and universities have access, and if you're an alumnus -- and join the alumni association -- you'll probably retain your access.
- Ditto for community colleges. Most community collges usually offer library cards for the public-at-large. These days, once you get a library card at a comm coll, you usually have access to their on-line catalog -- which probably includes on-line access to the OED.
- Also -- perhaps oddest of all -- if you join the 'History Book Club' (and perhaps others -- the Reader's Subscription, Quality Paperback Book Club, etc.) you are granted access to the on-line OED through their websites. I just discovered this the other day. I signed up for the History Book Club (in order to get the 4 free books) and then received an email explaining that I now had access to the full on-line OED.
- And finally, don't forget there's a compact OED -- two big volumes with a magnifying glass -- that contains the *complete* OED. (Doesn't include any recent updates, but it's fantastic for what it does contain -- and it's the most recent edition.) I received the Compact OED several years ago for free for joining the Book-of-the-Month club. The compact OED is also available for around $299 (I think) at Borders and Barnes and Noble. (If you know an employee of either of those stores, you can get a nice discount.)
So, yeah, there are *many* ways of getting the OED -- hard copy and on-line. And most likely you already have access for free but don't know it -- local library, college, community college, book club!
One of the best gifts: the $99 DirecTIVO at Circuit City. Helluva good deal if you already have a DirecTV setup. (And even if you don't -- it's a penny more for a dish and free installation.)
Good way to get TIVO and a boatload of sat channels.
Really. This is all such bullshit. I can see it now: Ballmer and Gates sitting around some massive table in a dark little room having a "soul-searching" discussion.
What, they're gonna get all touchy-feely now? Nex TechNet convention everybody is gonna join hands and let Ballmer know that he's succeeded well at this new mission to teach Microsoft how to "comport" itself as a company?
You know companies are full of the bullshit spin when they publically start talking about how it's high time to "change our image" and become less of a draconian, narcissistic, behemoth and more of a "company that understands."
Hey, here's a new flash for Microsoft. From someone down here in trenches.
Number one, shut the fuck up. Shut the fuck up about all this image enhancement and lessons learned about "just what exactly this massive monopolistic suit has taught us."
You know what it should have taught you? Not that you need to get more emotional with your employees but that you're a massive, monopolistic behemoth who steamrolled over a lot of good talent in order to get to the top. Maybe, okay, that's the nature of the business. Well, if it is, here's a clue: shut the fuck up about it. Don't remind people that you *aren't* touchy-feely and you *were* a massive, monopolistic behemoth that steamrolled over a lot of good talent.
Number two, no one really cares. The world ain't built around Microsoft. Much as Ballmer likes to leap around the stage and pretend he's got energy, the world has its own share of non-microsoft problems. You wanna go touchy-feely and try to comport yourself anew? Great, more power to ya.
Ya wanna try to "reduce the cutthroat culture" within the halls of Microsoft?
Great, go ahead, Pal. Do what ya need to do. Leap around the stage, waving your arms, spitting, screaming: "I love this COMPANY! I love this company!"
Whatever.
Just love your little employees, compete fairly, and keep on keeping on. Just don't announce that you're gonna love your little little employees, compete fairly, and keep on keeping on.
Really, no one cares. No one cares. No one really fucking cares.
And as an interesting (and, yes, off-topic) aside: one summer when I was around 12 or 13, my parents sublet the apartment next to his on 7th avenue in Manhattan. This was long before the "We're Not Gonna Take It" song -- more like when they were still paying dues in clubs and wearing their high heels and thick lipstick.
Anyway, two observations about Dee Snider: (1) he was one of the nicest, coolest people a 13 year old could possibly hope to meet and (2) he had the biggest damn stereo system I'd ever seen in my 13 years.
I mentioned that the apartment my parents sublet was next to his? Well, my bed was on the other side of the wall where his stereo was. That stereo put out enough base to shake my titties and whip the snot from my nose even when I was fast asleep -- which was seldom, since the stereo was almost always on, shaking and whipping me into sleep-deprived obvlion.
But Dee's all around coolness more than made up for the noise (which, in the grand scheme of things was no big deal).
And remember, too, copyright has always been framed as a "temporary" notion. True, the temporality of a single copyright has been extended, but as it was framed by the founders, copyright was never meant to be a sweeping, draconian notion of something *absolute*.
Copyright was meant to *promote* not meant to *inhibit*. It was not meant as an essentially permanent hedge for questionable constitutional and monopolistic manipulations.
Believe me, I don't expect the record company execs to understand this, let alone act within the spirit of the notion as it was originally proposed and written. But I do expect our own legislators to rap the collective heads of these executive fuckers and wake them up to the essential *spirit* of the law. A spirit, I would add, that transcends any temporary monetary gains for fat cat record exectives like Hilary Rosen or the ultra-ultra fat-cat film geriatric named Jack "America was great under Jack Kennedy" Valenti.
Copyright is not about money. It's about the promotion of art. Remember this. This should be the mantra. Someone should paint this slogan on Hilary's office door.
Copyright was never about money.
Copyright was never about money.
It's all about *promotion*. And the founders took this "promotion" to be integral to a diverse society.
In fact, I'm quite sure Jefferson would be disgusted by the actions of the music and film industries. Disgusted, too, by their abohorrent actions in light of the recent terrorist attacks -- attempting (if you recall) to attach their legislative riders to the bottoms of the recently passed terrorist legislation. It's disgusting and demeaning and proves that these fucking record executives will stop at nothing -- literally -- to keep their golf club memberships, Lexus', and summer homes in the Hamptons.
Look, I don't if Katz is asking a lot of rhetorical questions or what, but here's my own take on the current situation: I sleep better knowing we're using the "bunker busters" to penetrate twenty or so feet into the ground (from an altitude of 40,000 + feet and obliterate the caverns and bunkers of these people.
Here's a link from the International Herald Tribune. A commander talks about dropping a bunker buster on a terrorism camp, seeing the ground implode, and then seeing the hills light up with small arms fire (a bunch off pissed of al-qaeda fuckers):
I'm not particularly moved by war and hope everything gets settled peacefully, but, cripes, these guys are stateless, asymentrical savages. There's no two ways about it.
So, as far as I'm concerned, let us all praise the bunker busters and hope they're contributing to our self-defense.
Remember, too, the other series currently under development -- Star Trek: People Hut.
My group is working with the Paramount trek development group -- so some of this is subject to change -- but we're aiming 'People Hut' at folks who (unlike the original poster) believes that Star Trek is about people crammed in a small, metallic space -- a space within "deep space," you might say. We do, at any rate.
Anyway, we're also currently brainstorming and working with the Roddenberry tech-dev wing at Paramount, but People Hut -- tentatively -- is set to premier in 2004. We're thinking about taking a group of unemployed air traffic controllers -- the ones fired by Reagan about 20 years ago -- who have all sorts of dreams and longings for deep space.
People Hut, literally, would start in the living room of one the unemployed controllers and would focus in on the lives of these folks as they get closer to building their own little ship. (Sort of like 'Salvage One' from a long time ago -- you remember that? With Andy Griffith? And the girl that was in 'Escape from Witch Mountain'? They built a ship that looked like a thimble with a balloon on it and then zoomed off for various missions.)
Anyway, our 'ST:PH' would chronicle the lives of these dreamers. The ups and the downs of family life -- what it would mean, in other words, to be a dreamer in the era of the Reaganomics -- and how those dreams impact everyone emotionally.
Eventually they would christen their Sunday evening meeting the 'People Hut' where anyone -- not just unemployed air traffic controllers -- would come and chat about hopes, dreams, and deep space.
One guy -- we're not sure who -- wins the lottery in Michigan (this is pre-Power Ball, remember) and then realizes that, at long last, his dreams have a bit of financial backing behind them.
(We're thinking the lottery pay out would be around 12-15 million -- enough to build a ship and possibly hire some then-hot-shot Soviet scientists to defect and investigate various means of plasma transport -- the stuff that the Soviets were rumored to be working on before the break-up of the USSR.)
Probably midway through the first season they'll launch the People Hut -- PH001 -- and go on a few adventures. Maybe check out the moon a little bit more -- pick up some of the trash left behind by the previous lunar missions -- and really try to clean things up. ST:PH -- if all goes according to plan -- will have a strong socio-economic context.
If anyone is interested, I can detail a couple more advantures. Remember, lots of this is still under development. No green lights yet. Robert Downey, Jr is tentatively slated to play Captain O'Malley -- a grizzed Irish guy who invested his entire life in air-traffic control.
Urge your girlfriend to check out tech jobs with Chicago/State of Illinois agencies. Really. She'll be *very* surprised. There are a lot of openings for enjoyable, high-tech jobs.
Will they be firing fucking nerfguns?
No, because that's a bunch of shit for losers who don't know what a job is and think they need to be entertained all day long by stupid shit like slinkys and nerfballs and other toys.
But if your girlfriend is serious about working -- and wants a steady, reliable paycheck -- take a gander at state websites and job openings.
This is an interesting question: why would *anyone* be entitled to privacy when you're using equipment that someone else has paid for?
The question is interesting for a couple reasons. First, it assumes that money -- cash, whatever -- negates privacy considerations. I'm entitled to privacy only with stuff -- phones, faxes, computers -- that I *pay* for. If I haven't paid for it, then anything goes.
Second -- and this is derived from the first point -- is the resulting "anything goes" mentality. This seems to be the real point of the WSJ article. Even though I'm getting paid for working -- and certainly expect to be given the money I'm entitled to -- why must I give my fundamental right of privacy up?
(The logic here, then, if I'm *not* getting paid -- on my lunch hour -- then does that give me the right to surf? In some places, yes. In most places, no. Because -- and some junior manager will be quick to explain this -- the fact that you surf means not only wasted productivity [which is, of course, dubious] but also liability.)
