About a year before we cratered, Be, Incorporated, had developed a prototype of a product very similar to what Sony's come out with.
It was called HARP (Home Audio Reference Platform). Built on top of BeOS (naturally), the HARP prototype looked like an ordinary stereo component (principally because we bought an actual stereo component, hollowed it out, and shoved an Intel 810-based mobo in there). When you inserted a CD, HARP would begin ripping it immediately, convert it to MP3, and store it on the internal disk. But all that happened in the background; you could still play the disc immediately.
We used the built-in database features of the BeOS filesystem to index all internally stored MP3s. And we'd send off to FreeDB.org for the tracklist. But the really cool bit was that HARP had a built-in Web server. Just fire up your PC -- or your wireless Web tablet, of which we had plenty laying around -- connect to the HARP server, and you'd get a browsable list of all the songs on the machine, viewable in any Web browser. Pick one, and it would start playing.
We never got to finish the prototype; Be died before that could happen.
Funny, though; I seem to remember that we had showed HARP to the Sony people when we were developing the e-Villa Web appliance for them...
This argument is just wrong. I don't disagree with your motives, but your argument is fundamentally flawed. The only time you could possibly make such an argument is if you somehow independently created a work that someone else had created previously. While this is possible, it's quite unlikely.
This is tantamount to the statement, "No one will never need more than 640K of RAM." Whether you are doing software engineering or social engineering, you must consider the extreme case and its possible failure modes, and defend against it in your designs. Otherwise, it will come back to bite you on the bottom.
Witness The Walt Disney Company's encounter with exactly this problem. Disney is one of the most vigorous and shrill proponents of strong copyright protection. And yet, their animated film, The Lion King, collided with Kimba The White Lion. So, even if you have nearly unlimited resources to check for uniqueness, you can still get bitten.
...it is mathematically impossible to be aware of and avoid infringement of every other article.
How does the number of presses out there affect whether or not I am aware that the information I publish is (a) my own creative effort or (b) someone else's, and therefore infringing?
Perhaps I could have been more precise by saying, "mathematically impractical," for the same reason it is mathematically impractical to crack encryption systems.
In this specific case, the combinatorial explosion kills you. From math, you may remember the number of possible permutations of a set of n objects arranged in groups of k elements is given as:
n! -------- = n_P_k (n - k)!
Thus, as the number of elements increases, the number of possible permutations increases factorially.
Now, as the owner of printing press/computer k, you need to make sure that the output work n infringes on no other item n. This becomes factorially hard as n increases. Add in the fact that infringement can be entirely subjective, and it gets even messier.
Note well: It is entirely possible -- nay, highly probable -- that I am talking out my ass, and that the strict permutation formula used above doesn't apply here. However, it seems to me that, in order to maintain strict uniqueness among n objects, the work of comparing and testing that uniqueness is probably of order n! difficulty.
Great. Once again our "elected" officials are fellating the monied interests and giving them exactly what they want, regardless of whether or not it's actually necessary. And I can think of few things less necessary that government-mandated copy protection.
I can't begin to describe how infuriating it is to sit and watch this happen. Every time there's an "open" discussion of the issues surrounding digital copying. there is always an unstated assumption that it is something that must be stopped/controlled/regulated/quashed, and how best that can be accomplished. The very idea that, "The Sky Is Not, In Fact, Falling," is never brought up.
Let us be clear: Everyone agrees that artists should be rewarded for their good work. The dissent centers around whether copyright is any longer the best way to provide that reward. I contend that it isn't. First off, it doesn't scale. When there are only a handful of people with a printing press, it is reasonable to expect them to be cognizant of each other's "property" and avoid infringement. However, every computer is the equivalent of a printing press. With hundreds of millions of presses out there, all turning out copyrighted works (by the Berne Convention, everything is copyrighted upon creation), it is mathematically impossible to be aware of and avoid infringement of every other article.
Second, these legislative initiatives are being pushed because the respective industries claim to be losing money to unsanctioned copying (incorrectly referred to as "piracy"). However, these figures are complete fabrications, since they are attempts to measure events that never happened. No independent study of the effects of unsanctioned copying has ever been done. Heck, the industry's own claims have never been subjected to even the most rudimentary critical analysis. And yet these "reports" are being taken as gospel. The story is being repeated so many times, people are starting to believe it's true.
Third, the idea that solution is to "clamp down" is, at best, extremely suspect. Consider the dawn of the automobile, when society had known nothing but the horse and buggy. Automobiles were loud, smelly, and moved far more quickly than their organic counterparts. It is easy to see how the initial reaction would be to "clamp down" on automobiles: To pass laws prohibiting them from travelling faster than 30 miles/hour (somewhat below the top speed of a horse); to mandate that engines have governors to physically prevent them from going faster than 30 MPH; to require radio tamper switches to report if anyone attempts to defeat the governor; and to authorize and provide for police on every street corner to monitor the speed of automobiles, and incarcerate anyone caught exceeding the established limit. Though some would claim it impossible, you could, in fact, incur the financial and social costs and make such a system work.
...Or, you could raise the speed limit.
One of those solutions is much less costly and much less destructive to the social fabric we've struggled to create and grown to enjoy.
We now find ourselves at a similar crossroads, where a new technology is upsetting the old order. "Solutions" are being discussed. And the idea of raising the speed limit is being assiduously kept off the agenda. One is forced to wonder why.
I've been watching Doctor Who since Tom Baker still had the role. To see new episodes after a fifteen-year hiatus honestly makes me apprehensive. Sure I'd like to see new stories, but it would be so easy for them to lose the charm of the show under the weight of stuffy production values.
See, I've always seen Doctor Who as a "fragile" show, one that doesn't survive much tampering. Everyone likes to poke fun at the incredibly cheap sets and effects, but that cheapness, IMHO, is what made Dr. Who a good show. Because the writers/directors/producers couldn't fall back on lavish production values, they had to focus on quality of stories and development of characters to hold the audience's attention. You looked forward to the next show, not because you wanted to see new effects and 3D-rendered alien worlds, but because you wanted to see how the Doctor and Zoe and Jamie and Liz Shaw and Jo Grant and Sarah-Jane Smith and Harry Sullivan and Romana and Nyssa and Peri and (God help us) Mel coped with it, and how it affected them. (As for Brigadier Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart, we always knew how he would react. He started shooting, blindly faithful that, perhaps this time, the bullets would actually have an effect.)
