Once the judge dropped the bomb on napster, it gave users a chance to switch to gnutella or other file sharing networks that had better technology but less publicity. The end result was that we got more progress in P2P technology. Plus other services got a chance to reach critical mass.
A dying napster also helped keep the flames off of the newer services. While the RIAA still got into the act of attacking everyone associated with P2P, it seemed like the rest of the news media was still assigned to cover the 'napster story.' Thus, they covered the whole Bertlesmann fiasco, the so-called re-release of napster (remember all the silly reviews?) and diverted attention away from the other services.
Now that Napster's really dead, stories like the release of the Two Towers or of Episode II hitting the net before it opened are going to be attributed to Kazaa, WinMX or whoever the current popularity leader is. Then the techno-faddish (i.e. your local congressman) will have a concrete target to attack.
The company owns the bandwidth, PCs, internet gateways, etc. etc. If the company doesn't trust or can't trust (because of legal liabilities) their own employees, then some IT fool will buy this thing.
Of course this article is quite irrelevant for slashdotters. We should have our certificates, machines we can VNC to, encrypting proxy servers, etc.
But, ironically, it'll probably be the arrival of widespread wireless (be it 3G, a mesh network of 802.11, etc.) that provides a little privacy. Imagine, if you want to send a private email, just change your Wireless connection to be your public ISP-type network, send your mail, and voila. You use your ISP's network instead of the corporate one. Both parties are happier.
'The participants showed dramatic improvement over placebo participants who listened to someone else's brain music instead of their own.
"For the placebo group, the improvement was only about 15 percent as compared to 75 to 85 percent for the experimental group. So it's a highly significant statistical difference,"'
In other words, you need to listen to your own brainwaves, not some random noise or someone else's rhythms.
if all you're trying to do is share a file, infrared is probably the easiest. Just line up the ports and bang, you're ready to go. Mac supports IrDA and it usually works fine for me. While transfer speed is slow, it sure beats the setup time.
unfortunately, 802.11 configuration software is usually too clunky/inconvenient to be messing with often although winxp does a nice job and couple with osX 10.2 might just be easy enough.
That'll get a bunch of news vans with big antennas in front your building. Then impound the vans for tresspassing on private property and use the huge antennas from those vans for satellite access.
This might sound unconventional but I've found that techie types do better where English is not commonly found. I'm currently in Tokyo and frankly, people's english here is lousy. I barely speak japanese. English speaking people have the best resources. We get the best documentation, tech books are published first in English, English discussion boards, Usenet, Google, Sourceforge etc...it's all first rate compared to the non-English stuff.
In other words, if you know how to search for things, read and comprehend, you can often make better decisions than a local who knows exactly what's going on around them.
Of course you need to learn how to gently relay that information to your colleagues who aren't keen on speaking/reading english but if you simplify it enough for them it usually works fine.
As a caveat, I did come over with my US company, but many of my friends just moved here and got a job.
For your example, the economics are quite simple. You were the.0003% of the population that knew how to program your VCR and cared about how you did it.
The cable companies did their math and tried to make it so that 80% of people could record something. All they'd have to do is oversimply things and cut features
. End result is that technology gets better for joe blows and plainly blows for the enthusiasts out there. The good news is that companies are finally starting to realize that enthusiasts can make a differnece (i.e. people who love their _____ energize others to buy ______).
I've been living in japan for a year or so now and have noticed how little privacy there is out here.
-Your local police will visit your house as soon as you move to collect information on who lives there, 2 emergency contact numbers, where you work, what you do, etc.
-The state run television network (NHK) has your name and address and will keep tabs on whether you pay them or not and send people to your house to collect fee
-Buying anything by credit card often requires your telephone number (written in write after your signature)
-Think your safeway/vonsclub card is bad? Every store here has a "pointcard" most of which are electronic to track your purchases. And if you're a geek that shops regularly at one of the major electronics stores (bic camera, yodobashi, etc.) expect to pay 15% more on everything if you don't sign up for one of these cards
-You can buy phones with GPS built in. And most non-gps phones can already be tracked by the phone company based on cell-site (since the cell coverage is quite good, the location info is accurate)
-People can send you spam to your cell phone which you have to pay for (at maybe $.05 each) and it's not illegal
-National health insurance requires health checks every year with results reported to your employer
-Renting an apartment requires you to have character references and financial guarantees. You also need to sign provisions that limit the number of friends you can have over, require you to put a parking sticker on your bicycle, etc.