Which brings me to my third point -- and one that I have yet to receive an explanation for: the digital paradox. Why does a company fear the internet more than it does idle chatter in the bathroom? Or idle phone conversation? Why aren't my telephone calls monitored -- yet every site I visit is.
Why aren't there video cameras in the bathroom? (Because, well, that would be... disturbing. Employees wouldn't stand for that. Yet they -- we -- stand for web monitoring?)
I'd really like an explanation as to why the web -- more so than the phone, more so than the break-room during "work" time -- is so feared by management.
The reason, of course, is power. Skippy the mid-level manager can *see* you yabbering away in the break room.
Britney the just-out-of-Keller-with-an-MBA-I-worked-real-hard- for can *see* you yabbering when she passes your cubicle on her way to yet another important meeting.
Ah well. It's all power. Britney needs to commandeer what little power she is and make sure the power remains inviolable. I think that's what managers fear most -- loss of power. There is this illusion among the worst managers that somehow power -- their own, tenuous power -- will increase productivity. Because that means money -- the real reason the web is monitored.
It's crazy -- the surveillance. Everybody's watching, watching to make sure you don't do something to decrease productivity. Fucking absurd.
Here's the corproate SWAT scenario. Graphic, but true:
Corporate-sponsored, miltary-style copyright squads. Copyright-sponsored SWAT teams, licensed by Microsoft, Adobe, Sun, MPAA, RIAA (under whatever "license" they choose to deem official) running military-style ops to knock out egregious P2P "nodes".
Running an especially active P2P node?
Come 3AM in the morning, expect a white van to pull up outside your house/condo/apartment, filled to the brim with a covert tactical squad in full body armor and carrying fully-automatic weapons, two hundred pound door "key" to knock down those pesky screen doors.
Search warrants? Not a chance. None of this is supported by state, local or even federal law enforcement.
These renegade ops are private. Who has time for a search warrant? Or for due process? What matters here is that the RIAA and MPAA get their results.
You wanna know who these guys are that have their gun barrels pointed at your head? Your girlfriend's head?
Don't mean nothing when one guy has a steel toed boot across the back of your head and is pressing your cheek against the bathroom floor. One weapon is at the back of your head, the other's at the back of your girlfriend's head.
And your dog -- he's already knocked out cold, thanks to the little "dog sleeping darts" these guys carry. Rottweiller? German Shepard? Doesn't make a difference. First thing these guys do is look for the dogs. One dart, and the dog's out cold, lying with his tongue flopped out his mouth in the middle of your living room floor.
Meanwhile, all you see is odd flashes of light coming from all over your house. You can make out maybe five, six guys running around, screaming at the top of their lungs. But you can't tell for sure because everytime you sorta look around, the guy makes sure your forehead hits the floor with a thwap.
Two of your teeth are already on the floor, and you can feel one loose in the back of your mouth. You can't tell if all the blood is coming from your mouth or your split lip.
Your girlfriend is saying something -- yelling -- and these guys from behind their black goggles keep telling her to shut the fuck up. Shut the fuck up. She doesn't. And then you see one guy take some duct tape and put it over her mouth. She's still yelling something, but it's not as loud.
That's when you start hearing the crashes and thumps in the bedroom above you. What are they knocking down -- the shelves? Overturning the beds? Throwing the monitor down on the floor?
Couple seconds later, one guy comes down with your Dell Athlon box. Not the monitor, not the printer, just the white box with the keyboard cable hanging from it. The ethernet cable is still attached and he's dragging your Linksys hub -- bump, bump, bump -- down the stairs. He hustles out the front door. The guy above you gives you one more whack with his boot, then says, "Clear!" to someone.
Suddenly all these guys start saying "Clear" to one another. You hear everybody run out the front door, down your porch, and the sound of tires squealing off.
Meanwhile, you wait. You're not sure what to do. Your girlfriend is dragging her cheek against the kitchen floor to get the tape off her mouth.
And you -- your lips and gums hurt like a sonofabitch. They tied your hands with those plastic twisti-cuffs but you've got one hand free. You touch your mouth -- your front teeth are gone. The blood from your mouth smells metallic. And you're not even sure what happened.
Whatever it was, it took all of 2, maybe 3 minutes.
And you have no idea who it was. For days, you try and figure it out. Cops show up, they're stymied.
Was it a robbery?
Well, no.
These guys -- they were dressed in body armor?
Yeah. Like SWAT.
SWAT? The cops laugh. No, there's no SWAT here, son. Say, do you use drugs? Even smoked a little? Maybe it's some drug deal gone bad? One of your drug buddies come to get more of what you sold him?
No. No it wasn't that.
But the cops are suspicious. Say, maybe you'd like to come down with us? Answer a few questions?
You say, well, no, I'd rather not.
But they insist.
While you're waiting in the back of the cruiser you hear the cops laughing: SWAT, yeah. Sure. What's this guy smoking?
... or, at least, the first 3D game I remember playing over and over and over again: Death Maze 5000 for the TRS-80 Model I. I believe this was around 1980-82.
(I'll bet there were 3D-like games even before the TRS-80.)
There was also Asylum I and II -- both 3D (they weren't actually 3D, but the hallways had a 3D perspective). All the games were (more or less) real-time, too: you move through the maze using the arrow keys. Every time you moved, your perspective changed. You could pretty quickly locate doors and stretches of long hallways.
Remember, too, that the TRS-80 Model I's had really, really limited graphics: black and white and (IIRC) approximately 127 by 48. Later, you were able to buy a high-res upgrade (not sure if it was available for the Model I, but I remember the Model III/IV had the option).
And here I'll veer off-topic slightly, but I think it's interesting to mention that these early games (and I remember a 3D maze game for the Commodore Pet, too) were amazingly addictive despite limited graphics. I wouldn't be surprised if the Timex Sinclair had some sort of 3D game. I'm sure the Apple II had 'em -- as did the Atari 400/800 and the TI 99/4a.
What I distinctly remember -- and this was a long, long time ago -- was sitting with my buddies playing Asylum and wishing for better graphics and colors. We all thought it would never happen. (We were maybe 14, 15, at the time.) We figured games like Death Maze and Asylum were flukes. That they'd never catch on. We also figured the Infocom games -- Zork I and Deadline and Suspect -- would be the games that, over time, would last.
Really, really off-topic, but I remember this, too: does anyone recall the old-time Infocom game packaging? How they'd include all sorts of neat floor plans, maps, keychains, buttons and badges. Those old Infocom games were really a trip: each package was different and had all kinds of cool stuff.
*sigh*
Anyway, flash forward twenty years. Quake 3, Tribes 2, Counterstrike.
Little did we know...
Re:Does this effect Telocity/DirectTV customers
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Rhythms Flatlines
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· Score: 1
Yep. Ameritech. Static IP. But without our SDSL connections. ADSL 768/128.
For nearly 3 years I've had Telocity/DTV (one of the first in Chicago I was told) and loved it -- 1024/1024 SDSL.
Sweet mother of god: what a deal for 49 bucks a month.
Add to that this: the "book" as we know it has been around for over 500 years.
There's a reason for that. In fact, there's many reasons for that. Me, I've got 2000 books in my house. Sure, I've got a 40 gig hard drive, too -- in fact three 40 gig hard drives -- and could easily fit my books on one (probably less than 1) of those hard drives.
But why? Why would I want to sit and stare at a computer screen or Palm or PocketPC or iPaq or Rocket eBook reader or whatever is the gadget du jour?
I actually enjoy the physical book -- the paper, the way it smells, the way I can use it, abuse it, tote it, and carry it around. I also like the fact that I won't be arrested if, say, I decide to backwards engineer it -- if I take a peep at the binding, wonder if the leaves are glued, and even spot a couple pages that haven't been cut.
I can't do that with an eBook. I can't do that because Adobe and Microsoft will make sure I end up in jail. They'll claim that my "crime" is nearly as bad as murder -- more so, in fact, because I'm infringing on their "intellectual property" which, as we all know, is more important than anything else these days.
Yeah, eBooks rock, all right. Go ebooks. Wonderful.
And all these "screen reading" software that Microsoft is pioneering? Yeah, it's wonderful. Sit me down in front of a bigass monitor with Microsoft's Reader software. Software, by the way, which hasn't been updated in nearly a year. Software which is slow, buggy as hell, and won't even let me "register" more than twice.
Oh yeah, ebooks rock all right. Let's see. Don't get me started. How about the one time I decided to purchase an ebook? I filled out all the forms -- nearly had to give my driver's license number -- and then submitted all my credit card information only to -- get this! -- get a 500 Server Error when it came time to issue me the "digital verification" that I then had to "click" on then RESUBMIT just to prove that I'm who I said I was and that my reader was registered.
Love it! Let's see, now how does that compare with this:
Live in Ann Arbor (or any good college town with lots of bookstores). Go to Dawn Treader Books (or any good used bookstore piled high with thousands of books). Buy book. Buy another book. Bring book up to counter. Chat with clerk who says, "Hey, if you're into Thomas Pynchon, have you tried Gaddis?" "No," say I. "You recommend him?" "Oh yeah," says clerk who, within seconds, drops a copy of _The Recognitions_ and _JR_ on top of the nicely dog eared copies of _V_ and _Gravity's Rainbow_ that I'd already decided to purchase.
So exit I do, ambling down Liberty Street (or whatever street in your college town of choice that is lined with your used bookstores of choice) with my newly purchased used books. I can read these books anywhere. I can underline them. I can lend them to my friends. And -- imagine this! -- no matter what I do to these books -- read them, underline them, xerox a few pages from them for a presentation -- the FBI DOES NOT GET INVOLVED!
Now, compare that with digital books. Compare that with encryption, validation, verification. You tell me which is the better deal for readers?
Now, don't get me wrong. Maybe ebooks have their uses. You're Pre-Med, say, and can get a semester's worth of ebooks on a CDROM. Maybe that's a good deal. Or you're a law student and can get what you need a couple CDROMS and don't have to scout out estate sales of dead lawyers just so you can build a library of outdated law books. All right, fair enough.
