Think about it: The record labels make more on the "old stuff" (the guy who posted about going out and buying every CD from Rage Against the Machine) than they do from selling new albums (with some minor exception).
So by eliminating the ability to explore new artists cheaply (pay only for bandwidth) they eliminate tons of catalog sales, which are really their bread and butter.
This would be a good time to jump in and say "What about hemp?"
Last summer a group of young scientists drove an unmodified, diesel engine Mercedes Benz across country to promote hemp for fuel. They ran the car entirely on fuel created from hemp seeds. Although mileage was slightly impaired, the amount of pollution generated was greatly reduced because, unlike gasoline refining, which adds many noxious and dangerous chemicals, hemp fuels rely on natural methods.
Just like somebody posted earlier: Everything has to go somewhere when it burns, and the gasoline releases all of those naughty things back into the environment as gas or liquid. The hemp releases some gas, but greatly reduced emissions. And the processing requires very little un-natural additive to create fuel.
That is something that I'd like to hear more about. The article didn't mention noise factor, but I imagine if it could be "hidden under a desk" that it must not be that loud.
Enterprise might get better...As for that theme song, shit, Rodenberry must be rolling over in his grave.
It sounded like Michael Bolton mated with John Denver.
Also, I like the sexy characters on Star Trek to be subtle. T'pel almost got drilled in the decontamination chamber. And those nipples...I mean, how long before they just get it over and have her spread her legs on TV?
I mean, I thought it was supposed to be Star Trek, not Forbidden Alien Poon-tang Quest.
Also, since peecees require a "feature" (second mouse button) that over 75% of their userbase doesn't understand how to use makes it a "design flaw" and not a "feature".
See, I don't think open source is perfect either, and I didn't really say it was. Personally, I think all software would be a lot better if both models acknowledged the other's merits. Microsoft could learn a lot from Mozilla.org. (Certainly the opposite is also true.)
If you consider my response knee-jerk (I thought I made a pretty reasonable argument), my guess would be because you have more Microsoft stock in your portfolio than I have in mine (none).
All though it's a shame to give my good money to child-molesting Michael Jackson, anything for science!
My procedure will be:
1) Plug my regular CD player audio output into computer audio input.
2) Launch your favorite free audio recorder/editor. Hit record.
3) Press play on CD.
4) Enjoy (if possibble).
While we talk about discounts, lets talk about the fact that you're discounting how many proprietary programs just plain suck dick too.
Like IIS. It installs by default in Windows 2000 Professional. Why? So I can share printers? Are there that many people screaming to share a printer on the internet from a workstation that it needs to be a default?
You're discounting the fact that the corporate scene is driven wholly and totally by making as large a profit as possibble, ASAP.
Unfortunately, because management jobs are won and lost in quarters instead of decades, they have to turn a profit immediately or get fired. When you make 600k per year, you really don't want to get fired because you're on the fuckin' gravy train. Result?
When the deadline gets there, the product ships, regardless of whether it's really ready or not.
Where I work (a fortune 50 corporation) our developers fall into three categories:
1) Two uber-gods.
2) Three mid-levels, pretty smart, but have some minor flaws.
3) 14 slobbering dolts.
Furthermore, every software company I've ever worked in has had a similar distribution of programming talent.
My point here is that every corporate organization brings together varying levels of talent, just like Open Source projects do.
To claim that corporate organizations are exempt from the bell curve of programming talent is just plain stupid.
I think the huge underlying problem is that a) people do *not* know their box is infected and b) if they do know, they have no idea what to do about it. Don't forget, most people are very timid and lack any basic knowledge regarding computers. All they know how to do, is double click on the word2k icon, or outlook, or whatnot.
Even though my ISP sent me an e-mail, I knew before I received it beacause some enterprising chap wrote a program to automatically send an NT messenger message to infected machines.
In my case I was forced to re-install Windows recently and forgot to re-patch.
Which brings me to another point: Microsoft should release, ASAP, a Service Pack that encompasses all fixes to date. Based on the level of unreliability built into MS Windows, re-install is a three-four times a year event.
When our government says something will be temporary, mean is that it will be "temporary" in so much that it will exist until it benefits the politicians to eliminate it.
The best way to prove this theory out is Income Taxes. Remember how the income tax was a "temporary evil" to finance a war? Yet some Americans pay as much as 50% of their income every year out to satisfy state and federal income taxes today. The politicians will never end it because they are addicted to the power that the income tax gives them. Why?