-Signing up for recreational activities (like bike races, or just buying tickets from a travel agency) they often ask for information like your blood type, birthdate,etc.
-None of the mailing lists, etc. ever offer the option to 'opt out'
The big difference between this 11 digit number and all these other bits and pieces is that the new number is nationwide and owned by the government. Oddly, they seem to distrust their central government more than all the shops, conglomerates, local governments, and other establishments that they give their information out to. The people are too naive to realize that it's pretty doable to relate information from one database to another.
Use it on the field!!
h2O...gaatoraade...h2oooh...water sucks, it really really sucks
------
now that's some high quality h2O
------
courtesy of the waterboy..come get me MPAA!!!
no writing on paper=no desk chair needed
on
Painless Chairs?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
since almost all the work I do is on a keyboard with almost nothing done writing on a desk, I basically need to read (books/papers/screen) or type.
The best thing so far has been a big easy chair. A few years ago I used a standard recliner, and now it's just a swivel rocker. As long as you can lower your monitor (via an arm or just by lowering the desk), it's really comfortable and gives good back support with a lumbar pillow. The keyboard goes on my lap, the mouse on the armrest (use one of the new optical mice). A wireless set is best but cords work too.
As far as the cultural issues go, I find it's fine as long as your workplace looks reasonably progressive. The biggest problem is that other people are going to want to sit in your chair (or if they're waiting for you to come back to your desk you might find them in your chair and they won't want to get out of it).
Effective advertising is correlated with good entertainment. Instead of getting a variety of programming from the silly low budget game show to something like Dark Angel, networks can only afford the cheap stuff.
Note the move to all the reality based shows, silly game shows and other somewhat creative but altogether low budget shows appearing. Thanks to advertising not being effective enough (except on top shows like Friends) any high budget (read sci-fi, movie-like) shows will have to move to premium networks.
Jessica Alba with a pop up victoria secret ad...mmmmmm.
It's the ideas that count here not the manufacturing. Many major US commercial software publishers (MSFT, Intuit, Adobe to name a few) get their CD's stamped in Malaysia or somewhere outside the US. Does that mean that the software is no longer US based?
Or if you download a piece of software from a mirror based in another country, does that change the nation of origin for the software?
While hardware and software are different in physical form, when it comes to a product that's so highly engineered that production is largely the product of a software application, there's no real separation. It's the brains and ideas behind it, not where it gets stamped. An american subsidiary in another country is still quite different from a local company.
Re:Chinese media?...and their 5 star embassy
on
Can You Hear Me Now?
·
· Score: 1
I think the original poster was talking about
this story where they lifted a story from The Onion reporting that the US congress was demanding a new 5 star capital with better bathrooms and parking...not making a political statement (although both are true)
although the format is proprietary, isn't that a part of history? I don't remember anyone presenting off of PDF or some other format. the content is one part of the plan, the presentation of it is another. i'd like to see if there's a correlation between silly transition effects and animations and the amount of money lost by a dot com.
Interesting philosophy at work here. Not surprisingly, microsoft's quite the opposite. Along with your own office, they have windows terminals (i.e. old crusty machines that are now only good as dumb terminals) in all the building lobbies and in several computer labs so you can terminal server to the machines in your office or to a central server that just has Office+IE. So you can work remotely or in your own office...funny how they give employees the much coveted _choice_ while sun doesn't.
There's a pretty easy solution here. Just get rid of unicode fonts. They're bloated, buggy, slow down your machine and lots of people just don't need it (western europe/americas). When was the last time you felt like writing a letter in russian? While you can still link to a site, it's pretty clear when you see mi-r-s-ft.--m (where you usually get square boxees instead of dahses).
While that definately doesn't solve the problem for asia/eastern europe, if most asian/eastern european hackers are targetting big capitalists and money centers, it would take some of the incentive out of it. After all they'd likely be hurting their own countries.
Now if some silly yuppie script kiddie uses this attack to screw over asia and eastern europe, I guess the russian mafia can take care of him.
What happens when you're successful?
on
Creative Commons
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Creative commons sounds like a great idea to manage small clips that might be useful for someone's college project. But, what happens when an ad agency hears your music and wants an exclusive license?