But for book lovers -- and actual readers -- readers who like to discover an old Modern Library edition of Thackeray that was used by someone in 1941 who dated the book and even stuck a few interesting notes on the margin -- there's nothing to compare with actual, phsyical text.
My own opinion -- after years of haunting used bookstores and 'Friends of the Library' sales -- is this: that people who claim that ebooks are the best thing to come around since, er, the invention of the book are not readers. They simply don't read. They like to have the books. Or they like to have the electronic versions of books that they've read (I mean, really, how many copies of Joe Haldeman's 'Forever War' or Isaac Asimov's 'Foundation Trilogy' do you really need? If you check out the ebook groups on usenet, these are really the only books traded, posted, and pirated -- Haldeman, Asimov, some Sterling, Gibson (of course), and Heinlein. And the same pirated texts are posted day after day after day after day after day. But that's not the point, is it?)
You're wrong. The reason they weren't taking down corporate web servers 15 years ago was because there were no corporate web servers to take down. You've completely missed the point of the rebellious spirit. (Take a look at "Rebel Without a Cause" or "American Graffitti" and you'll see what I mean.)
Listen, 15 years ago, I was a 15 year old script kiddie wannabe before script kiddies were even known as script kiddies who used to spend all my weekends in the back of a Radio Shack store messing around with a TRS-80 Model I Level II and an acoustically coupled 300 baud modem.
I used to hang out with a slightly older dude named Eberle (pronounced eh-ber-lee). Me, my buddy Mark, and Eberle did all kinds of weird and rebellious shit over that modem. The grunts working the cash register up front had no idea this stuff was going on in the back of their store. I remember there were a couple of really old (and really slow) BBS's that we used to connect to with the modem. We taught ourselves Z80 assembly, played a lot of Zork I (remember when Radio Shack used to sell Zork I and II in those plastic zip-lock bags), and messed around occasionally with the TRS-80 Model II -- the one with the big-ass 8 inch floppy drives.
We played Dungeons and Dragons, Avalon Hill's Squad Leader, and rode our motocross bikes with the yellow mag wheels up and down the streets like we owned the town. We slapped quarters on the front of Donkey Kong arcade games ("Hey, pal, I'm taking the next game.") and used to wonder if a perfect score on Pac Man was possible. We knew all the patterns, BTW. The arcade managers at the Aladdin's Castle in the mall where me and Mark and Eberle used to hang out wore these red vests and carried around rolls of tokens. They used to hang out in the backroom and would silently come over to us whenever Tron or Pole Position ate our quarters.
We used to hang out at the local high school in the computer labs where they had old, grizzed ex-IBM guys working and teaching there who let us use the Osbourne MicroAce's and Commodore PET's (remember those plastic keyboards?) and the TRS-80's. Forget Apple and all the color shit that became popular -- the computer of choice in our small, midwestern town with a single mall and lots of D&D players was the Radio Shack TRS-80. (We carried around our copies of Super Utility Plus so we could copy any copy protected disk that came our way.)
Eventually we got kicked out of the Radio Shack. We scared off a lot of customers, I guess. Plus, Eberle started growing facial hair, so he looked a little strange.
I started taking computer classes at the local college -- Fortran, Pascal, some Cobol -- and eventually won a TRS-80 Model III by guessing the combination of a lockbox full of twenty dollar bills at the local mall.
My friend Mark moved out of town, and Eberle... he sorta drifted off. No one knew what happened to him. One day he was in gym class wearing his blue shorts with the white-stripes, and the next day he was gone.
Radio Shack stopped selling TRS-80's not long after that. Everybody started talking about Commodore 64's and Apple II's and Timex Sinclar's and Atari 400 and 800's.
Aladdin's Castle tweaked the Pac Man game so we couldn't run patterns anymore, introduced Ms. Pac Man (which let us all down), and got rid of their Tron game (which rocked).
And that was that.
Not exactly rebels, but we had our moments. That TRS-80 and its 300 baud modem was a helluva cool little machine.
What I'm curious about -- and I've even asked our company's counsel about this -- is what's the difference between monitoring web activity and monitoring, say, the lunchroom for suspicious "non-work" activity?
Or monitoring the content of our telephone calls for "non-work" communication?
Or monitoring the bathrooms for "non-work" activity?
If there were microphones in the lunchroom -- or, even worse -- in the bathroom -- employees would be furious.
But what's the fundamental difference -- since we're talking "content" here -- between "non-work" jibber-jabber (which surely wastes huge amounts of time) in the hall and "non-work" jibber-jabber surfing from, say, MarthStewart.Com or Kmart.com or Walmart.com?
Our company's counsel said, well, you have a good point. But he couldn't explain the difference.
Why is form of communication more "privileged" than the other? And why do employees sit by and allow their computer clicks to be monitored yet would raise holy hell if they found their "non-work" bathroom conversations were being taped, logged, and then catalogged for a manager's later perusal.
I suspect all this monitoring stuff boils down to two things: (1) liability and (2) bad managers. The liability I can understand -- sexual harrassment due to pornoography, etc. etc. Okay, I understand that.
But (2) is more complex. This isn't a newsflash to anyone on Slashdot, of course, but why is it that more and more managers are farming out their "managerial duties" to the IT department? "Hey, I can't monitor my employees all the time, but I can damn sure monitor what web pages he/she views. Ergo, I retain control."
The real question isn't "How can these 15 year olds usurp the power from the traditionally powerful" but is instead: "Why are our cultural institutions so fragile -- and so mysteriously sacrosanct -- that radical shifts in power (such as Lebed's stock trading) cause such widespread fear and paranoia?"
What is it that the "powerful" are protecting? My guess is that they're protecting the hegemony of their institutions so that they, the traditionally powerful, can remain in power. And until recently, these protected institutions have been immune to all but those in "power".
What all this shows, I think, is just how fragile things are -- cultural instititions -- and how the powerful will stop at nothing to maintain their hold on the institutions that legitimize their power. Adobe, for example, is proof of this. Microsoft, too.
But why? Why is everything so fragile? And why do guys like Lebed so honestly and completely expose the fragility?
If you saw Lebed on a recent 60 Minutes, you can see that he's obviously a smart, savvy guy. He's no nut, no raving lunatic. He's simply done his homework. And he understands how things work. Then, cut to the chair of the SEC: an old white guy, your typical CEO: big suit, big white hair, sun tan. Lots of years on the golf course, right?
He's "old school" all the way. Probably from the same school as our good buddy Jack Valenti. Probably shot a few holes with ol' Jack. (Can't you imagine the conversation these two guys would have? "All this internet stuff, Jack. It scares the hell out of me. Where's the honor? The tradition?" And Jack, nodding and nodding -- any more nodding and his head would pop off and birdie into the hole -- couldn't agree more: "The internet. It's the ruination of our culture. Bandwidth means piracy. There is no honor anymore, no tradition. Why I remember golfing with Jack Kennedy. There was a stand up guy. A guy who knew how things worked. Blah blah blah.)
Anyway, this SEC guy, he goes on and on about Lebed. How Lebed's crime is just about the worst sort of crime he could imagine. He defrauded the masses. He took advantage of the system. And, you better believe it, friend: Lebed oughta be thrown into the pokey and the key thrown away.
These old guys -- the CEOs still sitting around table chit chatting about golf and driving their Lexus' and worrying about their platinum parachutes -- these guys oughta be fired on the spot. Told to either get with the program or get the hell out. They still think the best business is the business you conduct between holes seven and eight. Driving around with their little ladies golf gloves in loud little golf carts, pretending to care about whether or not you got a Big Bertha driver or that latest titanium driver.
It's all a bunch of crap. Lebed and others -- they're the ones exposing the institutions for what they are. Maybe that's good, maybe that's bad. But more power to 'em.
I'm not opposed to open source data repositories. You misunderstand.
The usenet google, for example -- an *incredibly* valuable resource. Probably one of the top resources on the net. No question.
But an encyclopedia is different. It's different because it's not just a "data repository." You don't just dump data into an encyclopedia. Britannica, as I mentioned above, has a history. The history counts toward its usefulness. The history establishes the encyclopedia into a very specific social context. Its existence and past history work toward validating its continued presence and future usefulness.
Now, you could argue that the usenet archives, for example, operate under similar circumstances. They're useful -- and perhaps "valid" -- because they've proved their usefulness in both historical and day-to-day practical contexts.
If you said this -- and argued this way -- you'd be absolutely right. But DejaGoogle -- or whatever it's now called -- isn't the same sort of resource that an encyclopedia (for it to be useful) is.
This is a complex issue. A bunch of open sourcers deciding that the information is "surprisingly high quality" doesn't mean that its context is somehow magically established.
If I take black and white photographs, for example, and ardently practice Ansel Adams' "Zone System" -- visualing the finished image by exposing for a specific "zone" of gray in the scene, exposing for it, and then controlling my development process so that I can either add or decrease the contrast in the negative so that the finished image matches exactly my pre-visualization down to the whites, grays, and blacks -- I'm not necessarily making art. I'm following a technical process to achieve predictable results. But it may or may not be "art". I don't know. That's not for me to decide.
Same with the encyclopedia -- especially (in the case of nupedia) if there's only about 20 articles. You can't just decide, hey, we're following all the rules, therefore our resource is just as good as Britannica's and even better: we're free! (And then get someone at a Slashdot-like to website to write and call the content "surprisingly high quality.")
That's not to poo-poo the idea or to say that they're wasting their time. They're not wasting their time. It's a good idea. But to imply that it is now or will soon offer an alternative to the granddaddy (literally) of all reference works is just, well, absurd. Completely absurd.
It's like me deciding to write a dictionary. I decide there's 80,000 words in my dictionary. I have some fun with the definitions -- I'm a decent writer, so I give every definition a little "spin".
