Apple is a hardware company, the only reason they write software is to give their hardware something to do.
No, they aren't.
If Apple was a hardware company, they would cough up the programming specs on their machines so that alternate operating systems could be written for it. As it is, any alternate OS wishing to support Apple hardware must engage in a lengthy and expensive process of reverse-engineering. Open-sourcing Darwin makes this process (slightly) easier, but it's no substitute for having actual docs. This is why Be abandoned the PowerMac platform (and ultimately the PowerPC), since Apple kept changing things.
Further, if Apple was a hardware company, they would encourage porting of alternate operating systems to their hardware, as it would allow meaningful performance comparisons between Apple systems and PC systems. You'd be able to compare apples to Apples (so to speak) and truly see how Apple's hardware stacks up.
Also, if Apple was a hardware company, they would use some of their magnificent industrial design prowess to create some PC peripherals, and siphon off some Wintel dollars. They don't even have to design an actual PC; just the casework and accessories. Hell, wouldn't you be more likely to buy one of those Apple Cinema displays if it had a standard VGA connector?
Here's dumb idea. Write a bot that drives Hotmail's account creation pages and create a few hundred random accounts. Then just let them sit there; never use them, never delete anything (have the bot poll them just often enough to keep them from being deleted as inactive accounts).
Suddenly, the problem becomes Micros~1's as their mail spools fill up with unread, undeleted mail. Once the problem of locating and deleting spam becomes their administrative headache, then maybe they'll do something about it.
...most of them dont mind paying for them because they did get a copy when they bought the computer, and most of the realize that they did agree to the license in the manual, and they did have 14 days to return the pc if they wernt happy.
Ha ha, very funny. The "license" is not relevant to the discussion, since it is not a valid or binding document (much less ethical).
If you want to call it a replacement media cost, then fine. $9.95 is quite reasonable for seven CDs (although, it must be asked, what the heck are you loading on to the machine that requires seven CDs worth of data?). And yes, HP should consider switching to DVD-ROM if they're really tossing around that much data.
So, um... Is Crystal SoundFusion CS4624 support working yet?
I have a Hercules Gamesurround Fortissimo II (replaced my AWE64). It wasn't clear if the OSS modules included with kernel 2.2.19 supported it, so I decided to give ALSA a try. I downloaded and installed ALSA 0.5 some time ago. While the modules detected my card and configured themselves just fine, I got no sound out of the speakers. (Yes, I used alsamixer to turn up the volume on the appropriate channels.)
Someone on the alsa-user mailing list suggested it might have something to do with the "power management" on the newer chip, and to try ALSA 0.9.something (alpha-ware), which has code to handle it. So I did. It compiled, installed, detected my card, and configured itself just fine. alsamixer opens and lets me fool with sliders without trouble. Even the OSS compatibility modules come up fine. But I still can't hear anything.
I haven't touched it since then, as I've been consumed by other distractions. Clearly I'm doing something wrong. But I'm at a complete loss as to what it might be.
Ooo, good point. I have a copy of Photoshop 2.5 for the Mac (unused, still in the shrinkwrap to this day) that I won as a doorprize. Adobe's one of the biggest snots around when it comes to "piracy", and one of the founding members of the BSA.
Does that mean I can expect to get raided? "Hey, Adobe! I have a copy of Photoshop I didn't pay for! Nyah, nyah!!"
Yes, watching the platter spin is not very interesting. (Indeed, if it did look interesting, it probably means your drive is broken:-).)
Watching the heads move, however, is just amazing. I'd wager that your jaw would fall open, unbelieving that anything could possibly move that fast. Even given the low mass of the arm, it's still astonishing. It accelerates, moves across the surface of the platter, and comes to a dead stop in about 1/100th of a second. As far as your puny human eyes are concerned, you don't see any motion at all; it simply is in a new location.
With even moderate disk activity -- such as when Windows does, well, just about anything -- it's a wonder to behold. It's also a great way to see just how inefficiently your files are laid out:-).
Sure, that particular example is fairly easy. But don't tell me the install command is anywhere near that clear-cut.
Also, if you're trying to boot Windoze, the chainloader command may be a bit non-obvious (not to mention the drive-swapping and partition activation commands that may be necessary).