John Nathan-Turner, Dr. Who's final series producer, is a controversial figure among fans. Many believe -- me included -- that he sacrificed story quality in favor of production values. Compare, for example, Frontier in Space (Jon Pertwee era, produced by Barry Letts) with Vengeance on Varos (Colin Baker era, produced by John Nathan-Turner). While both stories utilized elements of violence, Vengeance on Varos seemed to revel in it. In Frontier in Space, the violence is almost completely confined to simple exchange of blood-free gunfire. The plot was advanced by intrigue and the Doctor's endless battle with slow-witted bureaucracy. In Vengeance on Varos, however, we are offered much more graphic violence: A man falling into pool of acid (and then struggling vainly to get out); slow exposure to lethal radiation; death by poison sting; and near encounters with hanging by the neck and falling in lava. Further, the villain, Sil, is physically repulsive. In previous years, the writers would have been content to make the audience despise the villain via his behavior and personality, and did so very successfully. Given that, it's unclear why they went to the extra trouble to give Sil a stomach-turning appearance, other than, "Because we could."
Advance a few more years to the Sylvester McCoy seasons, and things start to turn downright depressing. Delta and the Bannermen has almost no redeeming value whatsoever, being one long almost-continuous gunfight. There's the bizarre and disturbing The Greatest Show in the Galaxy, whose only saving grace is McCoy doing a series of vaudeville-style acts. And the final serial episode, Survival, has you shaking your head going, "What was the point?"
To his credit, Nathan-Turner did turn out some winners. Of note are The Caves of Androzani, Peter Davison's last, and arguably best, episode; and also featuring Morgus, one of the most deliciously despicable villains ever to appear on the show. Also good was Battlefield, where Arthurian legend and two generations of UNIT Brigadiers intersect with a small country village. Watching the new Brigadier kick the crap out of Ancelyn is by itself worth the trouble of watching.
...All of which is an overly long-winded way of saying: The standard Hollywood rules of lavish production values do not apply to Doctor Who. John Nathan-Turner tried it, and the results were, at absolute best, mixed. Doctor Who survives by story and character advancement. I have concerns about whether the new production company will understand this and, for that reason, am uneasy about this announcement.
If you're in the San Francisco Bay Area, the good Doctor can still be seen every Sunday night (barring pledge drives) on PBS station KTEH in San Jose, CA. They've broadcast every Doctor Who episode available over the years at least twice, and are currently running through the Jon Pertwee era.
Schwab
Re:space music from MST3K
on
Space Music
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· Score: 2
"Confucius's concept of the transmission of culture and Marx's views on the social nature of language and invention arose from very different ideological foundations. Nonetheless, because each school of thought in its own way saw intellectual creation as fundamentally a product of the larger society from which it emerged, neither elaborated a strong rationale for treating it as establishing private ownership interests.[15] Deeply influenced by these two ideologies, China falls behind all developed countries and many developing countries in the field of intellectual property protection. It is also not difficult to understand why most of Chinese did not know what were IPRs in 1980s."
How very pompous. How very arrogant. How very American.
I would contend that China leads all developed countries in intellectual "property" protection by failing to acknowledge it. Indeed, our very own Thomas Jefferson recognized that ideas and information inherently defy attempts to fence them in. Rather than erect a byzantine legal framework to pretend otherwise, China simply acknowledged this reality and incorporated it into their culture.
Apologists for intellectual "property" regularly and shrilly proclaim that, without strong protections against unsanctioned copying (incorrectly referred to as "theft"), industries will fall, unemployment will skyrocket, economies will collapse, the seas will rise and civilization will come to an end. And yet, somehow, even under an oppressive Totalitarian Communist regime, China still manages to move along, at its own pace, without any of the IP frameworks we "enjoy" here in the West.
China's culture is far, far older than the West's. Conservative estimates place it at somewhere around five thousand years. You don't hang around that long without learning a thing or two. And yet, the West is arrogantly demanding that China adopt our IP policies wholesale, even with full knowledge of the fact that, to do so, a central pillar of Chinese culture -- that sharing knowledge is laudable -- would have to be completely destroyed. Because it's not profitable.
I still say the whole damn intellectual "property" system needs fundamental re-evaluation.
What kind of fscking imbecile allows critical infrastructure control systems to be connected to the Internet?
This is a complete non-issue. There are no critical systems connected to the Internet. (Any that are need to have their plugs yanked and their admins fired, even if we weren't in the middle of an undeclared war.) This smells to me like a red herring for the Administration to grant itself more sweeping powers of warrantless surveillance and intrusion.
I wonder what Austria's immigration policies are like?
Thanks. I'll update my firewall tonight. And I'll be READING, DAMMIT!
Oh, and can I throw in a cheap plug for the FreeBSD Cheat Sheets while I'm here? It has a much more easy-to-follow tutorial on how to cvsup your ports, though it doesn't go into the theory behind it.
As has already been written, this post is a troll, ripped off from Kuro5hin, and made doubly so by the added allusion to, "bearded Linux hippies [living] in their parents' basement."
Although it did make an interesting point -- if the Government provides legal protection, you should forfeit technological protection -- I found the original Kuro5hin article very disturbing because turned Jefferson's writings on their head by surrounding them with misleading introductory material. As presented by the poster, Jefferson appears to be saying, "Information and ideas propogate freely, so we need copyrights to fence them in and encourage authorship."
This is false. Jefferson opposed copyrights, because they were a form of monopoly. Whether granted by monarchs or by parliaments, the evils of monopolies were well-known even back then (read up on the East India Company some time). The above quote was part of Jefferson's argument against enactment of copyright. That monopolies were evil was already agreed, but Jefferson was making the additional point, "Ideas and information disseminate themselves whether you want them to or not; it is the Way of Things. Copyright operates in direct opposition to the laws of nature."
In the end, Jefferson conceded to adding copyright to the Constitution, but not in the form he wanted. He saw it as a social compromise, and feared the abuses that they might one day bring.
Near as I can tell, the recurring costs are power, data pipes, a building lease, and people. The Ciscos may have a maintenance agreement, but they've mostly already been paid for. Of these, the people are obviously the most expensive component, but how many people does it really take when so much is automated?
I can't see how this got modded up as 'Insightful', as it's such a flagrant troll. Here are the key phrases that reveal the post's true character:
But one often overlooked area of piracy is that of person-to-person piracy. [... ] It skips our mind that it takes away revenue from the software producers. [... ] Person-to-person copying often goes on to result in commercial copying (copying for profit). This mode is often difficult for bearded linux hippies, as they are often without friends.
Emphasis added.
The assertion that the software producer loses revenue is unproved and unprovable. Indeed, direct counterexamples can be pointed out.
The assertion that casual copying leads to copying for profit is laughable; as credible as the argument that consuming marijuana leads to mainlining heroin.
The "bearded Linux hippie" comment, being ad hominem, speaks to its own merit.
If you want to make the case in favor of copy protection, do so. Discoursing on baseless, unprovable, and disprovable theories lends no credibility to your position.
You buy a TAPE DRIVE. Do not buy a cd-rw. Buy TAPE.