"It's a dictionary with attitude," I tell my friends. "And get this: it's surprisingly high quality! I mean, for chrissake, who wants to pay $1999 for the Oxford English Dictionary? You can have mine for free!"
"Suprisingly high quality" according to whom? According to some open source advocate? What the hell is this supposed to mean? This proof of something?
I've had plenty of students who would claim that their papers are of surprisingly high quality. "My roomate thought so. And he's a senior!"
Um, yeah. Whatever.
Bottom-line: the "open source" encyclopedias are noble ideas, but they'll never be accepted mainstream. They'll never be institutionalized the way that Britannica has and will continue to be.
And -- I don't see anyone writing about this -- bear in mind (just naming a few names off the top of my head) that Buckminster Fuller and Aaron Copland (among many, many others) have written and contributed articles to Britannica. This is part of what Britannica such an interesting, ongoing historical document. And this is part of what has "institutionalized" Britannica.
The question we should be asking -- and one, again, that I see no one concerned about -- is this: do we really need an "open source" enclopedia?
We might. I'm not sure. But then: why? Why do we need it? Do we need it because Britannica lacks quality content? Or do we need it because Britannica is charging five bucks a month and a couple people think: "Hmmmm. Monthly charge bad. Must start from scratch."
I think it's fairly obvious that, no, Katz doesn't read the replies posted to his, er, articles. People claim that Katz has responded to points they've made, but I've yet to see Katz engage in a discussion.
In fact, I'd be willing to bet Katz has a queue full of articles -- a week's worth, whatever -- and is not a regular visitor of Slashdot.
That said, I find it baffling that Katz would call Lieberman a "pompous gasbag."
For a couple of reasons:
First, the obvious.
And second: Lieberman -- of all of our elected officials -- is far from "pompous". Granted, he's fairly critical of the media and its portrayal of violence, but this doesn't necessarily make him pompous. At least not any more so than any other, er, media crtic. Ahem.
Katz's comment about Lieberman -- a slight slip, perhaps -- is fairly revealing: it makes Katz's previous points less persuasive and suddenly gives Katz the none-too-subtle appearance of having, eek!, an agenda.
And really -- I say this honestly -- what's worse than a media critic with an agenda who engages in ad hominem attacks?
- October, 2003: Bill Gates announces that "Microsoft Product Activation" has been a resounding success -- so much of a success, in fact, that he is pleased to announce "Microsoft Geo-Awareness" as the next logical step in Product Activation technologies.
"Microsoft users embraced Product Activation," Gates told the 5,000 developers at Chicago's Tech-Ed conference. "And now we offer users the next phase of our technology: Geo-Awareness. Thanks to advances in microtechnology, tiny GPS devices are embedded in every new DVD of Microsoft XP 2004. This technology will allow us to alert users to lost DVDs and tell them, specifically, where their lost disc can be found."
Gates added the new technology will also ensure that XP 2004 is installed only on the machines for which is was registered for. "You tell us your street location, we locate your house on our terraserver database, retrieve the GPS coordinates, and are able to activate your XP 2004 DVD so that it will install on exactly the machine you intended it to be installed on. In fact," Gates added, "we allow you to move within a 100 foot radius. If, say, you decide to add a new bedroom onto your house and decide to move the computer into that bedroom -- no problem! You are allowed to do so. You don't have to call to reactivate."
Gates assured the skeptical developers that users have demanded that Microsoft implement this new technology into their products so that Microsoft products continue to operate at the highest possible levels of performance.
Later that same afternoon, Gates announced that beta 25 of Microsoft's new.NET technology will be released to developers. "We're a little behind with.NET and web services, but we're sure that developers want the highest possible level of performance."
Gates also indicated that eventually copies of Visual Studio.NET will include the GPS technology. "Although we're restricting the area in which developers can use the software. Instead of the 100 feet we offer home users, we came to the decsion that most developers sit at one desk and at one computer for days, weeks, sometimes years at a time. So users of VS.NET (beta 25) will be allowed a 2 foot GPS radius."
Steve Ballmer added that the two feet of space allows developers to shift their computer from one end of the desk to the other. "Sometimes, um," Ballmer explained, "you get the sun in your eyes or you need a change of view. So we figured, two feet was a good GPS radius."
Developers who move outside the two foot radius will face the following fines:
- $150 first-time offense charge.
- $50 for every minute your activated Video Studio remains outside of the GPS coordinates.
- $250 processing fee for processing credit card fines.
- $500 mandatory training fee (one-time only). Offenders will be required to go to the nearest MSDN GPS office and sit through a 12 hour licensing awareness seminar. They will have the option of writing a 25 page "piracy awareness" paper or paying a $1500 flat-fee (non-refundable) convenience fee. Food will not be provided. Developers are asked to bring their own beverages, pens, and paper. The 25 page seminar paper must be completed before leaving the seminar. Armed guards will be posted at the door.
- Successful "converted" offenders will be among the first to receive.NET Framework Beta 26! (Once it's released.)
Slashdot Mirror
Question I have is this: if you search and can't find the document then do you get a refund?
You start charging for content -- searches, text, whatever -- you suddenly raise the bar. You can't expect people to "pay for searching" if the success rate isn't incredibly high.
Besides -- with very few exceptions -- does anyone actually buy into the idea of "premium content?" Lately, I see a lot of sites charging for premium content. But when you actually poke around and try to figure out the content, you discover a lot of lame videos, lame games, and generally uninspired content. (I'm thinking here of some of Real.com's "premium" offerings.)
True, the Wall Street Journal -- and other content specific sites like it -- are exceptions, but a *search engine?*
Cripes, you're not even paying for the content, as I understand this -- you're paying for some sort of advanced search algorithm. I mean, if you're paying for the content -- and they actually know where the content is -- then why not simply offer up the content and skip the whole "premium search" idea?
I don't get it. But I do know this: whenever most websites start talking about "premium" stuff, it usually means that they're close to going bankrupt.
Another example:
Salon.com. I went ahead and signed up a one-month subscription. I figued it'd be nice to get all of Salon in a single PDF file. Well, it *was* nice. But now I realize that size of "Salon Daily" in PDF is shrinking -- drastically. Yesterday, I think it was down to about 8 pages -- and not even all the stories on their website were actually in the PDF. (And the formatting for interviews is non-existent, so there's no way to distinguish the question from the answer -- which, in the case of last week's Noam Chomsky interview, was incredibly disconcerting (since Noam sounded as though he'd drunk a six-pack of Pabst and was spouting off any old shit that zipped through his head. One of the weirdest interviews I've ever read. But I digress...)
And yet another example of screwed up premium content:
Tivo. I hear now Tivo has partnered up with Real (I thought it was a joke, too, but then I read the press release) and see that they're going to recycle the stale videos and stale audio on Real's site into my Tivo. Wonderful. And then -- as if that wasn't enough to make you lose all faith in Tivo -- they've partnered up with (drum roll) some company that makes the 'You Don't Know Jack' game. Please. Like I want some 5 year old game being pumped down my wires just so Tivo can say they've conquered the living room?
It's interesting, but the real premium content -- the stuff that would actually make "premium" worth a premium price, IMHO -- is nowhere near being available -- and that's the "jukebox in the sky" idea (any song, on any computer, anywhere) or the "any concert, anytime, anywhere" idea. I'd gladly pay 10 bucks a month to see quality concerts streamed on-line. But not stale old recycled stuff. Up-to-the-minute stuff. Like being able to catch Dylan from the night before. Or whoever. Concert-at-glance type stuff. That's interesting. It's not worth a *lot* of money, but it'd be compelling content.
Ditto for the jukebox-in-the-sky.
But paying for some search engine?
Please. I bet even the Yahoo suits are scratching their heads and wondering how, exactly, to deliver "premium searching." I mean, maybe someone tries it out once because they're looking for a specific document -- like I coulda used a premium search not long ago when I was looking to compare miniDV cameras and wanted to see all the PDF manuals of my top-3 wishlist cameras -- but that's about it. (Of course, I couldn't find any of the manuals on-line.)
Or maybe to find some old on-line manual for the garbage disposal underneath your sink that has that little button on the bottom of the disposal unit and you wonder what the hell that button is for because it doesn't seem to do anything when you press it.
One thing I don't understand: why keep harping about "sharing?" As I read this -- the new Napster FAQ -- you no longer share music, right?
You simply connect to Napster, Inc and grab your limited tracks? So this is essentially a crippled version of the "jukebox in the sky" model that everyone has been talking about but no one can implement?
I mean, this is like MP3.com back before they got bitch-slapped by the RIAA, right? When you stored your music in a "locker" and could access it anywhere? (Which remains an interesting idea, although I have no idea how it works now on MP3.com. Last time I checked, all but two of my songs were "locked down" and a pop-up let me know that MP3.com were "working diligently" to restore the music in my locker. Sorta like the same lame rhetoric that Napster has: "We're working as fast as we can to get you MP3s to play on your MP3 player.")
Now, okay, maybe someone can explain this to me. I don't mean this to be a troll or flamebait. I'm actually curious about this: why in the world would I *pay* Napster simply to get a crippled version of (take your pick) Morpheus?
Granted, it's nice to see that artists are going to get paid. But -- again -- maybe I'm missing something here -- but if the RIAA four years had foresight enough to deal with the MP3 onslaught in a shrewd, savvy way, we'd (a) have the great big jukebox in the sky at this point and (b) the artists (at this point) *would* be getting paid.
So by supporting Napster -- or MusicNet or PressPlay -- what I'm essentially doing is two things: (1) paying protection so as not to get fingered by the RIAA and (2) supporting the RIAA in their quest to *litigate* technology out of the marketplace.
This new Napster is "approved" technology where the old technologies are maverick technologies, unapproved, and therefore illegal?
I get the sense that Napster will become some sort of litmus test for the RIAA. It's going to be one of the incubators (MusicNet and PressPlay being the others) to see how profit can be derived from on-line music.