In any case, I found it a bit overwhelming at first and ended up having to read the manual twice before I got a handle on how to write a bootmenu. But as you say, once you've got the basics down, GRUB rocks.
What makes GRUB especially cool is that it doesn't need to be installed on the hard disk in order to boot systems from it. Not only can GRUB locate every hard disk in the system, not only does it understand different partitioning schemes (including BSD-style partitions), but it can also understand various filesystem structures. So if you forgot the name of that latest kernel image you wanted to test, GRUB will let you poke around the filesystem looking for it. GRUB even has a find command to do it for you.
GRUB also supports other systems by performing the traditional read-the-first-block-from-the-partition method using the chainloader command. This lets you boot other OSes whose filesystems GRUB doesn't understand.
Once you get past the arcane command syntax, GRUB turns out to be a wonderful tool. I recommend checking it out.
I have FreeBSD 4.3 on a little x86 pizzabox that will eventually become my firewall and Web server. I'd like to upgrade to 4.5. Everyone I meet says, "just run cvsup and recompile the world."
Er, uh... Well, first of all, cvsup doesn't appear to be installed by default (why the heck not if it's so integral to keeping the system up to date?). Second, "recompiling the world" seems like a fairly drastic and space-hungry step, particularly since I installed binary packages in the first place (and presuming that actual recompilation is involved). And third, all the docs I could find on FreeBSD.org are rather thin (and even way out of date) on this process.
Is there a HOWTO or a step-by-step tutorial for FreeBSD newbies to become conversant with cvsup, the ports tree, and upgrading packages?
So, if you're finding your drives die in 30-60 days, there's likely another problem you're missing.
If there is, I'd sorely like to know what it is.
Barring that, you haven't said how the drives have died [... ]
Two drives died by developing an unrecovered read error on exactly two consecutive sectors. The latest one was right in the middle of the directory structure for C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM. Fortunately, the Linux and BeOS partitions remain bootable. The third drive hasn't malfunctioned yet, but is making a very worrying "squeak" noise regularly every 60 seconds, so I'm unwilling to commit data to it.
The system is all SCSI, all the time. The internal chain is all Wide SCSI (no 50-pin adapters), with a twisted-pair cable and a separate terminator pack. The controller is a Mylex (nee BusLogic) BT-958 single-ended controller.
The internal SCSI chain appears as follows (nice/proc/scsi/scsi formatting ruined to get past lameness filter):
The first two drives in the chain are the ones with problems. Drive 0 (boot drive) has the unrecovered read error; Drive 1 is the squeaker. Drive 1 itself is an RMA replacement for an earlier, identical drive that developed an unrecovered read error. Both of these drives have a fan blowing over them.
Drive 2 has never exhibited any problems.
The motherboard is an ASUS P2B-D, with two 1GHz Pentium-3s. The RAM is from Crucial, CAS latency 2, ECC. The power supply is 300W and came with the Antec case.
In short, I've tried to not cheap out on anything. If you can spot something I've missed, I'd be happy to know.
This is easily one of my most favorite of Adams' explanations on where he got an idea. This is a quote from The Original Hitchhiker Radio Scripts:
"Ah yes, the whale. Well, this came about as a result of watching an episode of a dangerously insane TV detective show called
Cannon in which people got shot the whole time for incredibly little reason. They would just happen to be walking across the street, and they would simply get killed, regardless of what their own plans for the rest of the day might have been.
"I began to find the sheer arbitrariness of this rather upsetting, not just because characters were getting killed, but because nobody ever seemed to care about it one way or another. Anybody who might have cared about any of these people -- family, friends, even the postman -- was kept firmly offstage. There was never any, 'Good night sweet Prince,' or, 'She should have died hereafter,' or even, 'Look you bastard, I was meant to be playing squash with this guy tonight,' just bang, clear them out of the way, on to the next. They were merely, excuse me, Cannonfodder.
"I thought I'd have a go at this. I'd write in a character whose sole function was to be killed for the sake of a small detail in the plot, and then damn well make the audience care about it, even if none of the other characters in the story did. I suppose I must have succeeded because I received quite a number of letters saying how cruel and callous this section was -- letters I certainly would not have received if I had simply mentioned the whale's fate incidentally and passed on. I probably wouldn't have received them if it had been a human either."