Additional clarification: Buy a good tape drive. Do not let cost be your guide; buy the best-rated drive you can find. Again, if they give you grief about the drive's cost, the parent poster's advice still applies.
I used to work at $(MUMBLE_SALTPILE_MUMBLE), whose IT department was staffed by people of diminished capacity. One day, due to a re-org, they physically moved a server containing critical data. Somehow, the move killed the drives. So they went to restore from backups.
During the restore, the drive ate itself and the tape. Backup destroyed.
Now, because the IT department had the aforementioned staff of diminished capacity, the next available backup was a week old (it turns out they were doing daily backups serially onto the same tape, because it was "faster").
So the lessons here are:
Do not skimp; get a solid, reliable tape drive,
Don't rely on it; use Best Practices for backing up data.
If I even hear someone say "That's just like MS," then you're too young to remember when an OS used to cost $300. Most people don't even "pay" for Windows.
What in the name of Ubizmo are you talking about? No OS, other than an enterprise-level UNIX, has ever cost $300.
It's difficult to make a comparison, since marketing of operating systems per se was never considered a major revenue source for anyone making one. Even Digital Research, makers of CP/M (the OS Gates ripped off, badly), didn't charge anywhere near the figure you quote for a copy of their system. Concurrent CP/M was also affordable. Oh, and DR gave you source code to many crucial modules, too. Not many other OSes show up on the radar as OSes per se, since they were more or less hard-wired into the machines they came with (AppleDOS for Apple ][, Atari DOS for Atari systems, and Commodore BASIC for C-64s).
Bioware's so-called "license" that lays claim to anything you create using their tools is not the first of its kind. Activision pulled exactly the same shite a few years ago with a "license" attached to a version of Worldcraft. And yes, Activision got flayed alive for it. But it's not clear whether they learned their lesson. Bioware certainly hasn't.
A copy of the old Activision/Worldcraft license is appended below (with minor reformatting for HTML). Honestly, these childish people who complain so bitterly and shrilly about "theft" really need to take a good, hard look in the mirror.
Schwab
________________________
Software License Agreement Summary:
These Utilities are for your sole, personal use
They are unsupported by Activision, Raven, and id
Levels created by these tools may not be sold or used commercially
as defied [sic] by the Software License Agreement below.
The use of this software is subject to the terms of the Software
License Agreement below. You must accept the Software License
Agreement before you can use Level Utilities. The Level Utilities
are provided strictly for your personal use. The use of the Level
Utilities is subject to additional license restrictions contained in
the Software License Agreement and may not be commercially exploited.
SOFTWARE LICENSE AGREEMENT
IMPORTANT - READ CAREFULLY: THE LEVEL PROCESSING UTILITIES (THE
"LEVEL UTILITIES") FOR USE WITH HEXEN II (THE "PROGRAM") ALLOWS
YOU TO CREATE CUSTOMIZED NEW GAME LEVELS AND OTHER RELATED GAME
MATERIALS FOR PERSONAL USE IN CONNECTION WITH THE PROGRAM ("NEW
GAME MATERIALS"). THE USE OF THE LEVEL UTILTIES IS SUBJECT TO
THE SOFTWARE LICENSE TERMS SET FORTH BELOW. BY USING THE LEVEL
UTILTIES, YOU ARE CONSENTING TO BE BOUND BY AND ARE BECOMING A
PARTY TO THIS AGREEMENT WITH ACTIVISION, INC. ("ACTIVISION").
IF YOU DO NOT AGREE TO THE TERMS OF THIS AGREEMENT, DO NOT USE
THE UTILITIES AND COMPLETELY REMOVE THEM FROM YOUR COMPUTER AND
YOUR POSESSION.
LIMITED USE LICENSE. Activision grants you the non-exclusive, non-
transferable, limited right to use the Level Utilities for the
purpose of creating New Game Materials solely and exclusively for
personal use. For purposes of this Agreement, "New Game Materials"
represent computer data that modifies, substitutes for or adds new
materials to the materials currently contained in the Product, thus
modifying or replacing one or more existing game levels and other
constituent elements provided in the Product. You shall not create
New Game Materials, or tools that have no substantial purpose other
than to contribute to the creation of New Game Materials, except as
expressly permitted pursuant to this Agreement.
All rights not
specifically granted under this Agreement are reserved by Activision
and, as applicable, its licensors. The Level Utilities are licensed,
not sold. Your license and the use of the Level Utilities confers no
title or ownership in the Level Utilities or the New Game Materials
created using the Level Utilities and should not be construed as a
sale of any rights in the Level Utilities or such New Game Materials.
OWNERSHIP. All title, ownership rights and intellectual property
rights in and to the Level Utilities and the New Game Materials
created by you using the Construction Kit are owned by Activision
or its licensors and are protected by the copyright laws of the
United States, international copyright treaties and conventions
and other laws. In the event that you should, by operation of law,
be deemed to retain any rights in any New Game Materials created
by you, you, by using the Level Utilities, hereby irrevocably
assign, without any further consideration and regardless of any
use by Activision of such New Game Materials, all of your rights
and interest, if any, in and to such New Game Materials to
Activision. You also hereby grant Activision an irrevocable,
perpetual, exclusive, fully paid and royalty-free license to
exercise any rights, including moral rights, to any and all
aspects of the New Game Materials. You agree that Activision shall
have the full and complete right to package, publish, print, copy,
promote, market, distribute, transfer and display the New Game
Materials created by you and prepare derivative works based upon
such New Game Materials, and any derivative works thereof,
anywhere throughout the world.
LICENSE CONDITIONS.
You agree that as a condition to Activision's consent to allow you
to use the Level Utilities, you will not use or allow third
parties to use the Level Utilities and the New Game Materials
created by you for commercial purposes, including but not limited
to selling, renting, leasing, licensing, distributing, or
otherwise transferring the ownership of such New Game Materials,
whether on a stand alone basis or packaged in combination with the
New Game Materials created by others, through any and all
distribution channels, including, without limitation, retail sales
and on-line electronic distribution. You agree not to solicit,
initiate or encourage any proposal or offer from any person or
entity to create any New Game Materials for commercial
distribution. You agree to promptly inform Activision in writing
of any instances of your receipt of any such proposal or offer.
If you decide to make available the use of the New Game Materials
created by you to your friends, family, co-workers and other
fellow gamers, you agree to do so solely without charge.
You shall create New Game Materials only if such New Game
Materials can be used exclusively in combination with the retail
version of the Product. The New Game Materials may not be designed
to be used as a stand-alone product.
New Game Materials shall not contain modifications to any COM, EXE
or DLL files or to any other executable Product files.