And again, I got no problem with giving artists their fair-share, but I'm very uncomfortable with the RIAA being in the middle.
What I'd like to see is a Napster that takes the RIAA out of the equation. I'd like to be able to give Bob Dylan or whomever my five cent listening fee and know that it's going into Dylan's pockets. I don't want some fat-cat exec skimming 4.5 cents from that nickel in order to support his Lexus habit or the fact that he or she has to pay rent on his overbig house in the Hamptons.
Napster? PressPlay? Forget it.
Wait, let me get this straight: $1499 for (1) a 40 gig hard drive and (2) a sleek looking case that fits into my home stereo system?
What are these guys smoking?
Two weeks agao, they come out with the obscenely priced PVR.
Last week, they sue Tivo.
This week, they have an obscenely priced hard drive/case that doesn't even play DVDs! Heck, even the ZapStation -- lame as it is -- has DVD capabilities.
I realize this stuff comes down in price once it establishes its niche in the market place. And I realize -- to some extent, at least -- you gotta give SonicBlue credit for some forward-thinking in a pretty stagnant consumer-digital-recorder marketplace.
But this price -- $1499 -- for a hard drive in a pretty case is beyond outrageous. It's beyond even "obscene." I mean, they're testing the waters here, I realize -- but come on!
Now, if they'd *combine* their new DVR with this digital audio receiver -- and then drop the price to around 699 -- they *might* have an interesting product -- a Tivo, in other words, that can record sound and video onto a CDR or DVD-R (or whatever the format is). Sorta like a DVD version of the Terrapin video recorder that can not only record in every known format -- CDR, VCD, SVCD, DVD -- but can also output digitally (optical or coax) and also send video out across a home LAN --this might be interesting -- especially if the hard drive is upgradable.
40 gigs is nothing these days. Yeah, it holds a lot of music -- 650 hours or whatever -- but what these people oftentimes don't realize is that once you have your 40 gigger filled, you don't stop. I mean, you keep getting *more* music. So 40 gig might be your "basic" music collection, but without any way to expand the 40 to over a 100 or so gigs -- or a way to swap out the filled hard drive for an empty one -- it doesn't make much sense.
Even for those folks who have hundreds of CDs -- and who eschew the MP3 scene -- 40 gigs won't even hold a good amount of CDs. It'll hold a lot, sure, but then what are you supposed to use to digitize the rest of your collection? Spend another $1499 for another measly 40 gigs?
LOL. How about just go into Best Buy, snag the latest and greatest Maxtor/Seagate hard drive for $129 and slap it into your computer.
Assuming $129 is the current price of, say, a 40 gigger -- $1499 ought to buy, well, close to 12 40 gig drives. Which gives a total -- right? -- of around 480 gigs. Now, this is approaching a size that most folks would feel pretty comfortable with -- 480 gigs is a good sized chunk of storage.
And -- finally -- why the hell doesn't some guy start making cool looking PC cases that fit in with stereo racks? I know there's the BookPC cases, but I gotta admit: the SonicBlue case looks pretty cool. I'd easily pay $199 or even $399 for a really, really cool looking case that I could line up with all of my other components -- my amp, DVD, CD, DirecTivo -- that looked like it was actually a component instead of a crappy looking PC case masquerading as a poor-man's SonicBlue digital audio receiver.
I second this: Covad DSL seems -- at this point, at least -- much better than nearly any alternative.
...)
I've got a 1500/384 pipe, absolutely *no* restrictions on servers or bandwidth, up to 10 IP addresses, no funky PPPoE, and access to a shell account. (Plus I'm going through Speakeasy's Chicago POP, so my pings are -- and have remained -- remarkably low for stuff like Quake.)
Yeah, it's a little pricey -- 75+ bucks a month (more because I have several IP addresses) -- but I'd always said that I'd be willing to pay a bit more for decent service, and so far Covad has given me superb service.
Kudos to Covad. As a former Telocity/Rhythms customer, I'm glad to see that out of the Rhythms/Northpoint/Covad group there appears to be at least one (possible) survivor.
Besides, there's no way in hell I'd give another penney to AT&T or Ameritech. I'd go back to a 56K if AT&T or Ameritech were my only DSL/Cable choices. (Although I'm worried about the DirecTV/EchoStar proposed merger, but that's another thread, another day
Kelso
Keep in mind, there are a number of ways to access the full on-line OED for free. If you really want access, you can find a way. For example:
- Most colleges and universities have access, and if you're an alumnus -- and join the alumni association -- you'll probably retain your access.
- Ditto for community colleges. Most community collges usually offer library cards for the public-at-large. These days, once you get a library card at a comm coll, you usually have access to their on-line catalog -- which probably includes on-line access to the OED.
- Also -- perhaps oddest of all -- if you join the 'History Book Club' (and perhaps others -- the Reader's Subscription, Quality Paperback Book Club, etc.) you are granted access to the on-line OED through their websites. I just discovered this the other day. I signed up for the History Book Club (in order to get the 4 free books) and then received an email explaining that I now had access to the full on-line OED.
- And finally, don't forget there's a compact OED -- two big volumes with a magnifying glass -- that contains the *complete* OED. (Doesn't include any recent updates, but it's fantastic for what it does contain -- and it's the most recent edition.) I received the Compact OED several years ago for free for joining the Book-of-the-Month club. The compact OED is also available for around $299 (I think) at Borders and Barnes and Noble. (If you know an employee of either of those stores, you can get a nice discount.)
So, yeah, there are *many* ways of getting the OED -- hard copy and on-line. And most likely you already have access for free but don't know it -- local library, college, community college, book club!
Kelso
One of the best gifts: the $99 DirecTIVO at Circuit City. Helluva good deal if you already have a DirecTV setup. (And even if you don't -- it's a penny more for a dish and free installation.)
Good way to get TIVO and a boatload of sat channels.
Really. This is all such bullshit. I can see it now: Ballmer and Gates sitting around some massive table in a dark little room having a "soul-searching" discussion.
What, they're gonna get all touchy-feely now? Nex TechNet convention everybody is gonna join hands and let Ballmer know that he's succeeded well at this new mission to teach Microsoft how to "comport" itself as a company?
You know companies are full of the bullshit spin when they publically start talking about how it's high time to "change our image" and become less of a draconian, narcissistic, behemoth and more of a "company that understands."
Hey, here's a new flash for Microsoft. From someone down here in trenches.
Number one, shut the fuck up. Shut the fuck up about all this image enhancement and lessons learned about "just what exactly this massive monopolistic suit has taught us."
You know what it should have taught you? Not that you need to get more emotional with your employees but that you're a massive, monopolistic behemoth who steamrolled over a lot of good talent in order to get to the top. Maybe, okay, that's the nature of the business. Well, if it is, here's a clue: shut the fuck up about it. Don't remind people that you *aren't* touchy-feely and you *were* a massive, monopolistic behemoth that steamrolled over a lot of good talent.
Number two, no one really cares. The world ain't built around Microsoft. Much as Ballmer likes to leap around the stage and pretend he's got energy, the world has its own share of non-microsoft problems. You wanna go touchy-feely and try to comport yourself anew? Great, more power to ya.
Ya wanna try to "reduce the cutthroat culture" within the halls of Microsoft?
Great, go ahead, Pal. Do what ya need to do. Leap around the stage, waving your arms, spitting, screaming: "I love this COMPANY! I love this company!"
Whatever.
Just love your little employees, compete fairly, and keep on keeping on. Just don't announce that you're gonna love your little little employees, compete fairly, and keep on keeping on.
Really, no one cares. No one cares. No one really fucking cares.
Really.
And as an interesting (and, yes, off-topic) aside: one summer when I was around 12 or 13, my parents sublet the apartment next to his on 7th avenue in Manhattan. This was long before the "We're Not Gonna Take It" song -- more like when they were still paying dues in clubs and wearing their high heels and thick lipstick.
Anyway, two observations about Dee Snider: (1) he was one of the nicest, coolest people a 13 year old could possibly hope to meet and (2) he had the biggest damn stereo system I'd ever seen in my 13 years.
I mentioned that the apartment my parents sublet was next to his? Well, my bed was on the other side of the wall where his stereo was. That stereo put out enough base to shake my titties and whip the snot from my nose even when I was fast asleep -- which was seldom, since the stereo was almost always on, shaking and whipping me into sleep-deprived obvlion.
But Dee's all around coolness more than made up for the noise (which, in the grand scheme of things was no big deal).
Anyway, I thought I'd point this out.
Dee Snider rocks!
Um, you guys are falling for it.
This is a stunt. MS will relent within a week or two. They're doing this to drum up more PR for the XP release. It keeps their names in the headlines.
Bad publicity is better than no publicity.
A week, maybe two weeks from now (probably after the XBOX) they'll relent, redesign the MSN site slightly, and allow all browsers access.
And remember, too, copyright has always been framed as a "temporary" notion. True, the temporality of a single copyright has been extended, but as it was framed by the founders, copyright was never meant to be a sweeping, draconian notion of something *absolute*.
Copyright was meant to *promote* not meant to *inhibit*. It was not meant as an essentially permanent hedge for questionable constitutional and monopolistic manipulations.
Believe me, I don't expect the record company execs to understand this, let alone act within the spirit of the notion as it was originally proposed and written. But I do expect our own legislators to rap the collective heads of these executive fuckers and wake them up to the essential *spirit* of the law. A spirit, I would add, that transcends any temporary monetary gains for fat cat record exectives like Hilary Rosen or the ultra-ultra fat-cat film geriatric named Jack "America was great under Jack Kennedy" Valenti.
Copyright is not about money. It's about the promotion of art. Remember this. This should be the mantra. Someone should paint this slogan on Hilary's office door.
Copyright was never about money.
Copyright was never about money.
It's all about *promotion*. And the founders took this "promotion" to be integral to a diverse society.
