Okay, who on Earth thinks that they should "backup audio cds"? Come on, that's a pretty forced issue. I have several thousand audio cds, and while I'd hate to lose any of them, I don't think I'm going to be burning CDR copies of the pile.
One thing that the synopsis fails to include is the like:
60 percent said they should be able to give copies of CDs to members of their families.
...and that's pretty much the point of the RIAA. You don't want to be limited in your use of the medium, but you also see nothing wrong with ripping off the artist. If people didn't have such a cavalier attitude towards the whole issue, copy protection wouldn't have ever come up in the first place.
Don't get me wrong, I'm no fan of the RIAA and their heavy handed tactics, nor of the major media companies that are wringing every last dime out of the transaction at the expense of the artist and the consumer. But, by the same token, if no one is buying cds anymore, what impetous is there for your favourite band to bother making one?
...so they'll move somewhere else and waste someone else's legal budget trying to get them gone.
Until there are real laws with teeth that take these guys down for good, victories will be short lived.
Not to mention the fact that, since they seem to be able to afford the legal fees of a losing battle, they're obviously making some serious coin from a gullible public, which simply means more and more of these bozos as time goes on.
Sigh....between spam and virii this last week, I don't think I really wanted to see 10% of my email.
It is an accepted historical fact that the Vikings settled Greenland, and then parts of eastern Canada as an outlying region from that. It all fell apart when the resupply fleet couldn't get out of Iceland one year.
There are numerous claimants to "discovering America," including the Spanish, Australians, Norwegians, even an Irish monk. Obviously there were Asians long established here via the land bridge. But the bottom line is that:
a) The main issue is who was the first European here, since it's mostly Europeans who care
b) There's a hell of a difference between just bumping into something and actually making use of it. Columbus and the Spanish get the credit they do because, regardless of whether the Chinese or Martians or whoever had already been round, no one established a permanent colony that's lasted through the ages until the Spanish did.
That is the stupidest thing that I've ever seen, and I've read through MFC:-)
I can't see any way that a labour intensive, energy consuming and inherently dangerous technology can possibly compete against the other options available.
Best of luck to this guy...I think I'd sink my money into the paper cell phone project before something as "pie in the sky" (no pun intended) as this.
It's amazing that someone whose clue meter is so desperately close to zero actually was able to register and get multiple web sites going. Proof, I guess, that there are functional mental illiterates out there.
Yes, at the PDC last summer, they were definitely pushing the cross language aspect without really getting into the cross platform issues, although it took me about three seconds to realize that cross platform with the common language specification would be a minor task.
It would be in their best interests, to some degree, to provide cross platform runtime support, as it reduces their code base for the Office suite (I talked to Bill Gates once about a product for MacOS to compliment an existing Windows one and his big issue was in having to maintain two code bases...at least it matters to him:-)
Microsoft knocks off something similar once it sees the potential
Microsoft markets the hell out of its version
Lemmings opt for the MS product
Original product market share shrinks back to a shadow of what it once was
If the past is any indication,.NET is at stage 3 and will likely continue on the roll. Managers who make decisions like "what development tools we should use" aren't paid for going against the grain. Once MS has provided a functional alternative to java, you can expect significant usage.
Well, they have something of a point. Does letting people use something for free stifle production? Obviously. The number of people who have the means to set aside a significant portion of their life to produce books, music or art for free is pretty small.
Does that mean that libraries are a bad idea? No -- there is a sale, albeit a small one. I'm not sure that that's the thrust of the article, though...it's more about how the free flow of information and how people can make money in the new economy. (And in case, at least around here, libraries are not patronized to the extent that they were 20 years ago...the one next to my office is rarely busy.)
Someone (RMS maybe?) once said "Information wants to be free." That may be true, but who's going to create the information in the first place if they aren't going to see anything for their efforts?
This applies to the free software movement in that someone who works on an open source project has their own reasons for doing so, but they are generally not financial. Even so, where does the money to pay the rent, food and cable teevee bill come from? I don't know too many programmers who can afford to work full time on something for free.
The solution might be patronage, where those who do have money (gov't, Bill Gates, etc) fund the development of books, art and other stuff that can be given away for free. However, they will generally reserve the right to pull the strings of what's being developed and what it says. What kind of solution is that?