For most starving artists (well, at least those who have starving for some time) they'd jump at the chance to make it big and forgo sharing their works publicly.
Once the first future star gets told by their agent or a big buyer that they love their stuff but can't support the Creative Commons license, one of two things would happen: 1. They abandon Creative Commons or 2. They abandon Creative Commons and tell the world how they screwed out of their first big 'hit' by releasing it for free. Unless open source software, it sounds like a system where, by its nature, the content is always inferior.
The original X-Box proposal would use Win9x with DirectX minus Explorer.exe in the interests of keeping working set smaller and developing it quickly.
So, the article was probably oversimplifying a relatively big change when they went away from win9x to win2k.
Slashdot Mirror
Introducing a new picture frame that's:
-With a built in Fan so you can hear just how hot your picutres are!
-Visible only from certain angles to keep prying eyes from seeing your precious photos
-Capable of being infected by a virus or taken out by a trojan. Imagine all the fun and games when some hacker draws a swastika on grandma's forehead
-Ugly to prop up while showing your eternal love for unnecessary keyboards
-Runs for almost 2 hours without plugging in!!!
-Consumes just 15 watts per hour so it only costs you about $50 a year in power costs
And if you act now we'll throw in a free screen saver to prevent pesky burn in.
Ummm really, is this progress?
A dying napster also helped keep the flames off of the newer services. While the RIAA still got into the act of attacking everyone associated with P2P, it seemed like the rest of the news media was still assigned to cover the 'napster story.' Thus, they covered the whole Bertlesmann fiasco, the so-called re-release of napster (remember all the silly reviews?) and diverted attention away from the other services.
Now that Napster's really dead, stories like the release of the Two Towers or of Episode II hitting the net before it opened are going to be attributed to Kazaa, WinMX or whoever the current popularity leader is. Then the techno-faddish (i.e. your local congressman) will have a concrete target to attack.
Of course this article is quite irrelevant for slashdotters. We should have our certificates, machines we can VNC to, encrypting proxy servers, etc.
But, ironically, it'll probably be the arrival of widespread wireless (be it 3G, a mesh network of 802.11, etc.) that provides a little privacy. Imagine, if you want to send a private email, just change your Wireless connection to be your public ISP-type network, send your mail, and voila. You use your ISP's network instead of the corporate one. Both parties are happier.
'The participants showed dramatic improvement over placebo participants who listened to someone else's brain music instead of their own.
"For the placebo group, the improvement was only about 15 percent as compared to 75 to 85 percent for the experimental group. So it's a highly significant statistical difference,"'
In other words, you need to listen to your own brainwaves, not some random noise or someone else's rhythms.
unfortunately, 802.11 configuration software is usually too clunky/inconvenient to be messing with often although winxp does a nice job and couple with osX 10.2 might just be easy enough.
According to this Salon article Windows users shouldn't switch unless you want all the old problems of incompatibility.
strangely Their web page has no mention of any conflict. Just a "hooray, we made the paper" announcement.
duh...
In other words, if you know how to search for things, read and comprehend, you can often make better decisions than a local who knows exactly what's going on around them.
Of course you need to learn how to gently relay that information to your colleagues who aren't keen on speaking/reading english but if you simplify it enough for them it usually works fine.
As a caveat, I did come over with my US company, but many of my friends just moved here and got a job.
The cable companies did their math and tried to make it so that 80% of people could record something. All they'd have to do is oversimply things and cut features
. End result is that technology gets better for joe blows and plainly blows for the enthusiasts out there. The good news is that companies are finally starting to realize that enthusiasts can make a differnece (i.e. people who love their _____ energize others to buy ______).
It seems like the Russians blew their chance at arresting him by announcing it to the press.
-Your local police will visit your house as soon as you move to collect information on who lives there, 2 emergency contact numbers, where you work, what you do, etc.