In fact, I'm quite sure Jefferson would be disgusted by the actions of the music and film industries. Disgusted, too, by their abohorrent actions in light of the recent terrorist attacks -- attempting (if you recall) to attach their legislative riders to the bottoms of the recently passed terrorist legislation. It's disgusting and demeaning and proves that these fucking record executives will stop at nothing -- literally -- to keep their golf club memberships, Lexus', and summer homes in the Hamptons.
Look, I don't if Katz is asking a lot of rhetorical questions or what, but here's my own take on the current situation: I sleep better knowing we're using the "bunker busters" to penetrate twenty or so feet into the ground (from an altitude of 40,000 + feet and obliterate the caverns and bunkers of these people.
Here's a link from the International Herald Tribune. A commander talks about dropping a bunker buster on a terrorism camp, seeing the ground implode, and then seeing the hills light up with small arms fire (a bunch off pissed of al-qaeda fuckers):
International Herald Tribune Bunker Buster article
I'm not particularly moved by war and hope everything gets settled peacefully, but, cripes, these guys are stateless, asymentrical savages. There's no two ways about it.
So, as far as I'm concerned, let us all praise the bunker busters and hope they're contributing to our self-defense.
Remember, too, the other series currently under development -- Star Trek: People Hut.
My group is working with the Paramount trek development group -- so some of this is subject to change -- but we're aiming 'People Hut' at folks who (unlike the original poster) believes that Star Trek is about people crammed in a small, metallic space -- a space within "deep space," you might say. We do, at any rate.
Anyway, we're also currently brainstorming and working with the Roddenberry tech-dev wing at Paramount, but People Hut -- tentatively -- is set to premier in 2004. We're thinking about taking a group of unemployed air traffic controllers -- the ones fired by Reagan about 20 years ago -- who have all sorts of dreams and longings for deep space.
People Hut, literally, would start in the living room of one the unemployed controllers and would focus in on the lives of these folks as they get closer to building their own little ship. (Sort of like 'Salvage One' from a long time ago -- you remember that? With Andy Griffith? And the girl that was in 'Escape from Witch Mountain'? They built a ship that looked like a thimble with a balloon on it and then zoomed off for various missions.)
Anyway, our 'ST:PH' would chronicle the lives of these dreamers. The ups and the downs of family life -- what it would mean, in other words, to be a dreamer in the era of the Reaganomics -- and how those dreams impact everyone emotionally.
Eventually they would christen their Sunday evening meeting the 'People Hut' where anyone -- not just unemployed air traffic controllers -- would come and chat about hopes, dreams, and deep space.
One guy -- we're not sure who -- wins the lottery in Michigan (this is pre-Power Ball, remember) and then realizes that, at long last, his dreams have a bit of financial backing behind them.
(We're thinking the lottery pay out would be around 12-15 million -- enough to build a ship and possibly hire some then-hot-shot Soviet scientists to defect and investigate various means of plasma transport -- the stuff that the Soviets were rumored to be working on before the break-up of the USSR.)
Probably midway through the first season they'll launch the People Hut -- PH001 -- and go on a few adventures. Maybe check out the moon a little bit more -- pick up some of the trash left behind by the previous lunar missions -- and really try to clean things up. ST:PH -- if all goes according to plan -- will have a strong socio-economic context.
If anyone is interested, I can detail a couple more advantures. Remember, lots of this is still under development. No green lights yet. Robert Downey, Jr is tentatively slated to play Captain O'Malley -- a grizzed Irish guy who invested his entire life in air-traffic control.
Hey, here's a tip: work for the state.
Really.
Forget this "fun" shit.
Think instead "enjoyment."
Where can I find an "enjoyable" job?
Urge your girlfriend to check out tech jobs with Chicago/State of Illinois agencies. Really. She'll be *very* surprised. There are a lot of openings for enjoyable, high-tech jobs.
Will they be firing fucking nerfguns?
No, because that's a bunch of shit for losers who don't know what a job is and think they need to be entertained all day long by stupid shit like slinkys and nerfballs and other toys.
But if your girlfriend is serious about working -- and wants a steady, reliable paycheck -- take a gander at state websites and job openings.
This is an interesting question: why would *anyone* be entitled to privacy when you're using equipment that someone else has paid for?
... disturbing. Employees wouldn't stand for that. Yet they -- we -- stand for web monitoring?)
- for can *see* you yabbering when she passes your cubicle on her way to yet another important meeting.
The question is interesting for a couple reasons. First, it assumes that money -- cash, whatever -- negates privacy considerations. I'm entitled to privacy only with stuff -- phones, faxes, computers -- that I *pay* for. If I haven't paid for it, then anything goes.
Second -- and this is derived from the first point -- is the resulting "anything goes" mentality. This seems to be the real point of the WSJ article. Even though I'm getting paid for working -- and certainly expect to be given the money I'm entitled to -- why must I give my fundamental right of privacy up?
(The logic here, then, if I'm *not* getting paid -- on my lunch hour -- then does that give me the right to surf? In some places, yes. In most places, no. Because -- and some junior manager will be quick to explain this -- the fact that you surf means not only wasted productivity [which is, of course, dubious] but also liability.)
Which brings me to my third point -- and one that I have yet to receive an explanation for: the digital paradox. Why does a company fear the internet more than it does idle chatter in the bathroom? Or idle phone conversation? Why aren't my telephone calls monitored -- yet every site I visit is.
Why aren't there video cameras in the bathroom? (Because, well, that would be
I'd really like an explanation as to why the web -- more so than the phone, more so than the break-room during "work" time -- is so feared by management.
The reason, of course, is power. Skippy the mid-level manager can *see* you yabbering away in the break room.
Britney the just-out-of-Keller-with-an-MBA-I-worked-real-hard
Ah well. It's all power. Britney needs to commandeer what little power she is and make sure the power remains inviolable. I think that's what managers fear most -- loss of power. There is this illusion among the worst managers that somehow power -- their own, tenuous power -- will increase productivity. Because that means money -- the real reason the web is monitored.
It's crazy -- the surveillance. Everybody's watching, watching to make sure you don't do something to decrease productivity. Fucking absurd.
Here's the corproate SWAT scenario. Graphic, but true:
Corporate-sponsored, miltary-style copyright squads. Copyright-sponsored SWAT teams, licensed by Microsoft, Adobe, Sun, MPAA, RIAA (under whatever "license" they choose to deem official) running military-style ops to knock out egregious P2P "nodes".
Running an especially active P2P node?
Come 3AM in the morning, expect a white van to pull up outside your house/condo/apartment, filled to the brim with a covert tactical squad in full body armor and carrying fully-automatic weapons, two hundred pound door "key" to knock down those pesky screen doors.
Search warrants? Not a chance. None of this is supported by state, local or even federal law enforcement.
These renegade ops are private. Who has time for a search warrant? Or for due process? What matters here is that the RIAA and MPAA get their results.
You wanna know who these guys are that have their gun barrels pointed at your head? Your girlfriend's head?
Don't mean nothing when one guy has a steel toed boot across the back of your head and is pressing your cheek against the bathroom floor. One weapon is at the back of your head, the other's at the back of your girlfriend's head.
And your dog -- he's already knocked out cold, thanks to the little "dog sleeping darts" these guys carry. Rottweiller? German Shepard? Doesn't make a difference. First thing these guys do is look for the dogs. One dart, and the dog's out cold, lying with his tongue flopped out his mouth in the middle of your living room floor.
Meanwhile, all you see is odd flashes of light coming from all over your house. You can make out maybe five, six guys running around, screaming at the top of their lungs. But you can't tell for sure because everytime you sorta look around, the guy makes sure your forehead hits the floor with a thwap.
Two of your teeth are already on the floor, and you can feel one loose in the back of your mouth. You can't tell if all the blood is coming from your mouth or your split lip.
Your girlfriend is saying something -- yelling -- and these guys from behind their black goggles keep telling her to shut the fuck up. Shut the fuck up. She doesn't. And then you see one guy take some duct tape and put it over her mouth. She's still yelling something, but it's not as loud.
That's when you start hearing the crashes and thumps in the bedroom above you. What are they knocking down -- the shelves? Overturning the beds? Throwing the monitor down on the floor?
Couple seconds later, one guy comes down with your Dell Athlon box. Not the monitor, not the printer, just the white box with the keyboard cable hanging from it. The ethernet cable is still attached and he's dragging your Linksys hub -- bump, bump, bump -- down the stairs. He hustles out the front door. The guy above you gives you one more whack with his boot, then says, "Clear!" to someone.
Suddenly all these guys start saying "Clear" to one another. You hear everybody run out the front door, down your porch, and the sound of tires squealing off.
Meanwhile, you wait. You're not sure what to do. Your girlfriend is dragging her cheek against the kitchen floor to get the tape off her mouth.
And you -- your lips and gums hurt like a sonofabitch. They tied your hands with those plastic twisti-cuffs but you've got one hand free. You touch your mouth -- your front teeth are gone. The blood from your mouth smells metallic. And you're not even sure what happened.
Whatever it was, it took all of 2, maybe 3 minutes.
And you have no idea who it was. For days, you try and figure it out. Cops show up, they're stymied.
Was it a robbery?
Well, no.
These guys -- they were dressed in body armor?
Yeah. Like SWAT.
SWAT? The cops laugh. No, there's no SWAT here, son. Say, do you use drugs? Even smoked a little? Maybe it's some drug deal gone bad? One of your drug buddies come to get more of what you sold him?
No. No it wasn't that.
But the cops are suspicious. Say, maybe you'd like to come down with us? Answer a few questions?
You say, well, no, I'd rather not.
But they insist.
While you're waiting in the back of the cruiser you hear the cops laughing: SWAT, yeah. Sure. What's this guy smoking?
Some weird shit, that's for sure.
They laugh some more.
And that's that.
... or, at least, the first 3D game I remember playing over and over and over again: Death Maze 5000 for the TRS-80 Model I. I believe this was around 1980-82.