-- Douglas N. Adams
...it would have been really nice to see:
1. text of the original novels.
There is no "authoratative" version of the story. Douglas Adams kept making small changes to it every time it was published in a new medium. Even different BBC radio broadcasts were slightly different. I remember reading somewhere that he did this deliberately just to mess with the fans' heads, but I can't locate the reference. I daresay he would have insisted the DVD go out with yet another minor tweak to the story line.
Here's a quote from the Introduction to The Original Hitchhiker Radio Scripts:
"The people who heard the show on BBC World Service will have heard a slightly different version from the original BBC Radio 4 transmission. Those people who heard the BBC transcription service disc will have heard another version, and those who heard the commercial records will have heard another version again. Those people who saw the television show will have seen another different version, and those people who have read the books will have come across yet another different version."
-- Geoffrey Perkins
A local radio station, 102.1 FM KDFC, has been running the scare-tactic ads for a while now. In response, I sent the below letter to their public affairs editor. I have yet to receive any reply from them.
From this, I conclude "The Media" isn't interested in presenting contrasting points of view. You might be able to get them to run an ad, but only if you pay major bucks for it (which none of us have). And there's no guarantee that a quiet phone call from the BSA won't get your ad pulled.
Schwab
-- Letter appears below --
Date: Wed, 9 Jan 2002 06:02:59 -0800
To: nkrautter@kdfc.com
Subject: BSA Ads
Your station is currently broadcasting an ad from the Business
Software Alliance (BSA) intended to intimidate local businesses with the
threat of a, "BSA investigation."
It's probably worth mentioning that the BSA is not a law enforcement
agency or any other arm of the government. They are a privately held
political advocacy committee funded principally by Microsoft. As such, they
have no power to launch an "investigation" or compel cooperation with such
activity without actually filing a lawsuit.
As a software professional of over 20 years experience, I take
umbrage at the BSA's misleading and intimidating tactics, and feel it merits
a response. If it is within the scope of your station's editorial policy, I
wonder if you might be willing to consider broadcasting a rebuttal to the
BSA's ad?
There has never been a documented case of a software company going under due to unsanctioned copying of its products. Ever.
If true, yours would be the first-ever such incident. Would you care to provide more details and hard evidence -- product names, release dates, supported platforms -- rather than friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend hearsay?
I agree that "copy prevention," "usage control," or "crippled media" is more linguistically accurate. Unfortunately, the term "copy protection" has entered the common lexicon, and most immediately conveys the issue at hand to the casual listener.
When you say "copy protection" to an ordinary computer user, they immediately know what it is, and what it means for their ability to use the data with their computer. Thus, "copy protection" gets you on a common footing quickest. If you use an unfamiliar term at them, you'll have to spend time explaining what you mean -- time that could have been spent building their support, or informing the next person -- after which, your listener will probably say, "Oh, you mean copy protection."
"Copy protection" isn't an ideal term, but its meaning is almost universally understood. For myself, I plan to stick with it.
Believe it or not, I actually thought about doing it that way.
Then I looked at the array of monitors lining the hall, and imagined the huge pile of shattered plastic and glass they would become post-roof disposal. Cleaning up just four monitors was a real hassle. Cleaning up 18 would have taken hours. Plus, there was a significant probability that, as the impact zone became a non-flat heap of monitor debris, one of them would have taken a bad bounce and gone sailing through the windows of the Chuck E. Schwab office on the ground floor.
Further, recycling a monitor isn't as simple as recycling an aluminium can. Careful disassembly is required. Sometimes the monitor can be brought back to life by replacing a bad component (in which case, roof-disposing it was a horrible waste).
So, while it would have been a magnificent sight -- and, honestly, if David Letterman had asked us to do it, I would have agreed -- I just couldn't see releasing that much toxic material into the local environment. I knew I sure as hell didn't want to clean it up.
