I think so. It's surpassed Mac and Novell in the server share (I think I saw somewhere it was marching toward the 25% mark?). There are many articles here on how this country or that are moving away from proprietary and toward free or open source. Many other stories about how MS is starting to feel the heat. But the other day when I went into a school building I got into a conversation with a secretary there. She told me how her son had put Linux (mandrake) on for her at home and she really liked it. When it starts to trickle in like that, you know its starting to take hold.
So now I'll have to CTRL-ALT-DEL to access my phone book.
Will it ask me for an administrators password when I want to change the ring tone?
And what will I do when I get an 'Ignore/Cancel' error message?
I can see it now: mid conversation, and all of a sudden a message pops up 'There is a new security patch for your phone. Would you like to install it now?'
Sad isn't it? It would be great to expect my elected officials to spend their time keeping us safe, improving health care and education, rebuilding highways and bridges - and what is happening to our environment and ozone lately? But unfortunately while we are all preoccupied with a potential WWIII, a few greedy corporate cartels are taking advantage and whittling away at our fundamental rights and freedoms.
Some things change our lives so significantly that they deserve better than to be trampled out of existence by the changing face of subtle bureaucratic oppression.
Agreed. To me there are only 3 major breakthroughs in personal computing technology (and Windows isn't one of them). They are Netscape - literally changed the world (doesn't matter that Mosaic came first, Netscape is the one that did it), Doom - literally exploded first person, multi-user gaming and is the foundation of a multi-billion dollar industry, and Napster who completely 'rocked' the world of content connected computing (CCC - did I just make that up?). If you look back at Doom, how grainy the graphics, limited function etc, and compare to today's spectacular graphics, ability to swim, side step, etc. Netscape and the first web pages - grey, simple, one font, no indents or bullets. Now we have interactive pages, e-commerce, etc. Napster never got to become what it could have been. Just like early explorers confronting something with teeth, the **AA shot it dead before finding out if it was friend or foe.
If the big labels continue to impose restrictions on CDs, the bands that are really into music will simply leave the label.
No, they won't. Because they have iron-clad contracts and they are not allowed to leave unless the label kicks them out. The labels have full control, and the artists will be just as trapped as the music lover. Look at Dixie Chicks, they tried to leave Sony, and after a long court case they finally settled and came to better terms (Sony realized how bad it would look to let them win, esp after earning over 200mil off of them while the girls only got 50k each). Anyway, they are still with Sony, that's how strong those contracts are.
I remember back in the IE 3.0 days, if you turned their very weak content rating all the way up, you couldn't get to Microsoft.com, or more importantly, the now defunct RSAC (It's now the Internet Content Rating Association (ICRA) - because neither site was rated! Unfortunately, filtering hasn't improved much, and this story is a sad testament to that. Just a few months ago our school filter not only blocked out many school web pages, including one school who had just installed it, but it also blocked many sites about protecting your kids online. The process is very clunky - you can't get to it at work, so you go home and check and find there is nothing at all wrong with the site. So you go back to work and submit to them that they should unblock it. It takes days and the interest is long gone - thus censorship happens. On one site they unblocked for me, they couldn't unblock just the one site, because many web severs have 1 IP with multiple names, so they unblocked the whole IP. I wonder how many 'inappropriate' sites they unblocked in the process?
I'm sure the ALA would be interested in this (and if you don't want censorware to become federal law, we should all bombard them with this one).
How about paying attention to what your kids are doing? How about instructing them on what you think their appropriate behavior/actions should be while they are online? How about not just dropping your kids off at the local library and assume that it is free babysitting? Of course, if you really believe your local library should babysit your kids, then make sure you vote accordingly so they are well funded enough to afford the extra position. Or maybe, here's a thought, you can get your ass over there and volunteer to do the computer babysitting yourself.
eSchool News just did a recent story on Linux in schools. Nice read.