New Game Materials must not contain any illegal, obscene or
defamatory materials, materials that infringe rights of privacy
and publicity of third parties or (without appropriate irrevocable
licenses granted specifically for that purpose) any trademarks,
copyright-protected works or other properties of third parties.
New Game Materials must contain prominent identification at least
in any on-line description and with reasonable duration on the
opening screen: (a) the name and E-mail address of the New Game
Materials' creator(s) and (b) the words "THIS MATERIAL IS NOT MADE
OR SUPPORTED BY ACTIVISION."
You will not use the Level Utilities to reverse engineer, extract
source code, modify, decompile or disassemble the Program, in
whole or in part.
TERMINATION. Without prejudice to any other rights of Activision,
this Agreement will terminate automatically if you fail to comply
with its terms and conditions. In such event, you must immediately
discontinue the use of the Level Utilities and any New Game Materials
created using the Level Utilities.
INJUNCTION. Because Activision would be irreparably damaged if the
terms of this Agreement were not specifically enforced, you agree
that Activision shall be entitled, without bond, other security or
proof of damages, to appropriate equitable remedies with respect to
breaches of this Agreement, in addition to such other remedies as
Activision may otherwise have under applicable laws.
INDEMNITY. You agree to indemnify, defend and hold Activision, its
partners, licensors, affiliates, contractors, officers, directors,
employees and agents (specifically including, but not limited to, Id
Software, inc., and Raven Software, inc.) harmless from all damages,
losses and expenses arising directly or indirectly from your acts and
omissions to act in using the Level Utilities pursuant to the terms
of this Agreement
MISCELLANEOUS. This Agreement represents the complete agreement
concerning this license between the parties and supersedes all prior
agreements and representations between them. It may be amended only
by a writing executed by both parties. If any provision of this
Agreement is held to be unenforceable for any reason, such provision
shall be reformed only to the extent necessary to make it enforceable
and the remaining provisions of this Agreement shall not be affected.
This Agreement shall be construed under California law as such law is
applied to agreements between California residents entered into and
to be performed within California, except as governed by federal law
and you consent to the exclusive jurisdiction of the state and
federal courts in Los Angeles, California.
If you have any questions concerning this license, you may contact
Activision at 3100 Ocean Park Boulevard, Santa Monica, California
90405, (310) 255-2000, Attn. Business and Legal Affairs,
legal@activision.com
Even if you never get near embedded systems of this type, you can't call yourself a responsible software engineer until you read and learn from An Investigation of the Therac-25 Accidents.
Executive Summary: Company introduces next-generation radiation therapy machine, replacing hardware-based overdosage safety interlocks with software-based mechanisms. Software fails. People are killed.
I think the author overstates the influence of DirectX (nee Direct 3D) on early 3D gaming. Glide was certainly influential -- not to mention the fact that it actually worked -- but worthy of at least as much credit was OpenGL.
The reason OpenGL was (and is) important is because that's what you had to have if you wanted to run 3D-accelerated Quake. And Quake was the undisputed king of first-person shooters. OpenGL support for Quake required downloading a new executable, but Quake2 shipped with it.
OpenGL's API, designed over the course of more than a decade by SGI engineers, beat the crap out of Micros~1's Hacked-Up Losing Kluge. Only now is DirectX starting to approach OpenGL's usability.
Things are a bit more flexible these days, but back then, if you wanted any hope of selling your 3D card, you had to run Quake. And to do that, you had to support OpenGL. Period.
Oh, and NVidia has always had the best OpenGL implementation out there. Funny how that worked out:-). (Permedia's might technically be better, but have you seen what those cards cost?)
The only way any industry will ever get everyone to accept hardware "rights management" like this is if they make a better product.
This is impossible, because "good product" and "copy protection" are contradictory terms.
Copy protection is an artificially introduced capacity for failure. In other words, they are creating failures and and breakages where none would exist otherwise. If the copy protection isn't there, the product is less expensive and more reliable. So what are consumers going to buy: The cheap, reliable product, or the expensive, flaky product?
HP laptops? I never considered... I've tried half a dozen other OEMs for PC laptops, but never HP. It seems looking at the sells figures I wasn't alone.
I can't speak toward HP's more recent offerings, but the HP Omnibook 800CT I own is easily one of the most wonderful things I've ever had the privilege of owning. Sure, it's dog slow (166MHz Pentium) compared to more recent laptops, but it'll be a long time before I part with it.
It's no one thing, but a bunch of small details that made me fall in love with the thing:
Built-in SCSI (being a SCSI bigot with lots of old drives, this was a nice plus),
Perfect "heft": not too heavy, not too thin or fragile (I'm always afraid I'm going to snap those ultra-thin Sony VAIOs in half),
Static RAM and a FET in the hard drive power line means you can leave the machine in Standby mode for a month before the battery needs recharging,
Honest-to-$(GOD) "Instant-On" feature (from Standby mode, press the power button; it's on now),
The hinge (actually a clutch) on the display stays where you leave it; the display doesn't spring or flex back when you let it go.
The machine isn't perfect -- the keyboard is sticky, the display could be higher-res, and the BIOS "hiccups" occasionally -- but the number of things HP did right make it so gosh-darned nice that I'll probably still be holding on to it ten years from now.
I had the privilege of meeting one of the designers of the machine. He says it was the last such machine HP designed in-house. Everything after that was farmed out to OEMs. Too bad; a machine like this with a modern CPU and display would rock.
I strongly doubt these were posted on a lobby card with URLS embedded; nor does reposting the message with them gratuitously inserted add anything to the material.
Possibly not; it was an indulgence on my part. While it may not have added anything to the material, I don't think it detracted from it, either.
There are a lot of twenty-somethings and younger who read Slashdot, who may have never even heard of Don Ameche, Ethel Merman, Edward Everett Horton, or even Cary Grant (whose closest still-living analog might be Sean Connery), all of them great entertainers.
It also gives Packard's message some historical context. In January of the same year, Benny Goodman had his triumphant jazz concert at Carnegie Hall. On 30 October, Orson Welles plunged the nation into panic with his famous War of The Worlds broadcast. And just a few days later, Kristallnacht took place, widely regarded as the beginning of the Jewish Holocaust.
So, no, I don't think adding the links was necessarily a bad thing. Of course, as the story's submitter, I'm biased...:-)
Lest Slashdot readers be tempted to dismiss Harlan Ellison as a technophobic crank, be aware that he is one of the most financially successful writers working in Hollywood today. He got that way by fighting the studios who tried to rip him off.
Hollywood operates in large part on reputation fraud and misappropriation of other people's work, particularly screenwriters. Plot ideas and outlines are co-opted left and right. Writers in Hollywood do indeed work like dogs and end up getting treated about as well. Ellison stepped into these shark-infested waters many decades ago and has consistently and resolutely refused to allow himself to be fscked by the studios.