The constitution gives congress the power of the "purse": the ability to spend the government's (your) money. If they eliminate the income tax they would be ending their own gravy train. After all, who's going to lobby congress for appropriations when they have no public money to give away? Who's going to pony up giant campaign contributions if congress can't dole out pork projects and corporate welfare tax breaks? No, they are far too addicted to a kushy six-figure salary and the ability to dole out "favors".
Just as the politicians have become addicted to the income tax, so will law enforcement become addicted to "stepping on a few constitutional freedoms" in the name of justice.
Applying this same principle to the constitution, if we allow the "temporary" suspension of one or two rights we can extrapolate that, by 2020, the CIA will be monitoring our thoughts for impurity and punishing evil "thought crimes".
Let's see. That is only for the XP Beta, and people can't read existing reports, as I recall. Reporting something to Microsoft is always a black box. It goes in, but nothing seems to happen. Besides, even if it gets a fix, you won't get an update for free. You might see the fix in XP2, but you'll have to shell money out for it.
Some might say that Netscape is the same way. It used to be, but things have changed. They used to be like Microsoft, but their market share reduction hit hard, and it seemed to make them smarter. They've grown up, so to speak (even under AOL/TW!)
Indeed. Also, even though I've ALREADY supplied a bunch of personal information to MS to get a passport account, for some reason I was prompted with a giant form asking for lots of personal info to get access to the "Beta" web site.
Great website. Still pales in comparison to Bugzilla, me thinks.
What many non-radio people don't understand is that CC owns so many stations that, in some cities, if it ain't on a CC station it doesn't exist.
My favorite entry on the list is:
ANY SONG BY RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE
I wonder if this has anything to do with their many references to "Evil broadcast conglomerates warping the minds of America"...
Most new Microsoft products have a bug tracking feature BUILT INTO THE SOFTWARE, so users simply have to click a button to report a bug and the system automatically sends relivant information in a completely secure and private way.
No personal information is sent, and all the user has to do is click a button.
Oh... look, a swine just launched past my window. Moron.
Hmm...They just added a feature Netscape and Winamp have had for years now. Way to innovate, boys.
Also, please email me a link to the place on Microsoft's web site where I can search through an interactive, live bug database? I'd like to check that out...
I fail to see how this is a good thing for Mozilla, or Bugzilla. How many bugs are in the latest version of IE? It seems kind of silly to be proclaiming this as a great proof of the scalability of Mozilla. If MS were proclaiming, "We just fixed the 10,000th bug in IE 6.0!", people would do nothing but talk about how the software should have been thoroughly tested, and there should have been NO bugs!
The scalability argument was for Bugzilla.
Nobody expects microsoft to sell bug-free software, but we do expect them to do at least as good a job as a group of volunteers do. I mean, come on. Some of those programmers/QA people at MS are earning six figures (or more for some guys) per year and a group of volunteers has a better system for resolving post-release bugs than them.
If MS had a PUBLIC bug-database where we could at a minimum report all the problems with Windows or IE it would go a long way.
Maybe the Justice Department should make them do something like this as part of a settlement?
The people at my company laughed when I suggested Bugzilla instead of our recently purchased RATIONAL SUITE. I explained that Bugzilla has all the bug tracking web-features we wanted today, instead of waiting until we could "afford to implement the web piece". It seems the licensing costs for Rational Suite are sort of, well, high.
But nobody listened to me, and a million dollars later the entire enterprise runs Rational. Sucks.
I've been watching news for the past 3 hours tonight,
1) Don't watch too much TV...especially this kind. If something big happens, you'll be able to tune in. Me, I've been reading a lot (studying) for my MCSE exams. (No flames, it's required for work.) Besides, it's more fun to keep up to date by watching slashdot.
what is going on? as of this morning everything was "let's go get'em" Now it seems that we arent going to actually do anything. They are saying that this could take years or decades. What the hell is that all about? we all know that if they say something like that they are saying that NOTHING is going to happen.
2) They always say that. Remember when we were told that Saddam's army was one of the best in the world? "How else did he secure Kuwait so quickly?"
With that said, I'm not sure if Dubya has any idea what he's truly undertaking.
This has the potential to be a lot worse than Vietnam, with the added joy that some of the players have nukes and chemical weapons.
Remember, if we wipe out the Taliban, we'll almost certainly end up leaving a garrisson force that will be the subject of revenge attacks by Hamas and Islamic Jihad and everybody else on earth not to mention the communist government still trying to sieze power in Afghanistan.
They (the communists) staged a rocket attack on Kabul hours after the WTC attack, doubtless reasoning that the Taliban would be terrified, thinking it was the U.S. attacking them not the Commies.
For George to say this could take years, I think, sadly, he's more right than he knows.