Welcome to the new America, where you're guilty until proven innocent, at least in some regards. The proliferation of kooks who go on a tear and wipe out a bunch of people (witness Illinois yesterday, Edgewater Technology recently, etc) you should expect that people will tend to go a bit over the top where random violence (real or perceived) is concerned.
That's not necessarily a bad thing, but watch the civil liberties, boys! It's the sort of thing that can come back to snap you in the ass if you're not careful.
Well, I don't know about that. The dude from San Francisco won (and is featured prominently in the opening sequence,) while all the Japanese guys that the Ohta faction kept sending after Morimota kept getting their collective asses kicked. Granted, the Iron Chefs win an awful lot, but they do have "home kitchen" advantage, and given the "save face" mentality of the Japanese culture, I would suspect that in most cases, judges throw ties to the Iron Chef.
Remember the episode where Kaga boycotted because the ICs had lost three in a row?
I just disagree with the idea that all online chatting is limited to LOL and 13/m/NJ.
Well, that is true, but what is the cost of entry for the privilege of hitting chats of this nature? Members of the general public are not going to figure out how to download and configure IRC clients, they're not going to seek out (or even know about) telnetting into MUDs, etc.
They go for the easiest point of entry, like AOL or Yahoo chat. And who do they find there? Slack jawed yokels who can't get to IRC anymore than they could.
Now, if you're the type who is fascinated by conversations that are mostly acronyms repeated ad-nauseum, you'll stick around. Otherwise, you'll beat it back to whatever you were doing before, thinking "Internet, huh? Real interesting."
I don't want to come off as some sort of elitist snob, but I think that the advent of the commercialization of the net, combined with the influx of people who treat online communication as an extension of shouting at a football game, has made the Internet in general a far less interesting place to spend my time.
When I first got on the Web in 1995, it was more entertaining to "surf around", and I did spend a ridiculous amount of time doing that.
In the ensuing years, however, the rise in commercialization of the whole thing has led me to limit my use to email with friends, information gathering and buying stuff.
I spend about 1/10th of my work day on the net, and maybe 20 minutes a week when I'm home. It has not turned into the "television replacement" that was forecast a while back, and neither myself nor my nine year old daughter finds it all that entertaining.
Chat rooms seem to be a wasteland of children and idiots constantly on with their LOL and BRB, and I can't imagine anyone finding that to be a great use of time.
I think what keeps useage (and social isolation) down is the lack of community with a point -- it's one thing to go sit in a restaurant with friends talking, and quite another to slog through banner ads, only to find your communications inundated with the ROTFLMAO crowd.
I *hate* analog watches (the whole idea of moving parts on my wrist...), but I want a *tasteful* and *neat* digital watch. (Calculator watches need not apply.) Do they at least have the really nice cases and wristbands that I remember them having in my childhood?
No, it was that kind of chintzy looking gold band. The watch itself was about 1 inch by 1 inch and about 3/4 of an inch high. Looked almost exactly like a watch I had back in high school.
On the LED subject, I was at a Fossil store the other day and they were selling LED watches -- the ones with red numbers that you had to press a button to see...what was that, 1978 or so?
Twenty bucks, and it was even about the same size as the old ones (must have put lead or something in there to simulate the weight:-)
I can't imagine that this is even the best use of such "technology". I buy stuff from the Apple Store and have to admit that I've never been overly concerned about the speed of the process.
I would think that "one click ordering" is intended to assist in impulse purchases (like the crap at the supermarket check out) rather than making the buying experience more user friendly. And I would suspect that it becomes less and less viable as the cost of the item goes up.
I mean, it's one thing to say "oops, I just ordered a copy of 'Dirk Gently'" and quite another to say "oops, I just ordered a G4 cube":-)
But I suppose that, somewhere out there, there's someone waiting for one-click ordering here.
I'm not sure why Intel would be so bothered by some iMacs sitting around. With the market share enjoyed by the Wintel platform, I can't imagine they are overly concerned by what's coming out of Cupertino.
Sure, the design is different, but at this point, it's a bit passe, given that they've been out for, what, almost two years? I can imagine Intel sponsoring something at MIT and telling them to cover up anything in the Lab that doesn't look like a beige box that has a Start button in the lower left corner.