Ellison is widely recognized as one of the most litigious writers out there, suing studios when they misappropriate his work. What's more, Harlan wins these suits almost all the time. Writing is his vocation and his passion, and he stands among some of the first names in science fiction. But he has seen too many of his friends and colleagues screwed by the studio system, doing lame knock-offs of their work and making millions while the writer goes hungry. Most creative types -- me included -- would just roll over and go, "Oh, well, what can I do about it?"
Not Harlan. He bitch-slaps these creeps up Sunset Blvd. and back until they get the clue: You don't take a writer's work without paying for it.
Where Harlan has gone wrong, IMHO, is that he has misconceptualized the nature of the "wrong" against him. Ellison's entire experience of having his work copied has been in the context of Hollywood studios and publishers. Studios copy Harlan's work, and make money off it. So Harlan sues the studio. Then he sees copies of his work are, "all over AOL," and AOL's making money off it. Ergo, the same solution applies.
Except it doesn't.
I hope someone can explain this to Ellison. His stock and trade is science fiction. We need the imaginations of men like him to provide the ideas and invent a future where copying is ubiquitous and unconstrained, and artists still get handsomely remunerated.
Slashdot Mirror
About a year before we cratered, Be, Incorporated, had developed a prototype of a product very similar to what Sony's come out with.
It was called HARP (Home Audio Reference Platform). Built on top of BeOS (naturally), the HARP prototype looked like an ordinary stereo component (principally because we bought an actual stereo component, hollowed it out, and shoved an Intel 810-based mobo in there). When you inserted a CD, HARP would begin ripping it immediately, convert it to MP3, and store it on the internal disk. But all that happened in the background; you could still play the disc immediately.
We used the built-in database features of the BeOS filesystem to index all internally stored MP3s. And we'd send off to FreeDB.org for the tracklist. But the really cool bit was that HARP had a built-in Web server. Just fire up your PC -- or your wireless Web tablet, of which we had plenty laying around -- connect to the HARP server, and you'd get a browsable list of all the songs on the machine, viewable in any Web browser. Pick one, and it would start playing.
We never got to finish the prototype; Be died before that could happen.
Funny, though; I seem to remember that we had showed HARP to the Sony people when we were developing the e-Villa Web appliance for them...
Schwab
This is tantamount to the statement, "No one will never need more than 640K of RAM." Whether you are doing software engineering or social engineering, you must consider the extreme case and its possible failure modes, and defend against it in your designs. Otherwise, it will come back to bite you on the bottom.
Witness The Walt Disney Company's encounter with exactly this problem. Disney is one of the most vigorous and shrill proponents of strong copyright protection. And yet, their animated film, The Lion King , collided with Kimba The White Lion . So, even if you have nearly unlimited resources to check for uniqueness, you can still get bitten.
Schwab
Perhaps I could have been more precise by saying, "mathematically impractical," for the same reason it is mathematically impractical to crack encryption systems.
In this specific case, the combinatorial explosion kills you. From math, you may remember the number of possible permutations of a set of n objects arranged in groups of k elements is given as:
Thus, as the number of elements increases, the number of possible permutations increases factorially.
Now, as the owner of printing press/computer k, you need to make sure that the output work n infringes on no other item n. This becomes factorially hard as n increases. Add in the fact that infringement can be entirely subjective, and it gets even messier.
Note well: It is entirely possible -- nay, highly probable -- that I am talking out my ass, and that the strict permutation formula used above doesn't apply here. However, it seems to me that, in order to maintain strict uniqueness among n objects, the work of comparing and testing that uniqueness is probably of order n! difficulty.
Schwab
Great. Once again our "elected" officials are fellating the monied interests and giving them exactly what they want, regardless of whether or not it's actually necessary. And I can think of few things less necessary that government-mandated copy protection.
I can't begin to describe how infuriating it is to sit and watch this happen. Every time there's an "open" discussion of the issues surrounding digital copying. there is always an unstated assumption that it is something that must be stopped/controlled/regulated/quashed, and how best that can be accomplished. The very idea that, "The Sky Is Not, In Fact, Falling," is never brought up.
Let us be clear: Everyone agrees that artists should be rewarded for their good work. The dissent centers around whether copyright is any longer the best way to provide that reward. I contend that it isn't. First off, it doesn't scale. When there are only a handful of people with a printing press, it is reasonable to expect them to be cognizant of each other's "property" and avoid infringement. However, every computer is the equivalent of a printing press. With hundreds of millions of presses out there, all turning out copyrighted works (by the Berne Convention, everything is copyrighted upon creation), it is mathematically impossible to be aware of and avoid infringement of every other article.
Second, these legislative initiatives are being pushed because the respective industries claim to be losing money to unsanctioned copying (incorrectly referred to as "piracy"). However, these figures are complete fabrications, since they are attempts to measure events that never happened. No independent study of the effects of unsanctioned copying has ever been done. Heck, the industry's own claims have never been subjected to even the most rudimentary critical analysis. And yet these "reports" are being taken as gospel. The story is being repeated so many times, people are starting to believe it's true.
Third, the idea that solution is to "clamp down" is, at best, extremely suspect. Consider the dawn of the automobile, when society had known nothing but the horse and buggy. Automobiles were loud, smelly, and moved far more quickly than their organic counterparts. It is easy to see how the initial reaction would be to "clamp down" on automobiles: To pass laws prohibiting them from travelling faster than 30 miles/hour (somewhat below the top speed of a horse); to mandate that engines have governors to physically prevent them from going faster than 30 MPH; to require radio tamper switches to report if anyone attempts to defeat the governor; and to authorize and provide for police on every street corner to monitor the speed of automobiles, and incarcerate anyone caught exceeding the established limit. Though some would claim it impossible, you could, in fact, incur the financial and social costs and make such a system work.
One of those solutions is much less costly and much less destructive to the social fabric we've struggled to create and grown to enjoy.
We now find ourselves at a similar crossroads, where a new technology is upsetting the old order. "Solutions" are being discussed. And the idea of raising the speed limit is being assiduously kept off the agenda. One is forced to wonder why.
Schwab
I've been watching Doctor Who since Tom Baker still had the role. To see new episodes after a fifteen-year hiatus honestly makes me apprehensive. Sure I'd like to see new stories, but it would be so easy for them to lose the charm of the show under the weight of stuffy production values.
See, I've always seen Doctor Who as a "fragile" show, one that doesn't survive much tampering. Everyone likes to poke fun at the incredibly cheap sets and effects, but that cheapness, IMHO, is what made Dr. Who a good show. Because the writers/directors/producers couldn't fall back on lavish production values, they had to focus on quality of stories and development of characters to hold the audience's attention. You looked forward to the next show, not because you wanted to see new effects and 3D-rendered alien worlds, but because you wanted to see how the Doctor and Zoe and Jamie and Liz Shaw and Jo Grant and Sarah-Jane Smith and Harry Sullivan and Romana and Nyssa and Peri and (God help us) Mel coped with it, and how it affected them. (As for Brigadier Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart, we always knew how he would react. He started shooting, blindly faithful that, perhaps this time, the bullets would actually have an effect.)