For us, we are so locked into MS right now - the licensing fees are unbelievable. Servers, Cals, Office, Mail, etc cost us around 30K per year. In one recent example of price schemes - Office 97 and Pub 97 were separate packages (we didn't get Pub). For Office 2000 MS combined them and you got Pub for free. Office 2002 - they yank Pub back out (nice bait and switch!) and it costs an additional $5 per seat (5x1000+ pcs) We opted out and decided not be jerked around like that. We are a very technologically robust district with a computer at every teacher's desk and 1 to 5 computers in each classroom for student use, plus labs, libraries and tech ed rooms. In addition to the MS licensing, we have a huge investment in educational software and various databases to run the district. Our student pop is around 4000. Our anti-virus alone runs us 10K a year, plus firewall and citrix 10/10. There's more. I am stunned at how much we spend, versus starting with a meager 100K budget for everything, several years ago. We need our enterprise antivirus and firewall. We need our student information database and electronic libraries. But we were sucked into the MS spiral out-of-control licensing. We have invested years of training students and staff and administrators. It is very difficult to switch now. If I were starting fresh, I'd switch to free/open in a heartbeat.
Well, the Library of Congress pretty much squashed anything to do with DeCSS in the last round, lets see how they like this. The second anticircumvention rulemaking requests written commentsfrom all interested parties (Nov 19 - Dec 18). We'd like to see the law go away - they only want exemptions. I'm not sure if this fits, because they keep asking for a 'technological measure', but maybe this is some of the ammo we've been looking for.
The purpose of this proceeding is to determine whether there are particular classes of works as to which users are, or are likely to be, adversely affected in their ability to make noninfringing uses due to the prohibition on circumvention.
Format is important. Know what they are looking for and how they want it presented.
First, a proponent must identify the technological
measure that is the ultimate source of the alleged problem, and the
technological measure must effectively control access to a copyrighted
work.
Second, a proponent must specifically explain what noninfringing
activity the prohibition on circumvention is preventing.
Third, a
proponent must establish that the prevented activity is, in fact, a
noninfringing use under current law. The nature of the Librarian's
inquiry is further delineated by the statutory areas to be examined:
(i) The availability for use of copyrighted works;
(ii) The availability for use of works for nonprofit archival,
preservation, and educational purposes;
(iii) The impact that the prohibition on the circumvention of
technological measures applied to copyrighted works has on criticism,
comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research;
(iv) The effect of circumvention of technological measures on the
market for or value of copyrighted works; and
(v) Such other factors as the Librarian considers appropriate.
Wired recently had an article about the FTC and spam.
"The FTC can only legally pursue cases where there are clear instances of spam being used to perpetuate a scam or conduct fraudulent business activities.
"The test is: Does the spam make a representation, an offer of some sort of product or service? Is that representation false? And would an average consumer believe that the representation was true?" Huseman explained. "If those conditions are met, the FTC can act."
Just think, millions of spam messages get sent to uce@ ftc.gov (not easy to remember), yet only six people are on the job.
I thought it had to do with trademarks? If the Rolling Stones Wyman is trademarked, there could be a real issue. But we are not talking about domain names here, because the Stones Wyman already has that site. In the case of Katie.com (the book about the first 13yr old girl to successfully get someone arrested for baiting her over the Internet, then molesting her) - The book is called Katie.com, but the web site katie.com is owned by a woman who had the domain for years. Since the book came out, she now gets bombarded with hits of ppl looking for the book. The books domain name is katieT.com. The woman has tried unsuccessfully to get the publisher to stop using katie.com as the title of the book, but because she never trademarked her own name (which I don't think you can do anyway?) the publisher has no worries. Bottom line, if it's not trademarked, it could just be a spitting contest.
In another story, someone I know had a domain and received a C&D letter. The company who sent the letter did have a trademark which matched the domain name exactly, so the guy had to give it up.
