It was his reaction to the whole thing. Instead of pondering what this sudden influx of a fanbase for a non-existent show means, he jumps straight to the "cover it up through force" method.
I wouldn't go so far as to call it "force". It might be heavy-handed, but it's a viable and not-entirely-unreasonable legal option at his disposal.
In other words, I'm not really talking about copyrights. Then again, neither is Mr. Hoffman.;-)
Fair enough.:-) Incidentally I fully agreed with your assessment of the mass media pandering to the [s]lowest common denominator. Ugh.
Quick! Cover it up! People aren't supposed to know we're rejecting the GOOD shows in favor of more idiocy! God forbid that a television network pander to an intelligent clientele. After all, you're all supposed to slurp up the low cost, low profit, low intelligence, but HIGH MARGIN reality shows! Who wants to worry about actually pleasing customers? Just pander to the stupidity! That's the ticket!
And what does any of that have to do with protection of copyrights? You know, the topic that Hoffman was actually addressing. For good or bad, copyrighted junk is still copyrighted.
The power of the government to take private property and convert it into public use. The Fifth Amendment provides that the government may only exercise this power if they provide just compensation to the property owners.
Black's Law Dictionary (8th Ed.) defines the term very much the same way, but adds that the practice can be called compulsory purchase. (Apparently in Scots law this is also called compulsory surrender.) The aforementioned 5th Amendment item is called the Fifth Amendment Clause.
The company also operates a price-comparison shopping engine called Froogle, which analysts think could one day become the heart of a full-fledged e-commerce system.
"Unfortunately, [the paper] is actually one of the better academic papers on BitTorrent, because it makes some attempt, however feeble, to do an apples to apples comparison," he said.
Then Mr. Cohen patted Microsoft on the head, gave it a cookie, and sent it outside to play.
Sure, you wont be able to do anything at all with an IPC/IPX, but a SS5/170 or SS10/* do have comparable numbers to the Ultra 1
Respectfully, most of the SS10 machines - even the SM51/61 - are pretty weak overall compared to the Ultra 1 (even the 170). I recently mothballed two U1s (a 170 and a 170E) because they were no longer practical ( (heat+noise) > utility ). OTOH I have a very clean SS5/110 (with the internal CD-ROM and maximum RAM) and an IPC (w/ new NVRAM) tucked away for future somethingorother. Guess I better hang on to some of those 13W3 monitors...
Nope, I am referring to leo - the name for the ZX, not the 10mbit onboard ethernet.
D'oh - my fault. That's the two-SBUS-slot-wide 24-bit frame buffer, right? I might have one of those in the spares bin, along with myriad other parts. Know anyone who wants to buy a pile of [working] Sun gear?:-)
When it can be run fully from sun4cdm machines......OpenSolaris will be done.
Sure, if you can get Solaris 10 to run on a 4c machine like an IPC, with its blistering 25MHz CPU and SCSI-1 bus and maximum of 64MB (IIRC) RAM, you go ahead and do that. I'll be over here doing something fun, like compiling Gentoo while watching paint dry and hitting myself in the head with a hammer.
Until then, I assume Sun will play its usual EOL games with hardware (ZX off in 1-2 versions (crippled when officially supported, hackable onto Solaris 7), and the drop of 32bit hardware in Solaris 10 for example?).
Do you really expect Sun to support every piece of hardware they ever made forever and ever? That is a rather naive viewpoint. It would be nice to see S10 run on some 4m machines - e.g. an SS20 with 512MB RAM and dual Ross HyperSPARCs - but is it practical to expect the vendor to support these [relatively] aged machines? Of course not. Hey, you've got the code - go nuts!
Evidence of them doing this again is in the code - note that a search for leo brings up it being in a filter of "Obsolete hardware"
First, that should be le0, as in "Lance Ethernet 0 (zero)", the onboard NIC in 4[c,m,d] machines. Second, le0 is rather obsolete: it is (again, IIRC) a half-duplex 10Mb NIC that has been around for 12? 14? years. What is the point of supporting such an old NIC in a new OS version, particularly when the platforms containing said NIC cannot run the new OS?
I guess I'm really not to surprised that so many people can't or won't get the whole "PDF" issue. PDFs are not web pages, plain and simple.
Neither are MPGs, JPGs, MOVs and myriad other files with links pointing to them.