At some point, someone has to start looking at what the marketing department's policies are and how they truly affect the company's public image. Can't believe that the publicity this has generated has done a whole lot for people's impressions of the Wintel monopoly.
Hmm...combine this with the device for producing smells over the Internet, and it'll make Napster look like a walk in the park (just don't smell the roses).
...by the same token, it would be interesting to see what other things we've done in the last fifty years have been undertaken solely for their public relations benefits. The whole point of actually dropping the bombs on Japan was to "convince" them to give up, rather than fight on.
The whole "race to the moon" gimmick was largely that -- a PR scheme intended to show US superiority. Given that we haven't been back in almost thirty years, and we've largely abandonded manned missions to anywhere but our own atmosphere, the "Rah-rah" crowd got what they wanted and turned it over to the budget guys who whacked anything that cost over a set amount, regardless of what the results might be.
We may not see a manned mission to Mars unless there's some sort of compelling PR reason to do so.
Perhaps this will demonstrate to the casual observer that putting limits on exporting crypto can have a negative effect on the US. Telling someone that it hampers our efforts to broaden markets isn't quite the same thing as "see these cool games? You can't play 'em!"
One of my favourites as a kid was Clifford Simak. He tended to write stories that focused on people and their reactions to unusual situations. Not a lot of hard science, some very creative ideas, and most of it's based in a believable sense of reality. I think that most early teens interested in SF would find Simak both interesting and readable.
I still enjoy his short stories (which frankly are better than his novels,) although I recognize that they're more candy for the mind than deep thoughtful stuff.
> Given that IBMs net income for Q4 in 2000
> were up 28% over the previous year, that
> doesn't exactly sit with the tech doom and
> gloom.
IBM's growth, combined with the decline of other manufacturers, is just another sign that re-centralization is the future of tech. It's interesting that IBM gave the world a standard for personal computers, effectively pulled back from the market, and never really gave up their strengths in large scale implementations. What, if anything, did they understand about technology that Apple, Dell and the like did not?
In five years, when most of your software is run off of mainframes running some variant of un*x, carried down a broadband pipe to your thin client box, telephone or teevee, the big money will be in IBM and whoever's providing the broadband and thin clients.
IBM may not be a bellweather check of how technology in general is doing, because I think that they understand the future, while the rest of the sector does not. Most of the 'me too' Dotcoms will go away from traditional business reasons (poor management, not understanding financial realities, pure competition, etc) but those who provide the backbone of the whole thing will always be successful.
Slashdot Mirror
One thing that the synopsis fails to include is the like:
60 percent said they should be able to give copies of CDs to members of their families.
Don't get me wrong, I'm no fan of the RIAA and their heavy handed tactics, nor of the major media companies that are wringing every last dime out of the transaction at the expense of the artist and the consumer. But, by the same token, if no one is buying cds anymore, what impetous is there for your favourite band to bother making one?
An interesting concept, to be sure. Were that all of the political process was "open source".
:-)
And even though it is written in Java, they'll still likely have their election results sooner than we had ours in 2000
...so they'll move somewhere else and waste someone else's legal budget trying to get them gone.
Until there are real laws with teeth that take these guys down for good, victories will be short lived.
Not to mention the fact that, since they seem to be able to afford the legal fees of a losing battle, they're obviously making some serious coin from a gullible public, which simply means more and more of these bozos as time goes on.
Sigh....between spam and virii this last week, I don't think I really wanted to see 10% of my email.
It is an accepted historical fact that the Vikings settled Greenland, and then parts of eastern Canada as an outlying region from that. It all fell apart when the resupply fleet couldn't get out of Iceland one year.
There are numerous claimants to "discovering America," including the Spanish, Australians, Norwegians, even an Irish monk. Obviously there were Asians long established here via the land bridge. But the bottom line is that:
a) The main issue is who was the first European here, since it's mostly Europeans who care
b) There's a hell of a difference between just bumping into something and actually making use of it. Columbus and the Spanish get the credit they do because, regardless of whether the Chinese or Martians or whoever had already been round, no one established a permanent colony that's lasted through the ages until the Spanish did.