First, I'd like to thank the Slashdot editors for publicizing this auction, thereby assuring that every item will be bid up well over retail by over-enthusiastic tourists, shutting out budget-minded unemployed guys like me. *sigh*
Oh well, there's probably a few things you should know about the stuff up for auction. First off is that Gassée ran a tight fiscal ship. As such, you aren't going to find Aeron chairs or 26" flat panel displays everywhere. Fact is, the standard developer workstation was a single processor Frankenbox in a generic beige ATX minitower, with a 16" (nominal) monitor and $5 keyboard. A typical RAM installation was 128M, with 64M also being common. So you're not going to see 21" Viewsonics in great numbers. Nor are you going to see 1.4GHz Athlon machines; just about everyone used 266-700MHz Pentium machines. The sound card of choice, when there was one at all, was an ISA-based Soundblaster descendant.
Second, towards the end, there were virtually no functional BeBoxes left. Even the internal build machine was decommissioned when PowerPC BeOS was internally deprecated, around the middle of 2001. Those that were left were used primarily as serial debugging terminals.
Third, there is a ton of junk at Be. Dead monitors, dead motherboards, dead hard drives, dead PCI cards, bad RAM, etc. We ran sutff into the ground there. At one point we had 18 dead monitors lined up in the hall (which were slated for a massive roof disposal, but I convinced management to have them recycled instead). We knew where all those piles of crud were, and to avoid them. If the last of the Be people didn't throw it out, I'm sure the auction people can't tell the difference, and will try and sell paperweights alongside the good stuff.
And fourth, the former employees got first crack at all the good stuff.
What all this basically means is that you can be sure that all the BeBoxes that are left are either broken or incomplete (or, in some instances, empty cases being used to hold up bookshelves).
As for the good stuff that remains, I call dibs on the 'scope and logic analyzer:-).
Schwab
Former employee of Be, Inc.
P.S: Whoever ends up with the espresso machine better take damn good care of it, or I'll come after your ass.
A friend of mine keeps getting CometCursor installed on her laptop without her permission. She runs AdAware every so often to find and remove it, but it keeps reappearing.
She suspects it's being installed covertly by some Web sites she visits (though we haven't yet isolated which ones). She surfs with IE, but even so, it seems highly improbable to me that something like CometCursor could be downloaded and installed behind the user's back.
I know CometCursor is spyware, but does anyone have more details about this particular behavior?
We are providing the capital for the software development, and yet others are reaping the rewards, in effect stealing our labor and capital. This is wrong.
By this, are you saying that Japan is stealing our labor and capital by manufacturing and selling cars? After all, enormous US capital and labor went not only in to developing automotive technologies and manufacturing, but also in to developing the entire US market for cars. Should not, then, the fruits of such investment be reserved exclusively for US interests?
Although I fully sympathize with your plight, being in the middle of the same thing myself, the long-term consequences are far more dire.
Taking the job is a black mark that will follow you for the rest of your professional life. No one that you'd actually want to work for will knowingly hire a spammer. Your employment options will be forever limited to spammers and spam-friendly organizations. You will also not be able to reveal the nature of your employment to your friends, for fear of their reaction.
If you simply fail to mention that piece of your employment history on future resumes, you'll still have a curious gap that future employers will ask about.
A quick trip through mythological or Biblical references will show you this is how Evil traditionally works: Wait for a moment of supreme weakness, then make the victim an Offer He Can't Refuse.
Ultimately, as an earlier poster pointed out, you are the final arbiter of your own ethics and what you think you can live with. But if you want my opinion, I recommend avoiding the Faustian Bargain. The long-term costs to your professional career are simply too high.
I have to admit, lack of top-down leadership seems plausible. How else can you explain Half-Life being so good, and Daikatana being so bad? Same basic engine, but one lacked the ability to pull off the added extras.
I think your analysis may be a little simplistic. Half-Life originally started out as a Quake total conversion project. The designers began to get the sense that the end product wasn't going to be all that good.
Ordinary business sense would say to simply focus the team, get the game out the door ASAP, and try to recover sunk costs. But that's not what they did. Instead, they admitted to themselves that the game they had so far wasn't that good, and either needed serious re-design, or to be abandoned completely.
As part of this soul-searching, someone in the company made a new map that incorporated all the really cool elements they'd developed for all the other maps they'd made so far. It played exceptionally well, and everyone loved it. Someone said, "Great! Now all we need to do is make thirty or forty more of these." Half-Life was the result.