The past few days have shown that ISPs are refusing to install Carnivore on their networks. This is a sign to me that Carnivore is not as large a network we all think it is. If it was this "email vaccuum" capable of grabbing everything, it would already be in place everywhere, right? The fact that
ISPs are making statements that they are refusing FBI install requests suggests that Carnivore is very small in size as it is now, and probably wont grow much larger in the immediate future.
My guess would be that more than a few of these statements are out and out lies. If the FBI installed Carnivore they would not want it to be public information which ISP has Carnivore and which one allows you to communicate undetected.
This is exactly how I would instruct an ISP to act if I was an FBI g-man and had just installed Carnivore.
US Attorney General says attacks will mean changes in law.
"It's clear to me we need to upgrade and strengthen a number of laws in the US," he says.
Why are politicians always so fast to "do something about it" by "making a number of laws"?
It is my opinion that hastily sloshing bills through congress to ban any type of encryption (or cripple it by installing a KNOWN backdoor) is a huge mistake that will ultimately only cost Americans (not to mention American businesses) the right to secure their own data.
Any knee-jerk law outlawing encryption would not have the intended effect of stopping terrorists from communicating, because chances are they already have high-encryption software that's been available for years, free of charge, on the net. Even if you could somehow magically take that software away, they would just switch to a nearly unbreakable "One-time-pad" system. You would be needlessly stifling innovation and almost guaranteeing the failure of most, if not all e-businesses.
A mandatory backdoor provision would compromise such vital business protocols/technologies as:
IPSec (Used for VPNs)
Kerberos v5
SSL
L2TP
Just imagine if a group of malicious black hat hackers decided to compromise the backdoor on SSL, and intercept traffic from, say, Amazon.com. Since they're the bad guys, they exploit it for profit.
Imagine the mental effect this would have on consumers? Who would buy online after that? Not me.
Or what if a foreign government broke into Lockheed Martin's "encrypted" business network and stole information about new technologies? What faith would any of us have in our nations infrastructure?
I urge you to write your congressman today and tell him or her how you feel about knee-jerk reaction laws.
If you don't know who your congressman is or where to write to them (many have email!) go to the left side of Project Vote Smart to find your elected officials based on your zip code. If you need to lookup your zip+4 there is a link available to do that, also.
Instead of staying home, watching TV, and getting bummed out, why not do something that will help the situation AND make you feel better personally?
They're asking for Tech help in NY to try and recover from the disaster (long-term) and set up communications networks for the rescuers and people at ground-zero (immediate-term need).
They're looking for EVERYTHING. Cell phone/RF engineers, network gurus, SQL/Exchange people, everything. If you've been looking for a way to help but aren't able to help with digging through rubble, this is it.
I strongly encourage anybody who has this creeping urge to "do something" to make sure it's something positive like this. If you live in NY volunteer. If you live a few hours away, drive to NY and volunteer.
All my life, I've been looking for a way to really "do something special" with my tech skills. For anybody else who has been thinking along those lines, here's your chance.
Slashdot Mirror
Think about it: The record labels make more on the "old stuff" (the guy who posted about going out and buying every CD from Rage Against the Machine) than they do from selling new albums (with some minor exception).
So by eliminating the ability to explore new artists cheaply (pay only for bandwidth) they eliminate tons of catalog sales, which are really their bread and butter.
That they'll be leaving their customers high and dry? Or will AT&T keep the @Home network (such as it is) running during the transition?
This would be a good time to jump in and say "What about hemp?"
Last summer a group of young scientists drove an unmodified, diesel engine Mercedes Benz across country to promote hemp for fuel. They ran the car entirely on fuel created from hemp seeds. Although mileage was slightly impaired, the amount of pollution generated was greatly reduced because, unlike gasoline refining, which adds many noxious and dangerous chemicals, hemp fuels rely on natural methods.
Just like somebody posted earlier: Everything has to go somewhere when it burns, and the gasoline releases all of those naughty things back into the environment as gas or liquid. The hemp releases some gas, but greatly reduced emissions. And the processing requires very little un-natural additive to create fuel.
That is something that I'd like to hear more about. The article didn't mention noise factor, but I imagine if it could be "hidden under a desk" that it must not be that loud.
Enterprise might get better...As for that theme song, shit, Rodenberry must be rolling over in his grave.
It sounded like Michael Bolton mated with John Denver.
Also, I like the sexy characters on Star Trek to be subtle. T'pel almost got drilled in the decontamination chamber. And those nipples...I mean, how long before they just get it over and have her spread her legs on TV?
I mean, I thought it was supposed to be Star Trek, not Forbidden Alien Poon-tang Quest.
X plays nice with two-button mice by default.