I don't know why the MPAA gets so freaked about this. Spiderman was leaked and it may have even helped sales. According to DVD Store, Movie Studio news: "Spiderman continued to break records. It finished second over the four days to take $US 36.5 million from a record high 3,876 theatres to push its 25 day total to a mammoth $US 334.3 million." That's 334 mil in less than a month.
According to
this site The DVD just came out, and guess what? DVD sales crushed Spiderman's theater opening weekend by raking in millions in just one weekend!
"Spider-Man" set new records in sales for its first day and week on DVD and video, earning an estimated $245 million-plus in gross rental and sell-through revenue during its first five days in release."
It only proves that when they put out a quality film, people will go to see it, maybe more than once, and they will buy the DVD.
I love books that say 24 hours and are 508 pages long. Come on! You couldn't even read that in 24 hours. There are some books out there '31 days to teach yourself C++' or whatever. Then you realize - it's 31 days for each chapter.
First, although the photos are in black&white and look pretty old, remember that those systems were still in heavy use right through the 80's and some even into the 90's before Y2K finally freaked everyone out enough to move on replacing them. Florida's election last year with a bunch of retired, poor eye sighted ppl trying to look at all those little chads on an 80-column punch card! My eyes hurt just thinking about it. (just a disclaimer so I don't age myself tooo much)
Anyway, one of my worst was the first time I did the old 'Del *.*' on the root of a PDP. I thought I was in my own directory. Good thing I was also responsible for the backups and restores. There was a team coming in to use the lab in a couple of hours so I had to run and grab the old reel tape and do a restore. I was so panicked but I made it. These were 24 hour shops because you didn't power this kind of equipment down, so I would always take the Thanksgiving shift (at triple pay) with a skeleton crew. We would bring in Turkey and champagne with everything else and party and feast all day. You could drink and smoke just about anywhere except for right next to the equipment. I remember a water sprinkler busting and flooding a lab, a fire another time that closed us up for two weeks. Counting in octal - ha! Does anyone ever do that anymore? Moving on, I remember using the Internet before there was a 'Web' to get to technical companies to look for know problems, issues. I remember using Kermit to dial into 3Com in the 286 days to get an updated driver - it took 2 days! Or how about stuffing Windows 3.1, WordPerfect 5.1, and a printer driver all on one bootable 31/2 disk? Boy, I could go on....
Unlike the steep competitive of today, those days were truly special. Great people, great times - the epitome of a true team spirit. To me it was a wondrous era, followed by yet another wondrous era that we have today, with desktop computing and the Internet - truly amazing stuff. That's why I get so miffed at groups like the RIAA and silly patents, and broadband ISPs whining about downloading and using bandwidth, about bad laws like the DMCA and elected officials and everyone just trying to jump on some bandwagon that they missed years ago. That's why I come here, so I can keep up to date on this crap and try and do something about it. I see technology on a precipice now. It can fall into the hands of greedy commercial corporations, or remain open and public so it can enter its next truly wondrous era.
Many moons ago I made a 31/2" disk bootable to a stripped down version of Windows 3.1 with a stripped down WordPerfect 5.1, and it even included a HP LaserJet II driver. And I managed to leave solitaire on it too. I used to give them to guys who were going on travel before laptops became commonplace. There is usually a lot of bloat in any OS or software package.
Oh dear - I started as computer operator. That was the most high-tech job available back then, next to programming of course. And it was often 'women's work'. (It was my experience that programmers were mostly women too cause most guys wouldn't be caught dead in front of a keyboard, [but they built the keyboards and mainframes] but that's for another thread) Of course 'computer' meant a large room full of mainframes. Tapes, cards, maintenance, backups, etc. Those vax disks pictured - ours were only 10MB, and you needed carts to move them around. Just look at those pictures again - that giant box with huge round platter drive on it- to hold 10 MB - so to get 100 MB you needed a room full of disk drives! An 8088 that was coming out right around the same time also had a 10MB drive. What a difference. Had to count in octal (thus my silly nick) cause the 32 bits were on the outside of some units - 0s and 1s - you pressed them in to turn them on. There are many things and many friends I wish I could have had photos of, but since 12 yrs of that time were in secret labs working for DoD, cameras weren't allowed.