The use of PDFs for other than for their intended purpose is, yes, less than professional.
The point of PDF is to allow people to view the same document in the same way on many different platforms. I suppose you have a different definition of "intended purpose", but that makes no difference: see what the vendor has to say about it.
Oh, and of course, the fact that it's a proprietary file format is just so totally irrelevant... sure.
Yes, actually it is irrelevant, and will be as long as freely available and/or open source tools are available to use/create/etc. the format. Proprietary doesn't necessarily mean closed.
As well, what happened to your sense of humor? Perhaps that cubicle is really starting to get to you?
There is no cubicle here - just an office w/ multiple windows, but thanks.:-)
IMHO, PDFs or links, especially unlabelled ones, are less than professional.
Yes, it certainly is unprofessional for a.gov entity to use a document format that can be used easily, effectively, and cheaply by any one of its many constituents - you know, the people that actually paid for the work. What were they thinking??
Look Sparky, if you are so &*%# worried about it, then - before you click on the link - place the mouse pointer (the li'l thingie that you move around the screen to click stuff) on the link. See the full URL displayed at the bottom of your browser window? Look at it carefully. If at the end of this URL you see a p and a d followed by an f, back slowly away from the link. There, you're all better; that mean ol' PDF won't bother you any more...
PS "Less than professional" On/.??!? Say it isn't so! *snicker*
Imagine a record with holes you can fill with plastic pins - spin the record, and hear what you just made! It would exercise the children's sense of rythm and logic.
The first thing that popped into my head was that gadget/toy that consists of a rectangular frame filled with small parallel metal rods; the rods can move in Y (but not in X) to make 3-D images of objects. Often they are used to make replicas of people's faces. What the heck are they called?? Grrr.
Anyway, picture a record-like disc of these movable rods. The child can move the rods, fix them in place and then play the creation. This fits with your idea: the disc would be heavier but the rods would be captive (and thus much harder for the child to lose them)
Hell, make it a standalone unit while you're at it, and make cardridges that hold the samples. Drums, guitars, voices, bird sounds, car sounds, etc.
With a simple process for converting the audio to a sound file and a USB port for exporting the child's music.:-)
the only numbers they talk about are $9 or $19/month, which are neither even near the small fee they talk about.
A person's definition of "small fee" tends to increase along with disposable income. At the same time, if an individual derives a great amount of utility/enjoyment from $SERVICE, then the fee might be considered small when compared to utility/enjoyment derived (regardless of disposable income), i.e. "bang for the buck".
(Yes, I combined "bang", "buck", "enjoyment" and "$SERVICE". Please focus.)
You don't believe the MeetUp fee is money well spent? That's quite all right: spend your money elsewhere, don't spend it at all, do whatever works for you. To each his own and all that. (For the record, I don't use MeetUp either.)
So our ISP (U of R computing services) not only disconnected him from the network,
So you get your Internet feed through Uni computing services - noted.
but refused to let him back on the network unless he agreed to give them his computer and let *them* run an antivirus scan on it , after which it would be returned.
That's actually not a bad idea. They want to be sure that the system in question is no longer a problem. I'm sure you can see where a user would have motivation to lie about the scan if it would get him back on the network.
but the point is that our ISP can not only watch your internet traffic(as they have been), but if you "get a virus" they can disconnect you and demand they have access to all your personal files at will.
Blows my mind.
Re: watching traffic, disconnecting users - re-read the Terms of Service you signed when you accepted their Internet access; I suspect you will find they've had these capabilities all along.
However, your comment about demand... access to all your personal files at will is completely ridiculous.
First, computing services will only need to examine your PC if it causing a problem for other users; if things have gotten to this point you are either unable or unwilling to maintain the machine yourself and have effectively abdicated this responsibility.
Second, you probably already gave them permission to require such a scan when you agreed to the ToS (see above).
Third, who says your personal files have to remain on the machine if/when you turn it in for virus scanning?? Your roommate was told to deliver the computer; he can sanitize it before he does so. (This should be obvious.)
The University is not a commercial ISP. They provide the Internet access as a tool for you to use to further your education. It is a shared resource, and if you are causing problems they can rectify said problems as necessary based on the ToS. If you don't like their ToS you are free to go back to dial-up or pay for a T1.
Turner acknowledges that binary-only drivers are a sore spot with free software purists, but says he'd "rather have a fully functional, if closed, Nvidia driver than a reverse-engineered one that limps along."