...
(I'll bet there were 3D-like games even before the TRS-80.)
There was also Asylum I and II -- both 3D (they weren't actually 3D, but the hallways had a 3D perspective). All the games were (more or less) real-time, too: you move through the maze using the arrow keys. Every time you moved, your perspective changed. You could pretty quickly locate doors and stretches of long hallways.
Remember, too, that the TRS-80 Model I's had really, really limited graphics: black and white and (IIRC) approximately 127 by 48. Later, you were able to buy a high-res upgrade (not sure if it was available for the Model I, but I remember the Model III/IV had the option).
And here I'll veer off-topic slightly, but I think it's interesting to mention that these early games (and I remember a 3D maze game for the Commodore Pet, too) were amazingly addictive despite limited graphics. I wouldn't be surprised if the Timex Sinclair had some sort of 3D game. I'm sure the Apple II had 'em -- as did the Atari 400/800 and the TI 99/4a.
What I distinctly remember -- and this was a long, long time ago -- was sitting with my buddies playing Asylum and wishing for better graphics and colors. We all thought it would never happen. (We were maybe 14, 15, at the time.) We figured games like Death Maze and Asylum were flukes. That they'd never catch on. We also figured the Infocom games -- Zork I and Deadline and Suspect -- would be the games that, over time, would last.
Really, really off-topic, but I remember this, too: does anyone recall the old-time Infocom game packaging? How they'd include all sorts of neat floor plans, maps, keychains, buttons and badges. Those old Infocom games were really a trip: each package was different and had all kinds of cool stuff.
*sigh*
Anyway, flash forward twenty years. Quake 3, Tribes 2, Counterstrike.
Little did we know
Yep. Ameritech. Static IP. But without our SDSL connections. ADSL 768/128.
For nearly 3 years I've had Telocity/DTV (one of the first in Chicago I was told) and loved it -- 1024/1024 SDSL.
Sweet mother of god: what a deal for 49 bucks a month.
Add to that this: the "book" as we know it has been around for over 500 years.
There's a reason for that. In fact, there's many reasons for that. Me, I've got 2000 books in my house. Sure, I've got a 40 gig hard drive, too -- in fact three 40 gig hard drives -- and could easily fit my books on one (probably less than 1) of those hard drives.
But why? Why would I want to sit and stare at a computer screen or Palm or PocketPC or iPaq or Rocket eBook reader or whatever is the gadget du jour?
I actually enjoy the physical book -- the paper, the way it smells, the way I can use it, abuse it, tote it, and carry it around. I also like the fact that I won't be arrested if, say, I decide to backwards engineer it -- if I take a peep at the binding, wonder if the leaves are glued, and even spot a couple pages that haven't been cut.
I can't do that with an eBook. I can't do that because Adobe and Microsoft will make sure I end up in jail. They'll claim that my "crime" is nearly as bad as murder -- more so, in fact, because I'm infringing on their "intellectual property" which, as we all know, is more important than anything else these days.
Yeah, eBooks rock, all right. Go ebooks. Wonderful.
And all these "screen reading" software that Microsoft is pioneering? Yeah, it's wonderful. Sit me down in front of a bigass monitor with Microsoft's Reader software. Software, by the way, which hasn't been updated in nearly a year. Software which is slow, buggy as hell, and won't even let me "register" more than twice.
Oh yeah, ebooks rock all right. Let's see. Don't get me started. How about the one time I decided to purchase an ebook? I filled out all the forms -- nearly had to give my driver's license number -- and then submitted all my credit card information only to -- get this! -- get a 500 Server Error when it came time to issue me the "digital verification" that I then had to "click" on then RESUBMIT just to prove that I'm who I said I was and that my reader was registered.
Love it! Let's see, now how does that compare with this:
Live in Ann Arbor (or any good college town with lots of bookstores). Go to Dawn Treader Books (or any good used bookstore piled high with thousands of books). Buy book. Buy another book. Bring book up to counter. Chat with clerk who says, "Hey, if you're into Thomas Pynchon, have you tried Gaddis?" "No," say I. "You recommend him?" "Oh yeah," says clerk who, within seconds, drops a copy of _The Recognitions_ and _JR_ on top of the nicely dog eared copies of _V_ and _Gravity's Rainbow_ that I'd already decided to purchase.
So exit I do, ambling down Liberty Street (or whatever street in your college town of choice that is lined with your used bookstores of choice) with my newly purchased used books. I can read these books anywhere. I can underline them. I can lend them to my friends. And -- imagine this! -- no matter what I do to these books -- read them, underline them, xerox a few pages from them for a presentation -- the FBI DOES NOT GET INVOLVED!
Now, compare that with digital books. Compare that with encryption, validation, verification. You tell me which is the better deal for readers?
Now, don't get me wrong. Maybe ebooks have their uses. You're Pre-Med, say, and can get a semester's worth of ebooks on a CDROM. Maybe that's a good deal. Or you're a law student and can get what you need a couple CDROMS and don't have to scout out estate sales of dead lawyers just so you can build a library of outdated law books. All right, fair enough.
But for book lovers -- and actual readers -- readers who like to discover an old Modern Library edition of Thackeray that was used by someone in 1941 who dated the book and even stuck a few interesting notes on the margin -- there's nothing to compare with actual, phsyical text.
My own opinion -- after years of haunting used bookstores and 'Friends of the Library' sales -- is this: that people who claim that ebooks are the best thing to come around since, er, the invention of the book are not readers. They simply don't read. They like to have the books. Or they like to have the electronic versions of books that they've read (I mean, really, how many copies of Joe Haldeman's 'Forever War' or Isaac Asimov's 'Foundation Trilogy' do you really need? If you check out the ebook groups on usenet, these are really the only books traded, posted, and pirated -- Haldeman, Asimov, some Sterling, Gibson (of course), and Heinlein. And the same pirated texts are posted day after day after day after day after day. But that's not the point, is it?)
You're wrong. The reason they weren't taking down corporate web servers 15 years ago was because there were no corporate web servers to take down. You've completely missed the point of the rebellious spirit. (Take a look at "Rebel Without a Cause" or "American Graffitti" and you'll see what I mean.)
... he sorta drifted off. No one knew what happened to him. One day he was in gym class wearing his blue shorts with the white-stripes, and the next day he was gone.
Listen, 15 years ago, I was a 15 year old script kiddie wannabe before script kiddies were even known as script kiddies who used to spend all my weekends in the back of a Radio Shack store messing around with a TRS-80 Model I Level II and an acoustically coupled 300 baud modem.
I used to hang out with a slightly older dude named Eberle (pronounced eh-ber-lee). Me, my buddy Mark, and Eberle did all kinds of weird and rebellious shit over that modem. The grunts working the cash register up front had no idea this stuff was going on in the back of their store. I remember there were a couple of really old (and really slow) BBS's that we used to connect to with the modem. We taught ourselves Z80 assembly, played a lot of Zork I (remember when Radio Shack used to sell Zork I and II in those plastic zip-lock bags), and messed around occasionally with the TRS-80 Model II -- the one with the big-ass 8 inch floppy drives.
We played Dungeons and Dragons, Avalon Hill's Squad Leader, and rode our motocross bikes with the yellow mag wheels up and down the streets like we owned the town. We slapped quarters on the front of Donkey Kong arcade games ("Hey, pal, I'm taking the next game.") and used to wonder if a perfect score on Pac Man was possible. We knew all the patterns, BTW. The arcade managers at the Aladdin's Castle in the mall where me and Mark and Eberle used to hang out wore these red vests and carried around rolls of tokens. They used to hang out in the backroom and would silently come over to us whenever Tron or Pole Position ate our quarters.
We used to hang out at the local high school in the computer labs where they had old, grizzed ex-IBM guys working and teaching there who let us use the Osbourne MicroAce's and Commodore PET's (remember those plastic keyboards?) and the TRS-80's. Forget Apple and all the color shit that became popular -- the computer of choice in our small, midwestern town with a single mall and lots of D&D players was the Radio Shack TRS-80. (We carried around our copies of Super Utility Plus so we could copy any copy protected disk that came our way.)
Eventually we got kicked out of the Radio Shack. We scared off a lot of customers, I guess. Plus, Eberle started growing facial hair, so he looked a little strange.
I started taking computer classes at the local college -- Fortran, Pascal, some Cobol -- and eventually won a TRS-80 Model III by guessing the combination of a lockbox full of twenty dollar bills at the local mall.
My friend Mark moved out of town, and Eberle
Radio Shack stopped selling TRS-80's not long after that. Everybody started talking about Commodore 64's and Apple II's and Timex Sinclar's and Atari 400 and 800's.
Aladdin's Castle tweaked the Pac Man game so we couldn't run patterns anymore, introduced Ms. Pac Man (which let us all down), and got rid of their Tron game (which rocked).
And that was that.
Not exactly rebels, but we had our moments. That TRS-80 and its 300 baud modem was a helluva cool little machine.
What I'm curious about -- and I've even asked our company's counsel about this -- is what's the difference between monitoring web activity and monitoring, say, the lunchroom for suspicious "non-work" activity?
Or monitoring the content of our telephone calls for "non-work" communication?
Or monitoring the bathrooms for "non-work" activity?
If there were microphones in the lunchroom -- or, even worse -- in the bathroom -- employees would be furious.
But what's the fundamental difference -- since we're talking "content" here -- between "non-work" jibber-jabber (which surely wastes huge amounts of time) in the hall and "non-work" jibber-jabber surfing from, say, MarthStewart.Com or Kmart.com or Walmart.com?
Our company's counsel said, well, you have a good point. But he couldn't explain the difference.
Why is form of communication more "privileged" than the other? And why do employees sit by and allow their computer clicks to be monitored yet would raise holy hell if they found their "non-work" bathroom conversations were being taped, logged, and then catalogged for a manager's later perusal.
