One counterpoint to the cases you mentioned though, is that the companies fighting those changes were not opposing new technology paradigms, but rather direct competition (AT&T, Std Oil) or humanity (child labor etc).
What we're seeing now is interesting in that outmoded businesses are now receiving strong legal protection (with no popular support) in the form of bizarre laws that allow them to do very anticompetitive/anticapitalist things. From what I know of American history, we used to be very eager to embrace new technologies - indeed, technology has been the backbone of the USA since the industrial age, and that tradition is what's being threatened here.
The good news is, the USA has a remarkable "healing" ability and after a few years, once everybody sees what's going on, we usually correct our mistakes pretty quickly and move on to the next battle.
What does that response mean? Faced with a big enough threat they wont try to stay in business?
okay it wasn't worded quite right, but I think you know what I mean: they'll try (take whatever steps) no matter what, but faced with a big enough threat, they'll still fail to stay in business and prosper.
Happy now? You've spoiled the succinctness of my original post. Thanks a lot.
I'm asking, can you build, in your back yard from raw materials, a general purpose computer?
No I can not turn rocks, dirt, and dog feces from my yard into a computer.
I'm betting that, perhaps, one one-thousandth of the slashdot readership has even the beginnings of the capability to do that.
Everyone has the "beginnings of the capability" to do whatever the hell they want.
The rest of us are consumers however much we'd like to think of ourselves as somehow above the comman man.
Eh? Everyone consumes. No shame in that.
But the fact is we buy our equipment from big corporations.
You can buy all kinds of stuff from small corporations. Often better stuff than the big corps sell.
Those big corporations will take whatever steps are necessary to stay in business and prosper.
Good for them, but faced with a big enough threat, they won't.
If that means that the common computer goes the way of the dodo bird and more stringently controlled systems replace them, then that's what will happen.
Why does that have to happen?
Stop acting like you're some kind of god and that the rules of economics don't apply to you.
If I write you a check for a trillion dollars will you shut up? Or do I have to send a plague on you and your family?
Rheingold is worried that established companies with business models that are threatened by these new technologies could 'quash such nascent innovations as file-sharing
Don't worry, they can only manage this for a very short period of time. They're all ice vendors in the age of the fridge, and it's not a rut that they can simply step out of. They're in the wrong business entirely - technology doesn't just stand aside when a few vested interests complain to Capitol Hill.
No, just that priorities are utterly out of whack when high school grads can't multiply, or find the USA on a map (and it's getting worse), while old folks keep getting a new lease on life with every bazillion dollars we pump into medical research. How about diverting a bit of our energies to the education system? Who's going to DO all this medical research next century?
a cryptographic hash is not the same as data encryption - it's a *signature* of the data such that generating other data with the same signature is difficult. This is how you can check that the mandrake ISO you snagged off of bittorrent is a) intact and b) authentic
I'm not sure about the definition of "collision" in this case, but of course if you always reduce the number of bits, or always maps to fixed number of bits, then you will always have >1 thing (specifically, an infinite number of things for most hash algos) which will map to the same reduced number of bits.
What they mean by "broken" is that you can trivially *find* such a string.
I'm kind of bummed actually that so much work is being spent on extending lives, rather than making the world a better place for yougsters.
Death, it seems, was cleverly designed as a means of making room for new ideas and advancement. Prolonging it doesn't seem to have had any particular benefit to society AFAICT.
Certainly I'd feel differently were I 40 yrs older with a multi-million-$ estate that I'd build over my lifetime....
The encryption over the air accomplishing nothing.
What I meant to say is "...nothing in terms of copy protection".
Apple knows this. Quoth Jobs:
When we first went to talk to these record companies -- about eighteen months ago -- we said, "None of this technology that you're talking about's gonna work. We have Ph.D.s here who know the stuff cold, and we don't believe it's possible to protect digital content."
And I'm sure the record companies are figuring it out now too.
So why encrypt?
Because thanks to the DMCA which makes it ILLEGAL to crack even the most trivial of encryptions, Apple has a powerful anti-competitive tool at their disposal, which lets them use the force of law to lock out anyone who would make devices and software to compete with theirs by supporting the same formats. There, I said it. Sorry, Apple fans, but it's dirty business over there.