I would have to agree with this - at least as far as my own systems are concerned. I appreciate the idea (and ideals) of F/OSS but do not pursue that single idea doggedly enough to ignore functionality. No single ideology can encompass all possible situations; open source can - and must, in many cases - co-exist peacefully next to closed source and commercial software.
[IANAL but have researched this issue to some extent. No statements I make should be construed as legal advice.]
Organizations should establish data retention and destruction policies and follow them consistently.
Suppose an organization has a policy that states that a) all email older than N days will be purged from the server and b) all email must remain on the server (i.e. no local storage of messages). Another party initiates legal action based on an email sent on $DATE and the discovery process begins. If the order comes through on the (N+1) day for the organization to produce its email, the organization will be in the clear because it followed its own already-established policy. However, if the order comes in on the (N-1) day and the organization purges older email early, it [the org.] will be in hot water.
However, the organization must be sure that it includes all sources of this information. Does the site backup/restore policy parallel the 90-day destruction rule? Many sites pull a set of tapes/media from the rotation once a month or so and put it aside for archival purposes. If the site policy is to destroy email but the backup tapes are available...
IIRC this was a serious mistake on the parts of Enron and Arthur Andersen: they had no such destruction policies in place and began deleting sensitive items only after they knew proceedings were about to begin.
Obviously, this has the potential for increasing storage capacity.
I suspect it could also improve read/write speed. If the bits are stacked vertically, it seems that the read/write head should parse the stacked bits in parallel instead of the current serial fashion.
Let's see if I can dodge the lameness filter...
bit 0 ----\
bit 1 ----\\
bit 2 ----\\\
bit 3 ----\\\\
---------read/write connection (electrical connection back to controller)
bit 4 ----////
bit 5 ----///
bit 6 ----//
bit 7 ----/
To provide additional anti-lameness filter text, I shall mention that the article was rather short on technical detail and Hitachi may in fact already be doing this.
This means that it can take the work that electrical engines don't like, low speed high torque work.
On the contrary, that is exactly the kind of work that electrical motors handle well. Many electric motors - particularly the kind used in industrial applications - offer something close to 100% of peak torque at 0 (zero) RPM.
From the article here that describes the 2005 Toyota Prius:
Thanks to the electric motor's 295 pound-feet of torque at 0 rpm from the engine, the Prius launches without hesitation.
On this page we see the description of a dynamometer used to test electric motors. This excerpt describes the units suitable for testing:
The I-300E electric motor dynamometer is rated at (200 H.R - 149 K.W.) at 1160 RPM, (300 H.P. 224 KW at 3600 RPM), 1050 Ft. lbs. torque - 1425 NM) at 0-1000 RPM. This unit comes standard with a balanced high speed driveline and shield and enables full horsepower-kilowatt testing in the 1800-3600 RPM range. A shear pin release is built into the unit for protection from harmonic vibration and possible torque overload. The unit has a maximum torque rating of 1050 ft. lbs. which occurs at 0 RPM - 1000 RPM. This enables the unit to check torque load of the new high torque/low RPM motors.
Slashdot Mirror
It was his reaction to the whole thing. Instead of pondering what this sudden influx of a fanbase for a non-existent show means, he jumps straight to the "cover it up through force" method.
I wouldn't go so far as to call it "force". It might be heavy-handed, but it's a viable and not-entirely-unreasonable legal option at his disposal.
In other words, I'm not really talking about copyrights. Then again, neither is Mr. Hoffman.
Fair enough.
Quick! Cover it up! People aren't supposed to know we're rejecting the GOOD shows in favor of more idiocy! God forbid that a television network pander to an intelligent clientele. After all, you're all supposed to slurp up the low cost, low profit, low intelligence, but HIGH MARGIN reality shows! Who wants to worry about actually pleasing customers? Just pander to the stupidity! That's the ticket!
And what does any of that have to do with protection of copyrights? You know, the topic that Hoffman was actually addressing. For good or bad, copyrighted junk is still copyrighted.
"I told you they were tricksy...I told you they were false..."
When I read 'Smeagol Jackson' for some reason I thought Elvish, motherf*cker, do you speak it??
Smeago L. Jackson?
Sam: Chris Farley
That would be interesting, except Chris Farley died several years ago.