That is the stupidest thing that I've ever seen, and I've read through MFC :-)
I can't see any way that a labour intensive, energy consuming and inherently dangerous technology can possibly compete against the other options available.
Best of luck to this guy...I think I'd sink my money into the paper cell phone project before something as "pie in the sky" (no pun intended) as this.
> Oh yeah, he's got a stack of Who CD's to get rid of too.
Why would he get rid of these? Pete Townshend doesn't seem to be against Napster. And he's got a point, to boot.
It's amazing that someone whose clue meter is so desperately close to zero actually was able to register and get multiple web sites going. Proof, I guess, that there are functional mental illiterates out there.
Yes, at the PDC last summer, they were definitely pushing the cross language aspect without really getting into the cross platform issues, although it took me about three seconds to realize that cross platform with the common language specification would be a minor task.
:-)
It would be in their best interests, to some degree, to provide cross platform runtime support, as it reduces their code base for the Office suite (I talked to Bill Gates once about a product for MacOS to compliment an existing Windows one and his big issue was in having to maintain two code bases...at least it matters to him
If the past is any indication,
Well, they have something of a point. Does letting people use something for free stifle production? Obviously. The number of people who have the means to set aside a significant portion of their life to produce books, music or art for free is pretty small.
Does that mean that libraries are a bad idea? No -- there is a sale, albeit a small one. I'm not sure that that's the thrust of the article, though...it's more about how the free flow of information and how people can make money in the new economy. (And in case, at least around here, libraries are not patronized to the extent that they were 20 years ago...the one next to my office is rarely busy.)
Someone (RMS maybe?) once said "Information wants to be free." That may be true, but who's going to create the information in the first place if they aren't going to see anything for their efforts?
This applies to the free software movement in that someone who works on an open source project has their own reasons for doing so, but they are generally not financial. Even so, where does the money to pay the rent, food and cable teevee bill come from? I don't know too many programmers who can afford to work full time on something for free.
The solution might be patronage, where those who do have money (gov't, Bill Gates, etc) fund the development of books, art and other stuff that can be given away for free. However, they will generally reserve the right to pull the strings of what's being developed and what it says. What kind of solution is that?
Welcome to the new America, where you're guilty until proven innocent, at least in some regards. The proliferation of kooks who go on a tear and wipe out a bunch of people (witness Illinois yesterday, Edgewater Technology recently, etc) you should expect that people will tend to go a bit over the top where random violence (real or perceived) is concerned.
That's not necessarily a bad thing, but watch the civil liberties, boys! It's the sort of thing that can come back to snap you in the ass if you're not careful.
Well, I don't know about that. The dude from San Francisco won (and is featured prominently in the opening sequence,) while all the Japanese guys that the Ohta faction kept sending after Morimota kept getting their collective asses kicked. Granted, the Iron Chefs win an awful lot, but they do have "home kitchen" advantage, and given the "save face" mentality of the Japanese culture, I would suspect that in most cases, judges throw ties to the Iron Chef.
Remember the episode where Kaga boycotted because the ICs had lost three in a row?
> before finally defeating the gang leader, a straight, white male
:-)
So I guess that homosexuals would be another non-slandered group?
Seriously, do you ever watch anime? How are orientals depicted in that genre, and do you protest that?
Well, that is true, but what is the cost of entry for the privilege of hitting chats of this nature? Members of the general public are not going to figure out how to download and configure IRC clients, they're not going to seek out (or even know about) telnetting into MUDs, etc.
They go for the easiest point of entry, like AOL or Yahoo chat. And who do they find there? Slack jawed yokels who can't get to IRC anymore than they could.
Now, if you're the type who is fascinated by conversations that are mostly acronyms repeated ad-nauseum, you'll stick around. Otherwise, you'll beat it back to whatever you were doing before, thinking "Internet, huh? Real interesting."
I don't want to come off as some sort of elitist snob, but I think that the advent of the commercialization of the net, combined with the influx of people who treat online communication as an extension of shouting at a football game, has made the Internet in general a far less interesting place to spend my time.
In the ensuing years, however, the rise in commercialization of the whole thing has led me to limit my use to email with friends, information gathering and buying stuff.
I spend about 1/10th of my work day on the net, and maybe 20 minutes a week when I'm home. It has not turned into the "television replacement" that was forecast a while back, and neither myself nor my nine year old daughter finds it all that entertaining.