John Nathan-Turner, Dr. Who's final series producer, is a controversial figure among fans. Many believe -- me included -- that he sacrificed story quality in favor of production values. Compare, for example, Frontier in Space (Jon Pertwee era, produced by Barry Letts) with Vengeance on Varos (Colin Baker era, produced by John Nathan-Turner). While both stories utilized elements of violence, Vengeance on Varos seemed to revel in it. In Frontier in Space, the violence is almost completely confined to simple exchange of blood-free gunfire. The plot was advanced by intrigue and the Doctor's endless battle with slow-witted bureaucracy. In Vengeance on Varos, however, we are offered much more graphic violence: A man falling into pool of acid (and then struggling vainly to get out); slow exposure to lethal radiation; death by poison sting; and near encounters with hanging by the neck and falling in lava. Further, the villain, Sil, is physically repulsive. In previous years, the writers would have been content to make the audience despise the villain via his behavior and personality, and did so very successfully. Given that, it's unclear why they went to the extra trouble to give Sil a stomach-turning appearance, other than, "Because we could."
Advance a few more years to the Sylvester McCoy seasons, and things start to turn downright depressing. Delta and the Bannermen has almost no redeeming value whatsoever, being one long almost-continuous gunfight. There's the bizarre and disturbing The Greatest Show in the Galaxy , whose only saving grace is McCoy doing a series of vaudeville-style acts. And the final serial episode, Survival , has you shaking your head going, "What was the point?"
To his credit, Nathan-Turner did turn out some winners. Of note are The Caves of Androzani , Peter Davison's last, and arguably best, episode; and also featuring Morgus, one of the most deliciously despicable villains ever to appear on the show. Also good was Battlefield , where Arthurian legend and two generations of UNIT Brigadiers intersect with a small country village. Watching the new Brigadier kick the crap out of Ancelyn is by itself worth the trouble of watching.
If you're in the San Francisco Bay Area, the good Doctor can still be seen every Sunday night (barring pledge drives) on PBS station KTEH in San Jose, CA. They've broadcast every Doctor Who episode available over the years at least twice, and are currently running through the Jon Pertwee era.
Schwab
From the above, here's Tom's Music from Some Guys in Space intro, in MP3 format.
Schwab
How very pompous. How very arrogant. How very American.
I would contend that China leads all developed countries in intellectual "property" protection by failing to acknowledge it. Indeed, our very own Thomas Jefferson recognized that ideas and information inherently defy attempts to fence them in. Rather than erect a byzantine legal framework to pretend otherwise, China simply acknowledged this reality and incorporated it into their culture.
Apologists for intellectual "property" regularly and shrilly proclaim that, without strong protections against unsanctioned copying (incorrectly referred to as "theft"), industries will fall, unemployment will skyrocket, economies will collapse, the seas will rise and civilization will come to an end. And yet, somehow, even under an oppressive Totalitarian Communist regime, China still manages to move along, at its own pace, without any of the IP frameworks we "enjoy" here in the West.
China's culture is far, far older than the West's. Conservative estimates place it at somewhere around five thousand years. You don't hang around that long without learning a thing or two. And yet, the West is arrogantly demanding that China adopt our IP policies wholesale, even with full knowledge of the fact that, to do so, a central pillar of Chinese culture -- that sharing knowledge is laudable -- would have to be completely destroyed. Because it's not profitable.
I still say the whole damn intellectual "property" system needs fundamental re-evaluation.
Schwab
Citation, please?
Schwab
What kind of fscking imbecile allows critical infrastructure control systems to be connected to the Internet?
This is a complete non-issue. There are no critical systems connected to the Internet. (Any that are need to have their plugs yanked and their admins fired, even if we weren't in the middle of an undeclared war.) This smells to me like a red herring for the Administration to grant itself more sweeping powers of warrantless surveillance and intrusion.
I wonder what Austria's immigration policies are like?
Schwab
Thanks. I'll update my firewall tonight. And I'll be READING, DAMMIT!
Oh, and can I throw in a cheap plug for the FreeBSD Cheat Sheets while I'm here? It has a much more easy-to-follow tutorial on how to cvsup your ports, though it doesn't go into the theory behind it.
Schwab
As has already been written, this post is a troll, ripped off from Kuro5hin, and made doubly so by the added allusion to, "bearded Linux hippies [living] in their parents' basement."
Although it did make an interesting point -- if the Government provides legal protection, you should forfeit technological protection -- I found the original Kuro5hin article very disturbing because turned Jefferson's writings on their head by surrounding them with misleading introductory material. As presented by the poster, Jefferson appears to be saying, "Information and ideas propogate freely, so we need copyrights to fence them in and encourage authorship."
This is false. Jefferson opposed copyrights, because they were a form of monopoly. Whether granted by monarchs or by parliaments, the evils of monopolies were well-known even back then (read up on the East India Company some time). The above quote was part of Jefferson's argument against enactment of copyright. That monopolies were evil was already agreed, but Jefferson was making the additional point, "Ideas and information disseminate themselves whether you want them to or not; it is the Way of Things. Copyright operates in direct opposition to the laws of nature."
In the end, Jefferson conceded to adding copyright to the Constitution, but not in the form he wanted. He saw it as a social compromise, and feared the abuses that they might one day bring.
Schwab
How much does it cost to run a NOC of this size?
Near as I can tell, the recurring costs are power, data pipes, a building lease, and people. The Ciscos may have a maintenance agreement, but they've mostly already been paid for. Of these, the people are obviously the most expensive component, but how many people does it really take when so much is automated?
Like I said, it's a stupid question...
Schwab
I can't see how this got modded up as 'Insightful', as it's such a flagrant troll. Here are the key phrases that reveal the post's true character:
Emphasis added.
The assertion that the software producer loses revenue is unproved and unprovable. Indeed, direct counterexamples can be pointed out.
The assertion that casual copying leads to copying for profit is laughable; as credible as the argument that consuming marijuana leads to mainlining heroin.
The "bearded Linux hippie" comment, being ad hominem, speaks to its own merit.
If you want to make the case in favor of copy protection, do so. Discoursing on baseless, unprovable, and disprovable theories lends no credibility to your position.
Schwab
Additional clarification: Buy a good tape drive. Do not let cost be your guide; buy the best-rated drive you can find. Again, if they give you grief about the drive's cost, the parent poster's advice still applies.