This is blatantly obvious and I'm not sure why the poster was modded up 5
Somebody please mod SuperBanana down to -1 for this pinheaded comment.
What he doesn't understand is that the Airport *does not even play the original AAC file*. It is converted to Apple Lossless in iTunes before the stream is sent down.
So what's going over the air is simply a losseslly compressed representation of what's coming right out the s/pdif port IN THE CLEAR. And there's no way to get at the original AAC data from either stream, even if you could decrypt it, because it's already been decompressed in iTunes!!!
The granparent's point is perfectly valid. The encryption over the air accomplishing nothing. It is just a placebo that Apple gives the music companies.
My wife keeps recording shows that she is never going to watch and keeps them on the HDD forever (You've Got mail, Down With Love, etc). I'd like some way of backing these up to free up the drive space.
going quite OT here but I'm curious if you know where the randomness comes from in casino machines?
A PRNG without getting some external noise could be easily predicted if you knew the algorithm. Do the machines have a noise source (eg microphone, diode noise circuit, radio receiver) or is it wired to the machine from somewhere?
Or does it come from measuring button timing? If that were the case then it's interesting that the user still has influence on the outcome in much the same way as an old-fashioned machine.
Probably there are both legal constraints about *where* the entropy comes from (to ensure fairness) as well as technical goals like making it practically impossible to predict.
What caught on the '90s was open source licensing, because a license was needed to keep open source going. People were freely sharing source code long before that, because no significant commercial/proprietary value was generally recognized for software source. Once "intellectual property" became the name of the technology game, the open source world needed tools like the GPL.
Nothing has changed, except the lawyers got involved. In the end it looks like OSS got a huge boost by having the protection and facilities offered by GPL.
From what I've seen, they toss free copies around to schools and governments as much as possible, and they tried their best to get people off Win9x and onto WinNT ASAP, but to no avail. Many of their policies are about creating new platforms and locking users into them.
But that's basically my point.... MSFT is still only pursuing the lock-in strategy. Cleary that has worked in the past, but I don't see Windows as a winner 10 years from now, and I don't see them doing anything else... all they're doing is squeezing harder, and it's not bringing them any new support. New computer deployments which aren't tied to windows applications are looking elsewhere, instead of looking to Windows as the "must have" platform that it used to be. That's what has changed recently.
Sure, MSFT is not a BAD place to put your money - they'll probably keep growing - but there are many more interesting and promising tech companies out there.
Just to make this a little less cut and dry, let me add another factor:
There's short term $ and long term $. Right now it looks like MSFT is grabbing for any sales they can get today, while ignoring the long-term prospects for their platform. A little "idealism" would go a long way towards helping them build a product that people actually want to pay for in the future, instead of something they're forced to buy just for the app support.
As prospective shareholders, we get to decide which strategy we'll support and how much short-term risk we'll take. I haven't been following MSFT's recent numbers but I know the company, and I know that it's not a place I'd put my money.
I hate to quibble but Moore's Law is cited incorrectly more often than not...
It actually refers to transistor density, NOT cpu Hz or any such metric of system speed.
And amazingly, it's still held true give or take a bit. But it's quite possible (in fact, likely) that CPU speed will top out even as Moore's Law continues to hold.
If it's running uclinux then it's definitely not the same hardware I looked at when the wet54g first came out. Could be they swapped the guts completely, perhaps for the same arch that's in the WGA.
I don't know what's in the WGA - could well be linux, but it is definitely not even remotely similar to the OS that's on the WET54. I am very familiar with that OS (Ubicom ipOS) because it's what we run on the Squeezebox
The reason the UI and settings look the same is because the vendors make them that way just for Linksys. If you get Ubicom's reference designs for 802.11 bridges, the default interface works exactly like you'd expect on a linksys product.
I don't think you understand what that means. It is not necessarily a good thing.
In a cell phone you might want the directionality to be somewhat away from the ground and away from your head, but you probably don't truly want a narrow beam unless you prefer to have to point your phone directly at the nearest cell tower any time you want to talk.