C. Why should we waste bandwidth on someone from say Florida when our customers could be using it.
This argument slays me. FTPing or P2P or whatever, to someone is FL is no different than being a Verizon customer and making a long distance call to an AT&T customer in another state. These companies wanted to jump on the bandwagon and offer this service, so they will just have to figure it out. I am sick of commercials that show space shuttles lifting off and music and video being downloaded, only to have these newbie ISPs get very upset when you actually do any of that! Providing internet is marching its way toward being no different than other utilities. Did POTs lines get overloaded way back when? Of course. And they have spent decades improving the phone system. And yet, in a catastrophe like a hurricane or 9/11, the phone lines can still get overloaded from too many people trying to check on loved ones.
E. Your speeds that your complaining about have been directly tied to these kinds of programs sucking down your bandwidth and its most likely being used by someone outside our network.
More BS. I know of no broadband ISP that had the foresight to offer tiered services from the get-go. And Napster was out long before cable and DSL finally made it to the general public. They didn't pay attention to the demand and the market and what it was all about, and they are complaining about it. They jumped onto something that was already in existence, and completely underestimated how they would handle the demand.
I. If these programs are not setup right your computers could have major security holes in them and your personal files could be available to the world.
Typical defensive stance - when you can't come up with a good answer, threaten them and change the subject. I am tired of hearing it from the RIAA or anyone else who wants to hit the below the belt like this and try to use the customers ignorant fear to coerce them into doing something. It's unethical and deceitful. Can running FTP cause a security breach? Yes. Can P2P programs of the world junk up your computer with adware and such. Oh yes. But it is not the ISPs place to dabble here. Anyone willing to run these things needs to be prepared to educate themselves.
Well, of course it is. Schools should never do anything that limits their students ability to gather new information. They already had badwidth throttled, and Kazza can grab more than just MP3. Most univerities don't go for dis-allowing just about anything, from the most outrageous art, weird science, etc.
It sounds like the RIAA got in their ear and convinced someone that all downloading was illegal, which of course it is not. You say it is the schools network, yet students pay many thousands to attend. Keeping the throttling seems like a reasonable middle ground. A similar line was just discussed here. Schools educate, not eliminate, and schools that dont take this opportunity to teach students about their fair use and the ethics behind it are missing out.
"we're wanting to enroll him into an accredited online high school curriculum."
Difficult, because there really is no such thing yet. There are a few (some mentioned here) that are achieving reasonable results, but most schools that even have distance learning capability, only offer for 1 or 2 courses. Looking at each states Dept of Ed web site, which may list the names and link to various high schools may be a good start. Remedial 2 year colleges are sometimes equiped with DL courses also. Really though, even at the university level, DL is not that common-place yet. NOVA is good, Arizona U, and U Mass, to name a few, but unless that is the focus, you'll find the offerings very limited.
Really, she is your congresswoman, so any comments should come from you. There is probably just some IE geek out there who designed a nifty little form retrieval for her that only runs in IE, without thinking about the implications and those who would not be able to use it. Similar to those who write pages in FrontPage then don't think to test if other browsers can view the page.
Read closer - it clearly states monitoring for bandwidth usage and security is appropriate, it's peeking into the content that is not. That's where the line is crossed between managing a network resource, and invading ones privacy and freedom of speech. The RIAA and such clearly want them to monitor the content too.
"While network monitoring is appropriate for certain purposes such as security and bandwidth management, the surveillance of individuals' Internet communications implicates important rights, and raises questions about the appropriate role of higher education institutions in policing private behavior."