-The state run television network (NHK) has your name and address and will keep tabs on whether you pay them or not and send people to your house to collect fee
-Buying anything by credit card often requires your telephone number (written in write after your signature)
-Think your safeway/vonsclub card is bad? Every store here has a "pointcard" most of which are electronic to track your purchases. And if you're a geek that shops regularly at one of the major electronics stores (bic camera, yodobashi, etc.) expect to pay 15% more on everything if you don't sign up for one of these cards
-You can buy phones with GPS built in. And most non-gps phones can already be tracked by the phone company based on cell-site (since the cell coverage is quite good, the location info is accurate)
-People can send you spam to your cell phone which you have to pay for (at maybe $.05 each) and it's not illegal
-National health insurance requires health checks every year with results reported to your employer
-Renting an apartment requires you to have character references and financial guarantees. You also need to sign provisions that limit the number of friends you can have over, require you to put a parking sticker on your bicycle, etc.
-Signing up for recreational activities (like bike races, or just buying tickets from a travel agency) they often ask for information like your blood type, birthdate,etc.
-None of the mailing lists, etc. ever offer the option to 'opt out'
The big difference between this 11 digit number and all these other bits and pieces is that the new number is nationwide and owned by the government. Oddly, they seem to distrust their central government more than all the shops, conglomerates, local governments, and other establishments that they give their information out to. The people are too naive to realize that it's pretty doable to relate information from one database to another.
Use it on the field!! h2O...gaatoraade...h2oooh...water sucks, it really really sucks ------ now that's some high quality h2O ------ courtesy of the waterboy..come get me MPAA!!!
The best thing so far has been a big easy chair. A few years ago I used a standard recliner, and now it's just a swivel rocker. As long as you can lower your monitor (via an arm or just by lowering the desk), it's really comfortable and gives good back support with a lumbar pillow. The keyboard goes on my lap, the mouse on the armrest (use one of the new optical mice). A wireless set is best but cords work too.
As far as the cultural issues go, I find it's fine as long as your workplace looks reasonably progressive. The biggest problem is that other people are going to want to sit in your chair (or if they're waiting for you to come back to your desk you might find them in your chair and they won't want to get out of it).
Note the move to all the reality based shows, silly game shows and other somewhat creative but altogether low budget shows appearing. Thanks to advertising not being effective enough (except on top shows like Friends) any high budget (read sci-fi, movie-like) shows will have to move to premium networks.
Jessica Alba with a pop up victoria secret ad...mmmmmm.
All that marketing must finally be paying off.
Does anyone read the article? This is the wrong column. this link actually works.
Or if you download a piece of software from a mirror based in another country, does that change the nation of origin for the software?
While hardware and software are different in physical form, when it comes to a product that's so highly engineered that production is largely the product of a software application, there's no real separation. It's the brains and ideas behind it, not where it gets stamped. An american subsidiary in another country is still quite different from a local company.
I think the original poster was talking about this story where they lifted a story from The Onion reporting that the US congress was demanding a new 5 star capital with better bathrooms and parking...not making a political statement (although both are true)
although the format is proprietary, isn't that a part of history? I don't remember anyone presenting off of PDF or some other format. the content is one part of the plan, the presentation of it is another. i'd like to see if there's a correlation between silly transition effects and animations and the amount of money lost by a dot com.
Interesting philosophy at work here. Not surprisingly, microsoft's quite the opposite. Along with your own office, they have windows terminals (i.e. old crusty machines that are now only good as dumb terminals) in all the building lobbies and in several computer labs so you can terminal server to the machines in your office or to a central server that just has Office+IE. So you can work remotely or in your own office...funny how they give employees the much coveted _choice_ while sun doesn't.
While that definately doesn't solve the problem for asia/eastern europe, if most asian/eastern european hackers are targetting big capitalists and money centers, it would take some of the incentive out of it. After all they'd likely be hurting their own countries.
Now if some silly yuppie script kiddie uses this attack to screw over asia and eastern europe, I guess the russian mafia can take care of him.
For most starving artists (well, at least those who have starving for some time) they'd jump at the chance to make it big and forgo sharing their works publicly.
Once the first future star gets told by their agent or a big buyer that they love their stuff but can't support the Creative Commons license, one of two things would happen: 1. They abandon Creative Commons or 2. They abandon Creative Commons and tell the world how they screwed out of their first big 'hit' by releasing it for free. Unless open source software, it sounds like a system where, by its nature, the content is always inferior.
more indiana jones games.
The original X-Box proposal would use Win9x with DirectX minus Explorer.exe in the interests of keeping working set smaller and developing it quickly. So, the article was probably oversimplifying a relatively big change when they went away from win9x to win2k.