I work in hardware/firmware development - bringing up new boards and building firmware on hacked-to-all-hell prototypes. I've soldered on stuff while it's running. I've swapped cpu, memory, pcmcia, and other components while the system is running. I'll run my feet across the carpet on purpose to test ESD tolerance... shorting signals on purpose because it's easier than cutting a trace and wiring the input to ground. It is amazing how much of a beating like this a system can take for months or years on end and still run perfectly. It does not surprise me at all when people talk about systems that have caught fire but still mostly work.
Now one of my favorite stories: a friend of mine worked for AlphaSmart - they make inexpensive portable word processors - really PC keyboards with memory. He said they got a report of a woman in India who had run her alphasmart through the dishwasher to clean some gummed up keys.
If you think about it it's not surprising... the equipment they use to clean PCBs at the factory is pretty much the same as a home dishwasher - just different solvents I guess.
I'll comment on this since I've reverse-engineered both products.
They accomplish EXACTLY the same thing but the two products run completely different hardware AND software. Linksys does this so that they can pit one vendor against another until neither makes any money.
The wireless gaming adaptor uses a MIPS clone from SiliconData with integrated PCI and ethernet interfaces and a Mini-PCI 802.11g card.
The WET54G uses a Ubicom processor (same as what's in the WET-11 except 160MHz instead of 120MHz. It has a Davicom 10/100 MAC and a Cardbus 802.11g card.
Both probably cost exactly the same to produce, but having two designs gives leverage on the supply side and the ability to justify two vastly different price points on the shelf.
Slashdot Mirror
One counterpoint to the cases you mentioned though, is that the companies fighting those changes were not opposing new technology paradigms, but rather direct competition (AT&T, Std Oil) or humanity (child labor etc).
What we're seeing now is interesting in that outmoded businesses are now receiving strong legal protection (with no popular support) in the form of bizarre laws that allow them to do very anticompetitive/anticapitalist things. From what I know of American history, we used to be very eager to embrace new technologies - indeed, technology has been the backbone of the USA since the industrial age, and that tradition is what's being threatened here.
The good news is, the USA has a remarkable "healing" ability and after a few years, once everybody sees what's going on, we usually correct our mistakes pretty quickly and move on to the next battle.
What does that response mean? Faced with a big enough threat they wont try to stay in business?
okay it wasn't worded quite right, but I think you know what I mean: they'll try (take whatever steps) no matter what, but faced with a big enough threat, they'll still fail to stay in business and prosper.
Happy now? You've spoiled the succinctness of my original post. Thanks a lot.
I'm going to stop replying to this thread now.
What are you, a retard?
Yes.
Can you build your own computer?
Yes
And I'm not talking some 8-bit micro controller thing you cobbled together from parts you picked up at RadioShack.
Well, yes, I've built on of those... but I didn't get the parts at Radio Shack.
I'm asking, can you build, in your back yard from raw materials, a general purpose computer?
No I can not turn rocks, dirt, and dog feces from my yard into a computer.
I'm betting that, perhaps, one one-thousandth of the slashdot readership has even the beginnings of the capability to do that.
Everyone has the "beginnings of the capability" to do whatever the hell they want.
The rest of us are consumers however much we'd like to think of ourselves as somehow above the comman man.
Eh? Everyone consumes. No shame in that.
But the fact is we buy our equipment from big corporations.
You can buy all kinds of stuff from small corporations. Often better stuff than the big corps sell.
Those big corporations will take whatever steps are necessary to stay in business and prosper.
Good for them, but faced with a big enough threat, they won't.
If that means that the common computer goes the way of the dodo bird and more stringently controlled systems replace them, then that's what will happen.
Why does that have to happen?
Stop acting like you're some kind of god and that the rules of economics don't apply to you.
If I write you a check for a trillion dollars will you shut up? Or do I have to send a plague on you and your family?
Fucking moron.
Indeed. Sorry I piped up.
Rheingold is worried that established companies with business models that are threatened by these new technologies could 'quash such nascent
innovations as file-sharing
Don't worry, they can only manage this for a very short period of time. They're all ice vendors in the age of the fridge, and it's not a rut that they can simply step out of. They're in the wrong business entirely - technology doesn't just stand aside when a few vested interests complain to Capitol Hill.