Slashdot Mirror
I think so. It's surpassed Mac and Novell in the server share (I think I saw somewhere it was marching toward the 25% mark?). There are many articles here on how this country or that are moving away from proprietary and toward free or open source. Many other stories about how MS is starting to feel the heat. But the other day when I went into a school building I got into a conversation with a secretary there. She told me how her son had put Linux (mandrake) on for her at home and she really liked it. When it starts to trickle in like that, you know its starting to take hold.
So now I'll have to CTRL-ALT-DEL to access my phone book.
Will it ask me for an administrators password when I want to change the ring tone?
And what will I do when I get an 'Ignore/Cancel' error message?
I can see it now: mid conversation, and all of a sudden a message pops up 'There is a new security patch for your phone. Would you like to install it now?'
Sad isn't it? It would be great to expect my elected officials to spend their time keeping us safe, improving health care and education, rebuilding highways and bridges - and what is happening to our environment and ozone lately? But unfortunately while we are all preoccupied with a potential WWIII, a few greedy corporate cartels are taking advantage and whittling away at our fundamental rights and freedoms.
Some things change our lives so significantly that they deserve better than to be trampled out of existence by the changing face of subtle bureaucratic oppression.
Agreed. To me there are only 3 major breakthroughs in personal computing technology (and Windows isn't one of them). They are Netscape - literally changed the world (doesn't matter that Mosaic came first, Netscape is the one that did it), Doom - literally exploded first person, multi-user gaming and is the foundation of a multi-billion dollar industry, and Napster who completely 'rocked' the world of content connected computing (CCC - did I just make that up?). If you look back at Doom, how grainy the graphics, limited function etc, and compare to today's spectacular graphics, ability to swim, side step, etc. Netscape and the first web pages - grey, simple, one font, no indents or bullets. Now we have interactive pages, e-commerce, etc. Napster never got to become what it could have been. Just like early explorers confronting something with teeth, the **AA shot it dead before finding out if it was friend or foe.
If the big labels continue to impose restrictions on CDs, the bands that are really into music will simply leave the label.
No, they won't. Because they have iron-clad contracts and they are not allowed to leave unless the label kicks them out. The labels have full control, and the artists will be just as trapped as the music lover. Look at Dixie Chicks, they tried to leave Sony, and after a long court case they finally settled and came to better terms (Sony realized how bad it would look to let them win, esp after earning over 200mil off of them while the girls only got 50k each). Anyway, they are still with Sony, that's how strong those contracts are.
I remember back in the IE 3.0 days, if you turned their very weak content rating all the way up, you couldn't get to Microsoft.com, or more importantly, the now defunct RSAC (It's now the Internet Content Rating Association (ICRA) - because neither site was rated! Unfortunately, filtering hasn't improved much, and this story is a sad testament to that. Just a few months ago our school filter not only blocked out many school web pages, including one school who had just installed it, but it also blocked many sites about protecting your kids online. The process is very clunky - you can't get to it at work, so you go home and check and find there is nothing at all wrong with the site. So you go back to work and submit to them that they should unblock it. It takes days and the interest is long gone - thus censorship happens. On one site they unblocked for me, they couldn't unblock just the one site, because many web severs have 1 IP with multiple names, so they unblocked the whole IP. I wonder how many 'inappropriate' sites they unblocked in the process?
I'm sure the ALA would be interested in this (and if you don't want censorware to become federal law, we should all bombard them with this one).
How about paying attention to what your kids are doing? How about instructing them on what you think their appropriate behavior/actions should be while they are online? How about not just dropping your kids off at the local library and assume that it is free babysitting? Of course, if you really believe your local library should babysit your kids, then make sure you vote accordingly so they are well funded enough to afford the extra position. Or maybe, here's a thought, you can get your ass over there and volunteer to do the computer babysitting yourself.
eSchool News just did a recent story on Linux in schools. Nice read.