I used to work at $(MUMBLE_SALTPILE_MUMBLE), whose IT department was staffed by people of diminished capacity. One day, due to a re-org, they physically moved a server containing critical data. Somehow, the move killed the drives. So they went to restore from backups.
During the restore, the drive ate itself and the tape. Backup destroyed.
Now, because the IT department had the aforementioned staff of diminished capacity, the next available backup was a week old (it turns out they were doing daily backups serially onto the same tape, because it was "faster").
So the lessons here are:
Schwab
What in the name of Ubizmo are you talking about? No OS, other than an enterprise-level UNIX, has ever cost $300.
It's difficult to make a comparison, since marketing of operating systems per se was never considered a major revenue source for anyone making one. Even Digital Research, makers of CP/M (the OS Gates ripped off, badly), didn't charge anywhere near the figure you quote for a copy of their system. Concurrent CP/M was also affordable. Oh, and DR gave you source code to many crucial modules, too. Not many other OSes show up on the radar as OSes per se, since they were more or less hard-wired into the machines they came with (AppleDOS for Apple ][, Atari DOS for Atari systems, and Commodore BASIC for C-64s).
Schwab
Bioware's so-called "license" that lays claim to anything you create using their tools is not the first of its kind. Activision pulled exactly the same shite a few years ago with a "license" attached to a version of Worldcraft. And yes, Activision got flayed alive for it. But it's not clear whether they learned their lesson. Bioware certainly hasn't.
A copy of the old Activision/Worldcraft license is appended below (with minor reformatting for HTML). Honestly, these childish people who complain so bitterly and shrilly about "theft" really need to take a good, hard look in the mirror.
Schwab
________________________
Software License Agreement Summary:
The use of this software is subject to the terms of the Software License Agreement below. You must accept the Software License Agreement before you can use Level Utilities. The Level Utilities are provided strictly for your personal use. The use of the Level Utilities is subject to additional license restrictions contained in the Software License Agreement and may not be commercially exploited.
SOFTWARE LICENSE AGREEMENT
IMPORTANT - READ CAREFULLY: THE LEVEL PROCESSING UTILITIES (THE "LEVEL UTILITIES") FOR USE WITH HEXEN II (THE "PROGRAM") ALLOWS YOU TO CREATE CUSTOMIZED NEW GAME LEVELS AND OTHER RELATED GAME MATERIALS FOR PERSONAL USE IN CONNECTION WITH THE PROGRAM ("NEW GAME MATERIALS"). THE USE OF THE LEVEL UTILTIES IS SUBJECT TO THE SOFTWARE LICENSE TERMS SET FORTH BELOW. BY USING THE LEVEL UTILTIES, YOU ARE CONSENTING TO BE BOUND BY AND ARE BECOMING A PARTY TO THIS AGREEMENT WITH ACTIVISION, INC. ("ACTIVISION"). IF YOU DO NOT AGREE TO THE TERMS OF THIS AGREEMENT, DO NOT USE THE UTILITIES AND COMPLETELY REMOVE THEM FROM YOUR COMPUTER AND YOUR POSESSION.
LIMITED USE LICENSE. Activision grants you the non-exclusive, non- transferable, limited right to use the Level Utilities for the purpose of creating New Game Materials solely and exclusively for personal use. For purposes of this Agreement, "New Game Materials" represent computer data that modifies, substitutes for or adds new materials to the materials currently contained in the Product, thus modifying or replacing one or more existing game levels and other constituent elements provided in the Product. You shall not create New Game Materials, or tools that have no substantial purpose other than to contribute to the creation of New Game Materials, except as expressly permitted pursuant to this Agreement.
All rights not specifically granted under this Agreement are reserved by Activision and, as applicable, its licensors. The Level Utilities are licensed, not sold. Your license and the use of the Level Utilities confers no title or ownership in the Level Utilities or the New Game Materials created using the Level Utilities and should not be construed as a sale of any rights in the Level Utilities or such New Game Materials.
OWNERSHIP. All title, ownership rights and intellectual property rights in and to the Level Utilities and the New Game Materials created by you using the Construction Kit are owned by Activision or its licensors and are protected by the copyright laws of the United States, international copyright treaties and conventions and other laws. In the event that you should, by operation of law, be deemed to retain any rights in any New Game Materials created by you, you, by using the Level Utilities, hereby irrevocably assign, without any further consideration and regardless of any use by Activision of such New Game Materials, all of your rights and interest, if any, in and to such New Game Materials to Activision. You also hereby grant Activision an irrevocable, perpetual, exclusive, fully paid and royalty-free license to exercise any rights, including moral rights, to any and all aspects of the New Game Materials. You agree that Activision shall have the full and complete right to package, publish, print, copy, promote, market, distribute, transfer and display the New Game Materials created by you and prepare derivative works based upon such New Game Materials, and any derivative works thereof, anywhere throughout the world.
LICENSE CONDITIONS.
You agree that as a condition to Activision's consent to allow you to use the Level Utilities, you will not use or allow third parties to use the Level Utilities and the New Game Materials created by you for commercial purposes, including but not limited to selling, renting, leasing, licensing, distributing, or otherwise transferring the ownership of such New Game Materials, whether on a stand alone basis or packaged in combination with the New Game Materials created by others, through any and all distribution channels, including, without limitation, retail sales and on-line electronic distribution. You agree not to solicit, initiate or encourage any proposal or offer from any person or entity to create any New Game Materials for commercial distribution. You agree to promptly inform Activision in writing of any instances of your receipt of any such proposal or offer.
If you decide to make available the use of the New Game Materials created by you to your friends, family, co-workers and other fellow gamers, you agree to do so solely without charge.
You shall create New Game Materials only if such New Game Materials can be used exclusively in combination with the retail version of the Product. The New Game Materials may not be designed to be used as a stand-alone product.
New Game Materials shall not contain modifications to any COM, EXE or DLL files or to any other executable Product files.
New Game Materials must not contain any illegal, obscene or defamatory materials, materials that infringe rights of privacy and publicity of third parties or (without appropriate irrevocable licenses granted specifically for that purpose) any trademarks, copyright-protected works or other properties of third parties.
New Game Materials must contain prominent identification at least in any on-line description and with reasonable duration on the opening screen: (a) the name and E-mail address of the New Game Materials' creator(s) and (b) the words "THIS MATERIAL IS NOT MADE OR SUPPORTED BY ACTIVISION."
You will not use the Level Utilities to reverse engineer, extract source code, modify, decompile or disassemble the Program, in whole or in part.
TERMINATION. Without prejudice to any other rights of Activision, this Agreement will terminate automatically if you fail to comply with its terms and conditions. In such event, you must immediately discontinue the use of the Level Utilities and any New Game Materials created using the Level Utilities.