The point I'm trying to make is that the team recognized that the direction in which they were headed wasn't leading anywhere. So they took stock of what they had, kept the best pieces, threw out the rest, and started over. Not an easy thing for anyone to do.
Slashdot Mirror
No, they aren't.
If Apple was a hardware company, they would cough up the programming specs on their machines so that alternate operating systems could be written for it. As it is, any alternate OS wishing to support Apple hardware must engage in a lengthy and expensive process of reverse-engineering. Open-sourcing Darwin makes this process (slightly) easier, but it's no substitute for having actual docs. This is why Be abandoned the PowerMac platform (and ultimately the PowerPC), since Apple kept changing things.
Further, if Apple was a hardware company, they would encourage porting of alternate operating systems to their hardware, as it would allow meaningful performance comparisons between Apple systems and PC systems. You'd be able to compare apples to Apples (so to speak) and truly see how Apple's hardware stacks up.
Also, if Apple was a hardware company, they would use some of their magnificent industrial design prowess to create some PC peripherals, and siphon off some Wintel dollars. They don't even have to design an actual PC; just the casework and accessories. Hell, wouldn't you be more likely to buy one of those Apple Cinema displays if it had a standard VGA connector?
So, no, Apple is not a hardware company.
Schwab
Here's dumb idea. Write a bot that drives Hotmail's account creation pages and create a few hundred random accounts. Then just let them sit there; never use them, never delete anything (have the bot poll them just often enough to keep them from being deleted as inactive accounts).
Suddenly, the problem becomes Micros~1's as their mail spools fill up with unread, undeleted mail. Once the problem of locating and deleting spam becomes their administrative headache, then maybe they'll do something about it.
Schwab
Not only that, but if you're visited by the BrownShirts from the BSA, you can send them packing.
Schwab
Ha ha, very funny. The "license" is not relevant to the discussion, since it is not a valid or binding document (much less ethical).
If you want to call it a replacement media cost, then fine. $9.95 is quite reasonable for seven CDs (although, it must be asked, what the heck are you loading on to the machine that requires seven CDs worth of data?). And yes, HP should consider switching to DVD-ROM if they're really tossing around that much data.
Schwab
So, um... Is Crystal SoundFusion CS4624 support working yet?
I have a Hercules Gamesurround Fortissimo II (replaced my AWE64). It wasn't clear if the OSS modules included with kernel 2.2.19 supported it, so I decided to give ALSA a try. I downloaded and installed ALSA 0.5 some time ago. While the modules detected my card and configured themselves just fine, I got no sound out of the speakers. (Yes, I used alsamixer to turn up the volume on the appropriate channels.)
Someone on the alsa-user mailing list suggested it might have something to do with the "power management" on the newer chip, and to try ALSA 0.9.something (alpha-ware), which has code to handle it. So I did. It compiled, installed, detected my card, and configured itself just fine. alsamixer opens and lets me fool with sliders without trouble. Even the OSS compatibility modules come up fine. But I still can't hear anything.
I haven't touched it since then, as I've been consumed by other distractions. Clearly I'm doing something wrong. But I'm at a complete loss as to what it might be.
Schwab
I wrote something vaguely similar a while back. A lawyer friend of mine tells me the contract won't work, since there is no "consideration" involved.
Schwab
Tell him to get a new DSL provider. Some, like Speakeasy, don't mind this sort of thing at all.
Schwab
Ooo, good point. I have a copy of Photoshop 2.5 for the Mac (unused, still in the shrinkwrap to this day) that I won as a doorprize. Adobe's one of the biggest snots around when it comes to "piracy", and one of the founding members of the BSA.
Does that mean I can expect to get raided? "Hey, Adobe! I have a copy of Photoshop I didn't pay for! Nyah, nyah!!"
Schwab
Yes, watching the platter spin is not very interesting. (Indeed, if it did look interesting, it probably means your drive is broken :-).)
Watching the heads move, however, is just amazing. I'd wager that your jaw would fall open, unbelieving that anything could possibly move that fast. Even given the low mass of the arm, it's still astonishing. It accelerates, moves across the surface of the platter, and comes to a dead stop in about 1/100th of a second. As far as your puny human eyes are concerned, you don't see any motion at all; it simply is in a new location.