For us, we are so locked into MS right now - the licensing fees are unbelievable. Servers, Cals, Office, Mail, etc cost us around 30K per year. In one recent example of price schemes - Office 97 and Pub 97 were separate packages (we didn't get Pub). For Office 2000 MS combined them and you got Pub for free. Office 2002 - they yank Pub back out (nice bait and switch!) and it costs an additional $5 per seat (5x1000+ pcs) We opted out and decided not be jerked around like that. We are a very technologically robust district with a computer at every teacher's desk and 1 to 5 computers in each classroom for student use, plus labs, libraries and tech ed rooms. In addition to the MS licensing, we have a huge investment in educational software and various databases to run the district. Our student pop is around 4000. Our anti-virus alone runs us 10K a year, plus firewall and citrix 10/10. There's more. I am stunned at how much we spend, versus starting with a meager 100K budget for everything, several years ago. We need our enterprise antivirus and firewall. We need our student information database and electronic libraries. But we were sucked into the MS spiral out-of-control licensing. We have invested years of training students and staff and administrators. It is very difficult to switch now. If I were starting fresh, I'd switch to free/open in a heartbeat.
Well, the Library of Congress pretty much squashed anything to do with DeCSS in the last round, lets see how they like this. The second anticircumvention rulemaking requests written commentsfrom all interested parties (Nov 19 - Dec 18). We'd like to see the law go away - they only want exemptions. I'm not sure if this fits, because they keep asking for a 'technological measure', but maybe this is some of the ammo we've been looking for.
The purpose of this proceeding is to determine whether there are particular classes of works as to which users are, or are likely to be, adversely affected in their ability to make noninfringing uses due to the prohibition on circumvention.
Format is important. Know what they are looking for and how they want it presented.
First, a proponent must identify the technological measure that is the ultimate source of the alleged problem, and the technological measure must effectively control access to a copyrighted work.
Second, a proponent must specifically explain what noninfringing activity the prohibition on circumvention is preventing.
Third, a proponent must establish that the prevented activity is, in fact, a noninfringing use under current law. The nature of the Librarian's inquiry is further delineated by the statutory areas to be examined:
(i) The availability for use of copyrighted works;
(ii) The availability for use of works for nonprofit archival, preservation, and educational purposes;
(iii) The impact that the prohibition on the circumvention of technological measures applied to copyrighted works has on criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research;
(iv) The effect of circumvention of technological measures on the market for or value of copyrighted works; and
(v) Such other factors as the Librarian considers appropriate.
Wired recently had an article about the FTC and spam.
"The FTC can only legally pursue cases where there are clear instances of spam being used to perpetuate a scam or conduct fraudulent business activities.
"The test is: Does the spam make a representation, an offer of some sort of product or service? Is that representation false? And would an average consumer believe that the representation was true?" Huseman explained. "If those conditions are met, the FTC can act."
Just think, millions of spam messages get sent to uce@ ftc.gov (not easy to remember), yet only six people are on the job.
I thought it had to do with trademarks? If the Rolling Stones Wyman is trademarked, there could be a real issue. But we are not talking about domain names here, because the Stones Wyman already has that site. In the case of Katie.com (the book about the first 13yr old girl to successfully get someone arrested for baiting her over the Internet, then molesting her) - The book is called Katie.com, but the web site katie.com is owned by a woman who had the domain for years. Since the book came out, she now gets bombarded with hits of ppl looking for the book. The books domain name is katieT.com. The woman has tried unsuccessfully to get the publisher to stop using katie.com as the title of the book, but because she never trademarked her own name (which I don't think you can do anyway?) the publisher has no worries. Bottom line, if it's not trademarked, it could just be a spitting contest.
In another story, someone I know had a domain and received a C&D letter. The company who sent the letter did have a trademark which matched the domain name exactly, so the guy had to give it up.
Funny, because every time I look at the word 'Blackcomb' I keep seeing 'Blackbomb'.