I suspect all this monitoring stuff boils down to two things: (1) liability and (2) bad managers. The liability I can understand -- sexual harrassment due to pornoography, etc. etc. Okay, I understand that.
But (2) is more complex. This isn't a newsflash to anyone on Slashdot, of course, but why is it that more and more managers are farming out their "managerial duties" to the IT department? "Hey, I can't monitor my employees all the time, but I can damn sure monitor what web pages he/she views. Ergo, I retain control."
The real question isn't "How can these 15 year olds usurp the power from the traditionally powerful" but is instead: "Why are our cultural institutions so fragile -- and so mysteriously sacrosanct -- that radical shifts in power (such as Lebed's stock trading) cause such widespread fear and paranoia?"
What is it that the "powerful" are protecting? My guess is that they're protecting the hegemony of their institutions so that they, the traditionally powerful, can remain in power. And until recently, these protected institutions have been immune to all but those in "power".
What all this shows, I think, is just how fragile things are -- cultural instititions -- and how the powerful will stop at nothing to maintain their hold on the institutions that legitimize their power. Adobe, for example, is proof of this. Microsoft, too.
But why? Why is everything so fragile? And why do guys like Lebed so honestly and completely expose the fragility?
If you saw Lebed on a recent 60 Minutes, you can see that he's obviously a smart, savvy guy. He's no nut, no raving lunatic. He's simply done his homework. And he understands how things work. Then, cut to the chair of the SEC: an old white guy, your typical CEO: big suit, big white hair, sun tan. Lots of years on the golf course, right?
He's "old school" all the way. Probably from the same school as our good buddy Jack Valenti. Probably shot a few holes with ol' Jack. (Can't you imagine the conversation these two guys would have? "All this internet stuff, Jack. It scares the hell out of me. Where's the honor? The tradition?" And Jack, nodding and nodding -- any more nodding and his head would pop off and birdie into the hole -- couldn't agree more: "The internet. It's the ruination of our culture. Bandwidth means piracy. There is no honor anymore, no tradition. Why I remember golfing with Jack Kennedy. There was a stand up guy. A guy who knew how things worked. Blah blah blah.)
Anyway, this SEC guy, he goes on and on about Lebed. How Lebed's crime is just about the worst sort of crime he could imagine. He defrauded the masses. He took advantage of the system. And, you better believe it, friend: Lebed oughta be thrown into the pokey and the key thrown away.
These old guys -- the CEOs still sitting around table chit chatting about golf and driving their Lexus' and worrying about their platinum parachutes -- these guys oughta be fired on the spot. Told to either get with the program or get the hell out. They still think the best business is the business you conduct between holes seven and eight. Driving around with their little ladies golf gloves in loud little golf carts, pretending to care about whether or not you got a Big Bertha driver or that latest titanium driver.
It's all a bunch of crap. Lebed and others -- they're the ones exposing the institutions for what they are. Maybe that's good, maybe that's bad. But more power to 'em.
I'm not opposed to open source data repositories. You misunderstand.
The usenet google, for example -- an *incredibly* valuable resource. Probably one of the top resources on the net. No question.
But an encyclopedia is different. It's different because it's not just a "data repository." You don't just dump data into an encyclopedia. Britannica, as I mentioned above, has a history. The history counts toward its usefulness. The history establishes the encyclopedia into a very specific social context. Its existence and past history work toward validating its continued presence and future usefulness.
Now, you could argue that the usenet archives, for example, operate under similar circumstances. They're useful -- and perhaps "valid" -- because they've proved their usefulness in both historical and day-to-day practical contexts.
If you said this -- and argued this way -- you'd be absolutely right. But DejaGoogle -- or whatever it's now called -- isn't the same sort of resource that an encyclopedia (for it to be useful) is.
This is a complex issue. A bunch of open sourcers deciding that the information is "surprisingly high quality" doesn't mean that its context is somehow magically established.
If I take black and white photographs, for example, and ardently practice Ansel Adams' "Zone System" -- visualing the finished image by exposing for a specific "zone" of gray in the scene, exposing for it, and then controlling my development process so that I can either add or decrease the contrast in the negative so that the finished image matches exactly my pre-visualization down to the whites, grays, and blacks -- I'm not necessarily making art. I'm following a technical process to achieve predictable results. But it may or may not be "art". I don't know. That's not for me to decide.
Same with the encyclopedia -- especially (in the case of nupedia) if there's only about 20 articles. You can't just decide, hey, we're following all the rules, therefore our resource is just as good as Britannica's and even better: we're free! (And then get someone at a Slashdot-like to website to write and call the content "surprisingly high quality.")
That's not to poo-poo the idea or to say that they're wasting their time. They're not wasting their time. It's a good idea. But to imply that it is now or will soon offer an alternative to the granddaddy (literally) of all reference works is just, well, absurd. Completely absurd.
It's like me deciding to write a dictionary. I decide there's 80,000 words in my dictionary. I have some fun with the definitions -- I'm a decent writer, so I give every definition a little "spin".
"It's a dictionary with attitude," I tell my friends. "And get this: it's surprisingly high quality! I mean, for chrissake, who wants to pay $1999 for the Oxford English Dictionary? You can have mine for free!"
"Suprisingly high quality" according to whom? According to some open source advocate? What the hell is this supposed to mean? This proof of something?
I've had plenty of students who would claim that their papers are of surprisingly high quality. "My roomate thought so. And he's a senior!"
Um, yeah. Whatever.
Bottom-line: the "open source" encyclopedias are noble ideas, but they'll never be accepted mainstream. They'll never be institutionalized the way that Britannica has and will continue to be.
And -- I don't see anyone writing about this -- bear in mind (just naming a few names off the top of my head) that Buckminster Fuller and Aaron Copland (among many, many others) have written and contributed articles to Britannica. This is part of what Britannica such an interesting, ongoing historical document. And this is part of what has "institutionalized" Britannica.
The question we should be asking -- and one, again, that I see no one concerned about -- is this: do we really need an "open source" enclopedia?
We might. I'm not sure. But then: why? Why do we need it? Do we need it because Britannica lacks quality content? Or do we need it because Britannica is charging five bucks a month and a couple people think: "Hmmmm. Monthly charge bad. Must start from scratch."
I think it's fairly obvious that, no, Katz doesn't read the replies posted to his, er, articles. People claim that Katz has responded to points they've made, but I've yet to see Katz engage in a discussion.
In fact, I'd be willing to bet Katz has a queue full of articles -- a week's worth, whatever -- and is not a regular visitor of Slashdot.
That said, I find it baffling that Katz would call Lieberman a "pompous gasbag."
For a couple of reasons:
First, the obvious.
And second: Lieberman -- of all of our elected officials -- is far from "pompous". Granted, he's fairly critical of the media and its portrayal of violence, but this doesn't necessarily make him pompous. At least not any more so than any other, er, media crtic. Ahem.
Katz's comment about Lieberman -- a slight slip, perhaps -- is fairly revealing: it makes Katz's previous points less persuasive and suddenly gives Katz the none-too-subtle appearance of having, eek!, an agenda.
And really -- I say this honestly -- what's worse than a media critic with an agenda who engages in ad hominem attacks?
Not much.
Katz, you care to respond?
I think it's fairly obvious where this is going:
.NET technology will be released to developers. "We're a little behind with .NET and web services, but we're sure that developers want the highest possible level of performance."
.NET Framework Beta 26! (Once it's released.)
- October, 2003: Bill Gates announces that "Microsoft Product Activation" has been a resounding success -- so much of a success, in fact, that he is pleased to announce "Microsoft Geo-Awareness" as the next logical step in Product Activation technologies.
"Microsoft users embraced Product Activation," Gates told the 5,000 developers at Chicago's Tech-Ed conference. "And now we offer users the next phase of our technology: Geo-Awareness. Thanks to advances in microtechnology, tiny GPS devices are embedded in every new DVD of Microsoft XP 2004. This technology will allow us to alert users to lost DVDs and tell them, specifically, where their lost disc can be found."
Gates added the new technology will also ensure that XP 2004 is installed only on the machines for which is was registered for. "You tell us your street location, we locate your house on our terraserver database, retrieve the GPS coordinates, and are able to activate your XP 2004 DVD so that it will install on exactly the machine you intended it to be installed on. In fact," Gates added, "we allow you to move within a 100 foot radius. If, say, you decide to add a new bedroom onto your house and decide to move the computer into that bedroom -- no problem! You are allowed to do so. You don't have to call to reactivate."
Gates assured the skeptical developers that users have demanded that Microsoft implement this new technology into their products so that Microsoft products continue to operate at the highest possible levels of performance.
Later that same afternoon, Gates announced that beta 25 of Microsoft's new
Gates also indicated that eventually copies of Visual Studio.NET will include the GPS technology. "Although we're restricting the area in which developers can use the software. Instead of the 100 feet we offer home users, we came to the decsion that most developers sit at one desk and at one computer for days, weeks, sometimes years at a time. So users of VS.NET (beta 25) will be allowed a 2 foot GPS radius."
Steve Ballmer added that the two feet of space allows developers to shift their computer from one end of the desk to the other. "Sometimes, um," Ballmer explained, "you get the sun in your eyes or you need a change of view. So we figured, two feet was a good GPS radius."
Developers who move outside the two foot radius will face the following fines:
- $150 first-time offense charge.
- $50 for every minute your activated Video Studio remains outside of the GPS coordinates.
- $250 processing fee for processing credit card fines.
- $500 mandatory training fee (one-time only). Offenders will be required to go to the nearest MSDN GPS office and sit through a 12 hour licensing awareness seminar. They will have the option of writing a 25 page "piracy awareness" paper or paying a $1500 flat-fee (non-refundable) convenience fee. Food will not be provided. Developers are asked to bring their own beverages, pens, and paper. The 25 page seminar paper must be completed before leaving the seminar. Armed guards will be posted at the door.
- Successful "converted" offenders will be among the first to receive