(The pigeonhole principle says that if you shoot N pigeons with N+1 bullets, and don't miss, one pigeon has two holes... or something like that.)
I prefer not to ruin the meat, so I always put the second bullet through the original hole.
Mmmmm. pigeon.
PyMP3Cut was designed to slice high quality MP3 recordings of day-long congresses into smaller per-speaker MP3 files.
I just tried this with a recording of some day-long "congress" I had yesterday. very embarrassing to hear yourself on tape like that....
No, just that priorities are utterly out of whack when high school grads can't multiply, or find the USA on a map (and it's getting worse), while old folks keep getting a new lease on life with every bazillion dollars we pump into medical research. How about diverting a bit of our energies to the education system? Who's going to DO all this medical research next century?
a cryptographic hash is not the same as data encryption - it's a *signature* of the data such that generating other data with the same signature is difficult. This is how you can check that the mandrake ISO you snagged off of bittorrent is a) intact and b) authentic
I'm not sure about the definition of "collision" in this case, but of course if you always reduce the number of bits, or always maps to fixed number of bits, then you will always have >1 thing (specifically, an infinite number of things for most hash algos) which will map to the same reduced number of bits.
What they mean by "broken" is that you can trivially *find* such a string.
I'm kind of bummed actually that so much work is being spent on extending lives, rather than making the world a better place for yougsters.
Death, it seems, was cleverly designed as a means of making room for new ideas and advancement. Prolonging it doesn't seem to have had any particular benefit to society AFAICT.
Certainly I'd feel differently were I 40 yrs older with a multi-million-$ estate that I'd build over my lifetime....
The encryption over the air accomplishing nothing.
What I meant to say is "...nothing in terms of copy protection".
Apple knows this. Quoth Jobs:
When we first went to talk to these record companies -- about eighteen months ago -- we said, "None of this technology that you're talking about's gonna work. We have Ph.D.s here who know the stuff cold, and we don't believe it's possible to protect digital content."
And I'm sure the record companies are figuring it out now too.
So why encrypt?
Because thanks to the DMCA which makes it ILLEGAL to crack even the most trivial of encryptions, Apple has a powerful anti-competitive tool at their disposal, which lets them use the force of law to lock out anyone who would make devices and software to compete with theirs by supporting the same formats. There, I said it. Sorry, Apple fans, but it's dirty business over there.
This is blatantly obvious and I'm not sure why the poster was modded up 5
Somebody please mod SuperBanana down to -1 for this pinheaded comment.
What he doesn't understand is that the Airport *does not even play the original AAC file*. It is converted to Apple Lossless in iTunes before the stream is sent down.
So what's going over the air is simply a losseslly compressed representation of what's coming right out the s/pdif port IN THE CLEAR. And there's no way to get at the original AAC data from either stream, even if you could decrypt it, because it's already been decompressed in iTunes!!!
The granparent's point is perfectly valid. The encryption over the air accomplishing nothing. It is just a placebo that Apple gives the music companies.
See, this is what happens when stories get posted in what for all reasonable people would be the middle of the night.
My wife keeps recording shows that she is never going to watch and keeps them on the HDD forever (You've Got mail, Down With Love, etc). I'd like some way of backing these up to free up the drive space.
Newlywed, eh?
Just tell her you did it. Problem solved.
Correction: there are more...
Some trivia along these lines:
"typewriter" is the longest word you can spell with just one line of the qwerty keyboard.
going quite OT here but I'm curious if you know where the randomness comes from in casino machines?
A PRNG without getting some external noise could be easily predicted if you knew the algorithm. Do the machines have a noise source (eg microphone, diode noise circuit, radio receiver) or is it wired to the machine from somewhere?
Or does it come from measuring button timing? If that were the case then it's interesting that the user still has influence on the outcome in much the same way as an old-fashioned machine.
Probably there are both legal constraints about *where* the entropy comes from (to ensure fairness) as well as technical goals like making it practically impossible to predict.
The open source movement did not yet exist.
Hogwash.
What caught on the '90s was open source licensing, because a license was needed to keep open source going. People were freely sharing source code long before that, because no significant commercial/proprietary value was generally recognized for software source. Once "intellectual property" became the name of the technology game, the open source world needed tools like the GPL.