With even moderate disk activity -- such as when Windows does, well, just about anything -- it's a wonder to behold. It's also a great way to see just how inefficiently your files are laid out :-).
Schwab
Sure, that particular example is fairly easy. But don't tell me the install command is anywhere near that clear-cut.
Also, if you're trying to boot Windoze, the chainloader command may be a bit non-obvious (not to mention the drive-swapping and partition activation commands that may be necessary).
In any case, I found it a bit overwhelming at first and ended up having to read the manual twice before I got a handle on how to write a bootmenu. But as you say, once you've got the basics down, GRUB rocks.
Schwab
Although I've used LILO for many years, I think at this point I've pretty much converted over to the GNU GRand Unified Bootloader (GRUB).
What makes GRUB especially cool is that it doesn't need to be installed on the hard disk in order to boot systems from it. Not only can GRUB locate every hard disk in the system, not only does it understand different partitioning schemes (including BSD-style partitions), but it can also understand various filesystem structures. So if you forgot the name of that latest kernel image you wanted to test, GRUB will let you poke around the filesystem looking for it. GRUB even has a find command to do it for you.
GRUB also supports other systems by performing the traditional read-the-first-block-from-the-partition method using the chainloader command. This lets you boot other OSes whose filesystems GRUB doesn't understand.
Once you get past the arcane command syntax, GRUB turns out to be a wonderful tool. I recommend checking it out.
Schwab
I have FreeBSD 4.3 on a little x86 pizzabox that will eventually become my firewall and Web server. I'd like to upgrade to 4.5. Everyone I meet says, "just run cvsup and recompile the world."
Er, uh... Well, first of all, cvsup doesn't appear to be installed by default (why the heck not if it's so integral to keeping the system up to date?). Second, "recompiling the world" seems like a fairly drastic and space-hungry step, particularly since I installed binary packages in the first place (and presuming that actual recompilation is involved). And third, all the docs I could find on FreeBSD.org are rather thin (and even way out of date) on this process.
Is there a HOWTO or a step-by-step tutorial for FreeBSD newbies to become conversant with cvsup, the ports tree, and upgrading packages?
Schwab
If there is, I'd sorely like to know what it is.
Two drives died by developing an unrecovered read error on exactly two consecutive sectors. The latest one was right in the middle of the directory structure for C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM. Fortunately, the Linux and BeOS partitions remain bootable. The third drive hasn't malfunctioned yet, but is making a very worrying "squeak" noise regularly every 60 seconds, so I'm unwilling to commit data to it.
The system is all SCSI, all the time. The internal chain is all Wide SCSI (no 50-pin adapters), with a twisted-pair cable and a separate terminator pack. The controller is a Mylex (nee BusLogic) BT-958 single-ended controller.
The internal SCSI chain appears as follows (nice /proc/scsi/scsi formatting ruined to get past lameness filter):
Attached devices:
Host: scsi0 Channel: 00 Id: 00 Lun: 00
Vendor: IBM
Model: DDYS-T18350N
Rev: S96H
Type: Direct-Access
ANSI SCSI revision: 03
Host: scsi0 Channel: 00 Id: 01 Lun: 00
Vendor: IBM
Model: DDYS-T18350N
Rev: S9YB
Type: Direct-Access
ANSI SCSI revision: 03
Host: scsi0 Channel: 00 Id: 02 Lun: 00
Vendor: IBM
Model: DDRS-39130D
Rev: DC1B
Type: Direct-Access
ANSI SCSI revision: 02
Host: scsi0 Channel: 00 Id: 08 Lun: 00
Vendor: PLEXTOR
Model: CD-ROM PX-40TW
Rev: 1.03
Type: CD-ROM
ANSI SCSI revision: 02
The first two drives in the chain are the ones with problems. Drive 0 (boot drive) has the unrecovered read error; Drive 1 is the squeaker. Drive 1 itself is an RMA replacement for an earlier, identical drive that developed an unrecovered read error. Both of these drives have a fan blowing over them.
Drive 2 has never exhibited any problems.