INJUNCTION. Because Activision would be irreparably damaged if the terms of this Agreement were not specifically enforced, you agree that Activision shall be entitled, without bond, other security or proof of damages, to appropriate equitable remedies with respect to breaches of this Agreement, in addition to such other remedies as Activision may otherwise have under applicable laws.
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MISCELLANEOUS. This Agreement represents the complete agreement concerning this license between the parties and supersedes all prior agreements and representations between them. It may be amended only by a writing executed by both parties. If any provision of this Agreement is held to be unenforceable for any reason, such provision shall be reformed only to the extent necessary to make it enforceable and the remaining provisions of this Agreement shall not be affected. This Agreement shall be construed under California law as such law is applied to agreements between California residents entered into and to be performed within California, except as governed by federal law and you consent to the exclusive jurisdiction of the state and federal courts in Los Angeles, California.
If you have any questions concerning this license, you may contact Activision at 3100 Ocean Park Boulevard, Santa Monica, California 90405, (310) 255-2000, Attn. Business and Legal Affairs, legal@activision.com
Hexen II(tm) ©1997 Raven Software Corporation. All Rights Reserved. Id Software, Inc. software code contained within Hexen II(tm) © 1996 Id Software, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Developed by Raven Software Corporation. Published by Id Software, Inc. Distributed by Activision, Inc. under sublicense. Hexen® is a registered trademark and Hexen II(tm) is a trademark of Raven Software Corporation. The Id Software name and the id logo are trademarks of Id Software, Inc. Activision® is a registered trademark of Activision, Inc. All other trademarks and trade names are the properties of their respective companies.
Even if you never get near embedded systems of this type, you can't call yourself a responsible software engineer until you read and learn from An Investigation of the Therac-25 Accidents.
Executive Summary: Company introduces next-generation radiation therapy machine, replacing hardware-based overdosage safety interlocks with software-based mechanisms. Software fails. People are killed.
Schwab
I think the author overstates the influence of DirectX (nee Direct 3D) on early 3D gaming. Glide was certainly influential -- not to mention the fact that it actually worked -- but worthy of at least as much credit was OpenGL.
The reason OpenGL was (and is) important is because that's what you had to have if you wanted to run 3D-accelerated Quake. And Quake was the undisputed king of first-person shooters. OpenGL support for Quake required downloading a new executable, but Quake2 shipped with it.
OpenGL's API, designed over the course of more than a decade by SGI engineers, beat the crap out of Micros~1's Hacked-Up Losing Kluge. Only now is DirectX starting to approach OpenGL's usability.
Things are a bit more flexible these days, but back then, if you wanted any hope of selling your 3D card, you had to run Quake. And to do that, you had to support OpenGL. Period.
Oh, and NVidia has always had the best OpenGL implementation out there. Funny how that worked out :-). (Permedia's might technically be better, but have you seen what those cards cost?)
Schwab
This is impossible, because "good product" and "copy protection" are contradictory terms.
Copy protection is an artificially introduced capacity for failure. In other words, they are creating failures and and breakages where none would exist otherwise. If the copy protection isn't there, the product is less expensive and more reliable. So what are consumers going to buy: The cheap, reliable product, or the expensive, flaky product?
Schwab
Can anyone name a single company that got in bed with Micros~1 that didn't later get attacked/sabotaged/destroyed by them in some way?
Schwab
So, like, is there a DivX version we can see?
Schwab
I can't speak toward HP's more recent offerings, but the HP Omnibook 800CT I own is easily one of the most wonderful things I've ever had the privilege of owning. Sure, it's dog slow (166MHz Pentium) compared to more recent laptops, but it'll be a long time before I part with it.
It's no one thing, but a bunch of small details that made me fall in love with the thing:
The machine isn't perfect -- the keyboard is sticky, the display could be higher-res, and the BIOS "hiccups" occasionally -- but the number of things HP did right make it so gosh-darned nice that I'll probably still be holding on to it ten years from now.
I had the privilege of meeting one of the designers of the machine. He says it was the last such machine HP designed in-house. Everything after that was farmed out to OEMs. Too bad; a machine like this with a modern CPU and display would rock.
Schwab
Possibly not; it was an indulgence on my part. While it may not have added anything to the material, I don't think it detracted from it, either.
There are a lot of twenty-somethings and younger who read Slashdot, who may have never even heard of Don Ameche, Ethel Merman, Edward Everett Horton, or even Cary Grant (whose closest still-living analog might be Sean Connery), all of them great entertainers.
It also gives Packard's message some historical context. In January of the same year, Benny Goodman had his triumphant jazz concert at Carnegie Hall. On 30 October, Orson Welles plunged the nation into panic with his famous War of The Worlds broadcast . And just a few days later, Kristallnacht took place, widely regarded as the beginning of the Jewish Holocaust.
So, no, I don't think adding the links was necessarily a bad thing. Of course, as the story's submitter, I'm biased... :-)
Schwab
Then in the meantime you may want to check out LyX, which is built on top of TeX/LaTeX. It's not as slickly polished, but damn it's useful.
Schwab
Lest Slashdot readers be tempted to dismiss Harlan Ellison as a technophobic crank, be aware that he is one of the most financially successful writers working in Hollywood today. He got that way by fighting the studios who tried to rip him off.
Hollywood operates in large part on reputation fraud and misappropriation of other people's work, particularly screenwriters. Plot ideas and outlines are co-opted left and right. Writers in Hollywood do indeed work like dogs and end up getting treated about as well. Ellison stepped into these shark-infested waters many decades ago and has consistently and resolutely refused to allow himself to be fscked by the studios.
Ellison is widely recognized as one of the most litigious writers out there, suing studios when they misappropriate his work. What's more, Harlan wins these suits almost all the time. Writing is his vocation and his passion, and he stands among some of the first names in science fiction. But he has seen too many of his friends and colleagues screwed by the studio system, doing lame knock-offs of their work and making millions while the writer goes hungry. Most creative types -- me included -- would just roll over and go, "Oh, well, what can I do about it?"
Not Harlan. He bitch-slaps these creeps up Sunset Blvd. and back until they get the clue: You don't take a writer's work without paying for it.
Where Harlan has gone wrong, IMHO, is that he has misconceptualized the nature of the "wrong" against him. Ellison's entire experience of having his work copied has been in the context of Hollywood studios and publishers. Studios copy Harlan's work, and make money off it. So Harlan sues the studio. Then he sees copies of his work are, "all over AOL," and AOL's making money off it. Ergo, the same solution applies.
Except it doesn't.
I hope someone can explain this to Ellison. His stock and trade is science fiction. We need the imaginations of men like him to provide the ideas and invent a future where copying is ubiquitous and unconstrained, and artists still get handsomely remunerated.
Schwab