I don't know why the MPAA gets so freaked about this. Spiderman was leaked and it may have even helped sales. According to DVD Store, Movie Studio news: "Spiderman continued to break records. It finished second over the four days to take $US 36.5 million from a record high 3,876 theatres to push its 25 day total to a mammoth $US 334.3 million." That's 334 mil in less than a month. According to this site The DVD just came out, and guess what? DVD sales crushed Spiderman's theater opening weekend by raking in millions in just one weekend!
"Spider-Man" set new records in sales for its first day and week on DVD and video, earning an estimated $245 million-plus in gross rental and sell-through revenue during its first five days in release."
It only proves that when they put out a quality film, people will go to see it, maybe more than once, and they will buy the DVD.
I love books that say 24 hours and are 508 pages long. Come on! You couldn't even read that in 24 hours. There are some books out there '31 days to teach yourself C++' or whatever. Then you realize - it's 31 days for each chapter.
First, although the photos are in black&white and look pretty old, remember that those systems were still in heavy use right through the 80's and some even into the 90's before Y2K finally freaked everyone out enough to move on replacing them. Florida's election last year with a bunch of retired, poor eye sighted ppl trying to look at all those little chads on an 80-column punch card! My eyes hurt just thinking about it. (just a disclaimer so I don't age myself tooo much)
Anyway, one of my worst was the first time I did the old 'Del *.*' on the root of a PDP. I thought I was in my own directory. Good thing I was also responsible for the backups and restores. There was a team coming in to use the lab in a couple of hours so I had to run and grab the old reel tape and do a restore. I was so panicked but I made it. These were 24 hour shops because you didn't power this kind of equipment down, so I would always take the Thanksgiving shift (at triple pay) with a skeleton crew. We would bring in Turkey and champagne with everything else and party and feast all day. You could drink and smoke just about anywhere except for right next to the equipment. I remember a water sprinkler busting and flooding a lab, a fire another time that closed us up for two weeks. Counting in octal - ha! Does anyone ever do that anymore? Moving on, I remember using the Internet before there was a 'Web' to get to technical companies to look for know problems, issues. I remember using Kermit to dial into 3Com in the 286 days to get an updated driver - it took 2 days! Or how about stuffing Windows 3.1, WordPerfect 5.1, and a printer driver all on one bootable 31/2 disk? Boy, I could go on....
Unlike the steep competitive of today, those days were truly special. Great people, great times - the epitome of a true team spirit. To me it was a wondrous era, followed by yet another wondrous era that we have today, with desktop computing and the Internet - truly amazing stuff. That's why I get so miffed at groups like the RIAA and silly patents, and broadband ISPs whining about downloading and using bandwidth, about bad laws like the DMCA and elected officials and everyone just trying to jump on some bandwagon that they missed years ago. That's why I come here, so I can keep up to date on this crap and try and do something about it. I see technology on a precipice now. It can fall into the hands of greedy commercial corporations, or remain open and public so it can enter its next truly wondrous era.
Well, obviously I remember those days! :)
Many moons ago I made a 31/2" disk bootable to a stripped down version of Windows 3.1 with a stripped down WordPerfect 5.1, and it even included a HP LaserJet II driver. And I managed to leave solitaire on it too. I used to give them to guys who were going on travel before laptops became commonplace. There is usually a lot of bloat in any OS or software package.
Oh dear - I started as computer operator. That was the most high-tech job available back then, next to programming of course. And it was often 'women's work'. (It was my experience that programmers were mostly women too cause most guys wouldn't be caught dead in front of a keyboard, [but they built the keyboards and mainframes] but that's for another thread) Of course 'computer' meant a large room full of mainframes. Tapes, cards, maintenance, backups, etc. Those vax disks pictured - ours were only 10MB, and you needed carts to move them around. Just look at those pictures again - that giant box with huge round platter drive on it- to hold 10 MB - so to get 100 MB you needed a room full of disk drives! An 8088 that was coming out right around the same time also had a 10MB drive. What a difference. Had to count in octal (thus my silly nick) cause the 32 bits were on the outside of some units - 0s and 1s - you pressed them in to turn them on. There are many things and many friends I wish I could have had photos of, but since 12 yrs of that time were in secret labs working for DoD, cameras weren't allowed.