Also, since peecees require a "feature" (second mouse button) that over 75% of their userbase doesn't understand how to use makes it a "design flaw" and not a "feature".
Another thing John Ashcroft is violently opposed to is pot. He wants life terms for growers.
He must own stock in companies that build prisons...
What happened to:
"...and God made all the plants for Man to use?"
See, I don't think open source is perfect either, and I didn't really say it was. Personally, I think all software would be a lot better if both models acknowledged the other's merits. Microsoft could learn a lot from Mozilla.org. (Certainly the opposite is also true.)
If you consider my response knee-jerk (I thought I made a pretty reasonable argument), my guess would be because you have more Microsoft stock in your portfolio than I have in mine (none).
Mac OS X v1.7 = 678k
All though it's a shame to give my good money to child-molesting Michael Jackson, anything for science!
My procedure will be:
1) Plug my regular CD player audio output into computer audio input.
2) Launch your favorite free audio recorder/editor. Hit record.
3) Press play on CD.
4) Enjoy (if possibble).
And I didn't even break a sweat.
While we talk about discounts, lets talk about the fact that you're discounting how many proprietary programs just plain suck dick too.
Like IIS. It installs by default in Windows 2000 Professional. Why? So I can share printers? Are there that many people screaming to share a printer on the internet from a workstation that it needs to be a default?
You're discounting the fact that the corporate scene is driven wholly and totally by making as large a profit as possibble, ASAP.
Unfortunately, because management jobs are won and lost in quarters instead of decades, they have to turn a profit immediately or get fired. When you make 600k per year, you really don't want to get fired because you're on the fuckin' gravy train. Result?
When the deadline gets there, the product ships, regardless of whether it's really ready or not.
Where I work (a fortune 50 corporation) our developers fall into three categories:
1) Two uber-gods.
2) Three mid-levels, pretty smart, but have some minor flaws.
3) 14 slobbering dolts.
Furthermore, every software company I've ever worked in has had a similar distribution of programming talent.
My point here is that every corporate organization brings together varying levels of talent, just like Open Source projects do.
To claim that corporate organizations are exempt from the bell curve of programming talent is just plain stupid.
Even though my ISP sent me an e-mail, I knew before I received it beacause some enterprising chap wrote a program to automatically send an NT messenger message to infected machines.
In my case I was forced to re-install Windows recently and forgot to re-patch.
Which brings me to another point: Microsoft should release, ASAP, a Service Pack that encompasses all fixes to date. Based on the level of unreliability built into MS Windows, re-install is a three-four times a year event.
I received a nastygram yesterday saying a machine on my network was infected. Being a responsible netizen I took it offline right away, of course.
But the email begged the question in my mind: Would @home continue billing me if they cut me off? Damn right they would've...
When our government says something will be temporary, mean is that it will be "temporary" in so much that it will exist until it benefits the politicians to eliminate it.
The best way to prove this theory out is Income Taxes. Remember how the income tax was a "temporary evil" to finance a war? Yet some Americans pay as much as 50% of their income every year out to satisfy state and federal income taxes today. The politicians will never end it because they are addicted to the power that the income tax gives them. Why?
The constitution gives congress the power of the "purse": the ability to spend the government's (your) money. If they eliminate the income tax they would be ending their own gravy train. After all, who's going to lobby congress for appropriations when they have no public money to give away? Who's going to pony up giant campaign contributions if congress can't dole out pork projects and corporate welfare tax breaks? No, they are far too addicted to a kushy six-figure salary and the ability to dole out "favors".
Just as the politicians have become addicted to the income tax, so will law enforcement become addicted to "stepping on a few constitutional freedoms" in the name of justice.
Applying this same principle to the constitution, if we allow the "temporary" suspension of one or two rights we can extrapolate that, by 2020, the CIA will be monitoring our thoughts for impurity and punishing evil "thought crimes".
To sum up: Temporary my ass.
Indeed. Also, even though I've ALREADY supplied a bunch of personal information to MS to get a passport account, for some reason I was prompted with a giant form asking for lots of personal info to get access to the "Beta" web site.
Great website. Still pales in comparison to Bugzilla, me thinks.
What many non-radio people don't understand is that CC owns so many stations that, in some cities, if it ain't on a CC station it doesn't exist.
My favorite entry on the list is:
ANY SONG BY RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE
I wonder if this has anything to do with their many references to "Evil broadcast conglomerates warping the minds of America"...
Hmm...They just added a feature Netscape and Winamp have had for years now. Way to innovate, boys.
Also, please email me a link to the place on Microsoft's web site where I can search through an interactive, live bug database? I'd like to check that out...
The scalability argument was for Bugzilla.