The motherboard is an ASUS P2B-D, with two 1GHz Pentium-3s. The RAM is from Crucial, CAS latency 2, ECC. The power supply is 300W and came with the Antec case.
In short, I've tried to not cheap out on anything. If you can spot something I've missed, I'd be happy to know.
Schwab
This is easily one of my most favorite of Adams' explanations on where he got an idea. This is a quote from The Original Hitchhiker Radio Scripts:
Schwab
There is no "authoratative" version of the story. Douglas Adams kept making small changes to it every time it was published in a new medium. Even different BBC radio broadcasts were slightly different. I remember reading somewhere that he did this deliberately just to mess with the fans' heads, but I can't locate the reference. I daresay he would have insisted the DVD go out with yet another minor tweak to the story line.
Here's a quote from the Introduction to The Original Hitchhiker Radio Scripts:
Schwab
The God that can be Slashdotted is Not the True God.
Schwab
A local radio station, 102.1 FM KDFC, has been running the scare-tactic ads for a while now. In response, I sent the below letter to their public affairs editor. I have yet to receive any reply from them.
From this, I conclude "The Media" isn't interested in presenting contrasting points of view. You might be able to get them to run an ad, but only if you pay major bucks for it (which none of us have). And there's no guarantee that a quiet phone call from the BSA won't get your ad pulled.
Schwab
-- Letter appears below --
Date: Wed, 9 Jan 2002 06:02:59 -0800
To: nkrautter@kdfc.com
Subject: BSA Ads
Your station is currently broadcasting an ad from the Business Software Alliance (BSA) intended to intimidate local businesses with the threat of a, "BSA investigation."
It's probably worth mentioning that the BSA is not a law enforcement agency or any other arm of the government. They are a privately held political advocacy committee funded principally by Microsoft. As such, they have no power to launch an "investigation" or compel cooperation with such activity without actually filing a lawsuit.
As a software professional of over 20 years experience, I take umbrage at the BSA's misleading and intimidating tactics, and feel it merits a response. If it is within the scope of your station's editorial policy, I wonder if you might be willing to consider broadcasting a rebuttal to the BSA's ad?
Thank you very much for your time.
Schwab
There has never been a documented case of a software company going under due to unsanctioned copying of its products. Ever.
If true, yours would be the first-ever such incident. Would you care to provide more details and hard evidence -- product names, release dates, supported platforms -- rather than friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend hearsay?
Schwab
I agree that "copy prevention," "usage control," or "crippled media" is more linguistically accurate. Unfortunately, the term "copy protection" has entered the common lexicon, and most immediately conveys the issue at hand to the casual listener.
When you say "copy protection" to an ordinary computer user, they immediately know what it is, and what it means for their ability to use the data with their computer. Thus, "copy protection" gets you on a common footing quickest. If you use an unfamiliar term at them, you'll have to spend time explaining what you mean -- time that could have been spent building their support, or informing the next person -- after which, your listener will probably say, "Oh, you mean copy protection."
"Copy protection" isn't an ideal term, but its meaning is almost universally understood. For myself, I plan to stick with it.
Schwab
Believe it or not, I actually thought about doing it that way.
Then I looked at the array of monitors lining the hall, and imagined the huge pile of shattered plastic and glass they would become post-roof disposal. Cleaning up just four monitors was a real hassle. Cleaning up 18 would have taken hours. Plus, there was a significant probability that, as the impact zone became a non-flat heap of monitor debris, one of them would have taken a bad bounce and gone sailing through the windows of the Chuck E. Schwab office on the ground floor.
Further, recycling a monitor isn't as simple as recycling an aluminium can. Careful disassembly is required. Sometimes the monitor can be brought back to life by replacing a bad component (in which case, roof-disposing it was a horrible waste).
So, while it would have been a magnificent sight -- and, honestly, if David Letterman had asked us to do it, I would have agreed -- I just couldn't see releasing that much toxic material into the local environment. I knew I sure as hell didn't want to clean it up.