Chat rooms seem to be a wasteland of children and idiots constantly on with their LOL and BRB, and I can't imagine anyone finding that to be a great use of time.
I think what keeps useage (and social isolation) down is the lack of community with a point -- it's one thing to go sit in a restaurant with friends talking, and quite another to slog through banner ads, only to find your communications inundated with the ROTFLMAO crowd.
I *hate* analog watches (the whole idea of moving parts on my wrist...), but I want a *tasteful* and *neat* digital watch. (Calculator watches need not apply.) Do they at least have the really nice cases and wristbands that I remember them having in my childhood?
No, it was that kind of chintzy looking gold band. The watch itself was about 1 inch by 1 inch and about 3/4 of an inch high. Looked almost exactly like a watch I had back in high school.
Neat? Yeah.
Tasteful? Not by a long shot.
On the LED subject, I was at a Fossil store the other day and they were selling LED watches -- the ones with red numbers that you had to press a button to see...what was that, 1978 or so?
:-)
Twenty bucks, and it was even about the same size as the old ones (must have put lead or something in there to simulate the weight
Or conversely, when someone comes into my office and asks if an earthquake hit, I can finally say "yes"!
I can't imagine that this is even the best use of such "technology". I buy stuff from the Apple Store and have to admit that I've never been overly concerned about the speed of the process.
:-)
I would think that "one click ordering" is intended to assist in impulse purchases (like the crap at the supermarket check out) rather than making the buying experience more user friendly. And I would suspect that it becomes less and less viable as the cost of the item goes up.
I mean, it's one thing to say "oops, I just ordered a copy of 'Dirk Gently'" and quite another to say "oops, I just ordered a G4 cube"
But I suppose that, somewhere out there, there's someone waiting for one-click ordering here.
Sure, the design is different, but at this point, it's a bit passe, given that they've been out for, what, almost two years? I can imagine Intel sponsoring something at MIT and telling them to cover up anything in the Lab that doesn't look like a beige box that has a Start button in the lower left corner.
At some point, someone has to start looking at what the marketing department's policies are and how they truly affect the company's public image. Can't believe that the publicity this has generated has done a whole lot for people's impressions of the Wintel monopoly.
Hey! They're bootlegging my "peach smell!"
The whole "race to the moon" gimmick was largely that -- a PR scheme intended to show US superiority. Given that we haven't been back in almost thirty years, and we've largely abandonded manned missions to anywhere but our own atmosphere, the "Rah-rah" crowd got what they wanted and turned it over to the budget guys who whacked anything that cost over a set amount, regardless of what the results might be.
We may not see a manned mission to Mars unless there's some sort of compelling PR reason to do so.
Perhaps this will demonstrate to the casual observer that putting limits on exporting crypto can have a negative effect on the US. Telling someone that it hampers our efforts to broaden markets isn't quite the same thing as "see these cool games? You can't play 'em!"
One of my favourites as a kid was Clifford Simak. He tended to write stories that focused on people and their reactions to unusual situations. Not a lot of hard science, some very creative ideas, and most of it's based in a believable sense of reality. I think that most early teens interested in SF would find Simak both interesting and readable.
I still enjoy his short stories (which frankly are better than his novels,) although I recognize that they're more candy for the mind than deep thoughtful stuff.
> were up 28% over the previous year, that
> doesn't exactly sit with the tech doom and
> gloom.
IBM's growth, combined with the decline of other manufacturers, is just another sign that re-centralization is the future of tech. It's interesting that IBM gave the world a standard for personal computers, effectively pulled back from the market, and never really gave up their strengths in large scale implementations. What, if anything, did they understand about technology that Apple, Dell and the like did not?
In five years, when most of your software is run off of mainframes running some variant of un*x, carried down a broadband pipe to your thin client box, telephone or teevee, the big money will be in IBM and whoever's providing the broadband and thin clients.
IBM may not be a bellweather check of how technology in general is doing, because I think that they understand the future, while the rest of the sector does not. Most of the 'me too' Dotcoms will go away from traditional business reasons (poor management, not understanding financial realities, pure competition, etc) but those who provide the backbone of the whole thing will always be successful.