Nobody expects microsoft to sell bug-free software, but we do expect them to do at least as good a job as a group of volunteers do. I mean, come on. Some of those programmers/QA people at MS are earning six figures (or more for some guys) per year and a group of volunteers has a better system for resolving post-release bugs than them.
If MS had a PUBLIC bug-database where we could at a minimum report all the problems with Windows or IE it would go a long way.
Maybe the Justice Department should make them do something like this as part of a settlement?
Maybe pigs will fly.
The people at my company laughed when I suggested Bugzilla instead of our recently purchased RATIONAL SUITE. I explained that Bugzilla has all the bug tracking web-features we wanted today, instead of waiting until we could "afford to implement the web piece". It seems the licensing costs for Rational Suite are sort of, well, high.
But nobody listened to me, and a million dollars later the entire enterprise runs Rational. Sucks.
1) Don't watch too much TV...especially this kind. If something big happens, you'll be able to tune in. Me, I've been reading a lot (studying) for my MCSE exams. (No flames, it's required for work.) Besides, it's more fun to keep up to date by watching slashdot.
2) They always say that. Remember when we were told that Saddam's army was one of the best in the world? "How else did he secure Kuwait so quickly?"
With that said, I'm not sure if Dubya has any idea what he's truly undertaking.
This has the potential to be a lot worse than Vietnam, with the added joy that some of the players have nukes and chemical weapons.
Remember, if we wipe out the Taliban, we'll almost certainly end up leaving a garrisson force that will be the subject of revenge attacks by Hamas and Islamic Jihad and everybody else on earth not to mention the communist government still trying to sieze power in Afghanistan.
They (the communists) staged a rocket attack on Kabul hours after the WTC attack, doubtless reasoning that the Taliban would be terrified, thinking it was the U.S. attacking them not the Commies.
For George to say this could take years, I think, sadly, he's more right than he knows.
My guess would be that more than a few of these statements are out and out lies. If the FBI installed Carnivore they would not want it to be public information which ISP has Carnivore and which one allows you to communicate undetected.
This is exactly how I would instruct an ISP to act if I was an FBI g-man and had just installed Carnivore.
...was from an FBI agent.
"We're looking at accounts that start with ALLAH and going from there."
Did I mention it was also the most chilling thing I've heard so far?
The witch hunt begins...
Why are politicians always so fast to "do something about it" by "making a number of laws"?
It is my opinion that hastily sloshing bills through congress to ban any type of encryption (or cripple it by installing a KNOWN backdoor) is a huge mistake that will ultimately only cost Americans (not to mention American businesses) the right to secure their own data.
Any knee-jerk law outlawing encryption would not have the intended effect of stopping terrorists from communicating, because chances are they already have high-encryption software that's been available for years, free of charge, on the net. Even if you could somehow magically take that software away, they would just switch to a nearly unbreakable "One-time-pad" system. You would be needlessly stifling innovation and almost guaranteeing the failure of most, if not all e-businesses.
A mandatory backdoor provision would compromise such vital business protocols/technologies as:
IPSec (Used for VPNs)
Kerberos v5
SSL
L2TP
Just imagine if a group of malicious black hat hackers decided to compromise the backdoor on SSL, and intercept traffic from, say, Amazon.com. Since they're the bad guys, they exploit it for profit.
Imagine the mental effect this would have on consumers? Who would buy online after that? Not me.
Or what if a foreign government broke into Lockheed Martin's "encrypted" business network and stole information about new technologies? What faith would any of us have in our nations infrastructure?
I urge you to write your congressman today and tell him or her how you feel about knee-jerk reaction laws.
If you don't know who your congressman is or where to write to them (many have email!) go to the left side of Project Vote Smart to find your elected officials based on your zip code. If you need to lookup your zip+4 there is a link available to do that, also.
It's worth their while to have "Administrative Problems" with requests not to sell data... Too many requests would queer the deal.
Instead of staying home, watching TV, and getting bummed out, why not do something that will help the situation AND make you feel better personally?
They're asking for Tech help in NY to try and recover from the disaster (long-term) and set up communications networks for the rescuers and people at ground-zero (immediate-term need).
They're looking for EVERYTHING. Cell phone/RF engineers, network gurus, SQL/Exchange people, everything. If you've been looking for a way to help but aren't able to help with digging through rubble, this is it.
I strongly encourage anybody who has this creeping urge to "do something" to make sure it's something positive like this. If you live in NY volunteer. If you live a few hours away, drive to NY and volunteer.
All my life, I've been looking for a way to really "do something special" with my tech skills. For anybody else who has been thinking along those lines, here's your chance.