Octal - aka 'The Lab Rat'
C. Why should we waste bandwidth on someone from say Florida when our customers could be using it.
This argument slays me. FTPing or P2P or whatever, to someone is FL is no different than being a Verizon customer and making a long distance call to an AT&T customer in another state. These companies wanted to jump on the bandwagon and offer this service, so they will just have to figure it out. I am sick of commercials that show space shuttles lifting off and music and video being downloaded, only to have these newbie ISPs get very upset when you actually do any of that! Providing internet is marching its way toward being no different than other utilities. Did POTs lines get overloaded way back when? Of course. And they have spent decades improving the phone system. And yet, in a catastrophe like a hurricane or 9/11, the phone lines can still get overloaded from too many people trying to check on loved ones.
E. Your speeds that your complaining about have been directly tied to these kinds of programs sucking down your bandwidth and its most likely being used by someone outside our network.
More BS. I know of no broadband ISP that had the foresight to offer tiered services from the get-go. And Napster was out long before cable and DSL finally made it to the general public. They didn't pay attention to the demand and the market and what it was all about, and they are complaining about it. They jumped onto something that was already in existence, and completely underestimated how they would handle the demand.
I. If these programs are not setup right your computers could have major security holes in them and your personal files could be available to the world.
Typical defensive stance - when you can't come up with a good answer, threaten them and change the subject. I am tired of hearing it from the RIAA or anyone else who wants to hit the below the belt like this and try to use the customers ignorant fear to coerce them into doing something. It's unethical and deceitful. Can running FTP cause a security breach? Yes. Can P2P programs of the world junk up your computer with adware and such. Oh yes. But it is not the ISPs place to dabble here. Anyone willing to run these things needs to be prepared to educate themselves.
Well, of course it is. Schools should never do anything that limits their students ability to gather new information. They already had badwidth throttled, and Kazza can grab more than just MP3. Most univerities don't go for dis-allowing just about anything, from the most outrageous art, weird science, etc.
It sounds like the RIAA got in their ear and convinced someone that all downloading was illegal, which of course it is not. You say it is the schools network, yet students pay many thousands to attend. Keeping the throttling seems like a reasonable middle ground. A similar line was just discussed here. Schools educate, not eliminate, and schools that dont take this opportunity to teach students about their fair use and the ethics behind it are missing out.
"we're wanting to enroll him into an accredited online high school curriculum."
Difficult, because there really is no such thing yet. There are a few (some mentioned here) that are achieving reasonable results, but most schools that even have distance learning capability, only offer for 1 or 2 courses. Looking at each states Dept of Ed web site, which may list the names and link to various high schools may be a good start. Remedial 2 year colleges are sometimes equiped with DL courses also. Really though, even at the university level, DL is not that common-place yet. NOVA is good, Arizona U, and U Mass, to name a few, but unless that is the focus, you'll find the offerings very limited.
Maybe there is a rogue manager wandering about. This letter is not even close to professional in any manner.
and just in time for Christmas shopping. I can cover a lot of teenagers on my list with this one, plus one for me of course.
Really, she is your congresswoman, so any comments should come from you. There is probably just some IE geek out there who designed a nifty little form retrieval for her that only runs in IE, without thinking about the implications and those who would not be able to use it. Similar to those who write pages in FrontPage then don't think to test if other browsers can view the page.
Read closer - it clearly states monitoring for bandwidth usage and security is appropriate, it's peeking into the content that is not. That's where the line is crossed between managing a network resource, and invading ones privacy and freedom of speech. The RIAA and such clearly want them to monitor the content too.
"While network monitoring is appropriate for certain purposes such as security and bandwidth management, the surveillance of individuals' Internet communications implicates important rights, and raises questions about the appropriate role of higher education institutions in policing private behavior."