Schwab
First, I'd like to thank the Slashdot editors for publicizing this auction, thereby assuring that every item will be bid up well over retail by over-enthusiastic tourists, shutting out budget-minded unemployed guys like me. *sigh*
Oh well, there's probably a few things you should know about the stuff up for auction. First off is that Gassée ran a tight fiscal ship. As such, you aren't going to find Aeron chairs or 26" flat panel displays everywhere. Fact is, the standard developer workstation was a single processor Frankenbox in a generic beige ATX minitower, with a 16" (nominal) monitor and $5 keyboard. A typical RAM installation was 128M, with 64M also being common. So you're not going to see 21" Viewsonics in great numbers. Nor are you going to see 1.4GHz Athlon machines; just about everyone used 266-700MHz Pentium machines. The sound card of choice, when there was one at all, was an ISA-based Soundblaster descendant.
Second, towards the end, there were virtually no functional BeBoxes left. Even the internal build machine was decommissioned when PowerPC BeOS was internally deprecated, around the middle of 2001. Those that were left were used primarily as serial debugging terminals.
Third, there is a ton of junk at Be. Dead monitors, dead motherboards, dead hard drives, dead PCI cards, bad RAM, etc. We ran sutff into the ground there. At one point we had 18 dead monitors lined up in the hall (which were slated for a massive roof disposal, but I convinced management to have them recycled instead). We knew where all those piles of crud were, and to avoid them. If the last of the Be people didn't throw it out, I'm sure the auction people can't tell the difference, and will try and sell paperweights alongside the good stuff.
And fourth, the former employees got first crack at all the good stuff.
What all this basically means is that you can be sure that all the BeBoxes that are left are either broken or incomplete (or, in some instances, empty cases being used to hold up bookshelves).
As for the good stuff that remains, I call dibs on the 'scope and logic analyzer :-).
Schwab
Former employee of Be, Inc.
P.S: Whoever ends up with the espresso machine better take damn good care of it, or I'll come after your ass.
A friend of mine keeps getting CometCursor installed on her laptop without her permission. She runs AdAware every so often to find and remove it, but it keeps reappearing.
She suspects it's being installed covertly by some Web sites she visits (though we haven't yet isolated which ones). She surfs with IE, but even so, it seems highly improbable to me that something like CometCursor could be downloaded and installed behind the user's back.
I know CometCursor is spyware, but does anyone have more details about this particular behavior?
Schwab
By this, are you saying that Japan is stealing our labor and capital by manufacturing and selling cars? After all, enormous US capital and labor went not only in to developing automotive technologies and manufacturing, but also in to developing the entire US market for cars. Should not, then, the fruits of such investment be reserved exclusively for US interests?
Is that what you're saying?
Schwab
Although I fully sympathize with your plight, being in the middle of the same thing myself, the long-term consequences are far more dire.
Taking the job is a black mark that will follow you for the rest of your professional life. No one that you'd actually want to work for will knowingly hire a spammer. Your employment options will be forever limited to spammers and spam-friendly organizations. You will also not be able to reveal the nature of your employment to your friends, for fear of their reaction.
If you simply fail to mention that piece of your employment history on future resumes, you'll still have a curious gap that future employers will ask about.
A quick trip through mythological or Biblical references will show you this is how Evil traditionally works: Wait for a moment of supreme weakness, then make the victim an Offer He Can't Refuse.
Ultimately, as an earlier poster pointed out, you are the final arbiter of your own ethics and what you think you can live with. But if you want my opinion, I recommend avoiding the Faustian Bargain. The long-term costs to your professional career are simply too high.
Schwab
I think your analysis may be a little simplistic. Half-Life originally started out as a Quake total conversion project. The designers began to get the sense that the end product wasn't going to be all that good.
Ordinary business sense would say to simply focus the team, get the game out the door ASAP, and try to recover sunk costs. But that's not what they did. Instead, they admitted to themselves that the game they had so far wasn't that good, and either needed serious re-design, or to be abandoned completely.
As part of this soul-searching, someone in the company made a new map that incorporated all the really cool elements they'd developed for all the other maps they'd made so far. It played exceptionally well, and everyone loved it. Someone said, "Great! Now all we need to do is make thirty or forty more of these." Half-Life was the result.
The point I'm trying to make is that the team recognized that the direction in which they were headed wasn't leading anywhere. So they took stock of what they had, kept the best pieces, threw out the rest, and started over. Not an easy thing for anyone to do.
Schwab