Nothing has changed, except the lawyers got involved. In the end it looks like OSS got a huge boost by having the protection and facilities offered by GPL.
From what I've seen, they toss free copies around to schools and governments as much as possible, and they tried their best to get people off Win9x and onto WinNT ASAP, but to no avail. Many of their policies are about creating new platforms and locking users into them.
But that's basically my point.... MSFT is still only pursuing the lock-in strategy. Cleary that has worked in the past, but I don't see Windows as a winner 10 years from now, and I don't see them doing anything else... all they're doing is squeezing harder, and it's not bringing them any new support. New computer deployments which aren't tied to windows applications are looking elsewhere, instead of looking to Windows as the "must have" platform that it used to be. That's what has changed recently.
Sure, MSFT is not a BAD place to put your money - they'll probably keep growing - but there are many more interesting and promising tech companies out there.
That's what you're asking corporations to do.
Just to make this a little less cut and dry, let me add another factor:
There's short term $ and long term $. Right now it looks like MSFT is grabbing for any sales they can get today, while ignoring the long-term prospects for their platform. A little "idealism" would go a long way towards helping them build a product that people actually want to pay for in the future, instead of something they're forced to buy just for the app support.
As prospective shareholders, we get to decide which strategy we'll support and how much short-term risk we'll take. I haven't been following MSFT's recent numbers but I know the company, and I know that it's not a place I'd put my money.
I hate to quibble but Moore's Law is cited incorrectly more often than not...
It actually refers to transistor density, NOT cpu Hz or any such metric of system speed.
And amazingly, it's still held true give or take a bit. But it's quite possible (in fact, likely) that CPU speed will top out even as Moore's Law continues to hold.
v2, eh?
If it's running uclinux then it's definitely not the same hardware I looked at when the wet54g first came out. Could be they swapped the guts completely, perhaps for the same arch that's in the WGA.
So the WGA isn't running a Linux kernel inside?
I don't know what's in the WGA - could well be linux, but it is definitely not even remotely similar to the OS that's on the WET54. I am very familiar with that OS (Ubicom ipOS) because it's what we run on the Squeezebox
The reason the UI and settings look the same is because the vendors make them that way just for Linksys. If you get Ubicom's reference designs for 802.11 bridges, the default interface works exactly like you'd expect on a linksys product.
Antenna gain?
I don't think you understand what that means. It is not necessarily a good thing.
In a cell phone you might want the directionality to be somewhat away from the ground and away from your head, but you probably don't truly want a narrow beam unless you prefer to have to point your phone directly at the nearest cell tower any time you want to talk.
I work in hardware/firmware development - bringing up new boards and building firmware on hacked-to-all-hell prototypes. I've soldered on stuff while it's running. I've swapped cpu, memory, pcmcia, and other components while the system is running. I'll run my feet across the carpet on purpose to test ESD tolerance... shorting signals on purpose because it's easier than cutting a trace and wiring the input to ground. It is amazing how much of a beating like this a system can take for months or years on end and still run perfectly. It does not surprise me at all when people talk about systems that have caught fire but still mostly work.
Now one of my favorite stories: a friend of mine worked for AlphaSmart - they make inexpensive portable word processors - really PC keyboards with memory. He said they got a report of a woman in India who had run her alphasmart through the dishwasher to clean some gummed up keys.
If you think about it it's not surprising... the equipment they use to clean PCBs at the factory is pretty much the same as a home dishwasher - just different solvents I guess.
I'll comment on this since I've reverse-engineered both products.
They accomplish EXACTLY the same thing but the two products run completely different hardware AND software. Linksys does this so that they can pit one vendor against another until neither makes any money.
The wireless gaming adaptor uses a MIPS clone from SiliconData with integrated PCI and ethernet interfaces and a Mini-PCI 802.11g card.
The WET54G uses a Ubicom processor (same as what's in the WET-11 except 160MHz instead of 120MHz. It has a Davicom 10/100 MAC and a Cardbus 802.11g card.
Both probably cost exactly the same to produce, but having two designs gives leverage on the supply side and the ability to justify two vastly different price points on the shelf.