And No, it's not just squeezing a motherboard into an object smaller than that motherboard (emphasis mine)
And how would one do that, exactly (and ensure the board still worked)?
The Legal Information Institute (LII) at Cornell University defines eminent domain like so:
Eminent Domain
The power of the government to take private property and convert it into public use. The Fifth Amendment provides that the government may only exercise this power if they provide just compensation to the property owners.
Black's Law Dictionary (8th Ed.) defines the term very much the same way, but adds that the practice can be called compulsory purchase. (Apparently in Scots law this is also called compulsory surrender.) The aforementioned 5th Amendment item is called the Fifth Amendment Clause.
The company also operates a price-comparison shopping engine called Froogle, which analysts think could one day become the heart of a full-fledged e-commerce system.
1) Froogle +
2) link to product +
3) "I'm feeling lucky" ==
4) profit?
From The Fine Article:
by early 2005 it was perhaps the dominant protocol on the Net, second only to TCP/IP itself
Wow - TCP/IP, then P2P, and then all those small niche protocols like http, smtp, ftp...
"Unfortunately, [the paper] is actually one of the better academic papers on BitTorrent, because it makes some attempt, however feeble, to do an apples to apples comparison," he said.
Then Mr. Cohen patted Microsoft on the head, gave it a cookie, and sent it outside to play.
I'll call it the "Smart-Ass Group"!
You could also call it the Smartner Group. Here is your ad campaign:
Is your company staffed with improvident lackwits?
We'll show you how to Smartner up!
Share and enjoy!
Sure, you wont be able to do anything at all with an IPC/IPX, but a SS5/170 or SS10/* do have comparable numbers to the Ultra 1
Respectfully, most of the SS10 machines - even the SM51/61 - are pretty weak overall compared to the Ultra 1 (even the 170). I recently mothballed two U1s (a 170 and a 170E) because they were no longer practical ( (heat+noise) > utility ). OTOH I have a very clean SS5/110 (with the internal CD-ROM and maximum RAM) and an IPC (w/ new NVRAM) tucked away for future somethingorother. Guess I better hang on to some of those 13W3 monitors...
Nope, I am referring to leo - the name for the ZX, not the 10mbit onboard ethernet.
D'oh - my fault. That's the two-SBUS-slot-wide 24-bit frame buffer, right? I might have one of those in the spares bin, along with myriad other parts. Know anyone who wants to buy a pile of [working] Sun gear?
When it can be run fully from sun4cdm machines...
Sure, if you can get Solaris 10 to run on a 4c machine like an IPC, with its blistering 25MHz CPU and SCSI-1 bus and maximum of 64MB (IIRC) RAM, you go ahead and do that. I'll be over here doing something fun, like compiling Gentoo while watching paint dry and hitting myself in the head with a hammer.
Until then, I assume Sun will play its usual EOL games with hardware (ZX off in 1-2 versions (crippled when officially supported, hackable onto Solaris 7), and the drop of 32bit hardware in Solaris 10 for example?).
Do you really expect Sun to support every piece of hardware they ever made forever and ever? That is a rather naive viewpoint. It would be nice to see S10 run on some 4m machines - e.g. an SS20 with 512MB RAM and dual Ross HyperSPARCs - but is it practical to expect the vendor to support these [relatively] aged machines? Of course not. Hey, you've got the code - go nuts!
Evidence of them doing this again is in the code - note that a search for leo brings up it being in a filter of "Obsolete hardware"
First, that should be le0, as in "Lance Ethernet 0 (zero)", the onboard NIC in 4[c,m,d] machines. Second, le0 is rather obsolete: it is (again, IIRC) a half-duplex 10Mb NIC that has been around for 12? 14? years. What is the point of supporting such an old NIC in a new OS version, particularly when the platforms containing said NIC cannot run the new OS?
I guess I'm really not to surprised that so many people can't or won't get the whole "PDF" issue. PDFs are not web pages, plain and simple.
Neither are MPGs, JPGs, MOVs and myriad other files with links pointing to them.
The use of PDFs for other than for their intended purpose is, yes, less than professional.
The point of PDF is to allow people to view the same document in the same way on many different platforms. I suppose you have a different definition of "intended purpose", but that makes no difference: see what the vendor has to say about it.
Oh, and of course, the fact that it's a proprietary file format is just so totally irrelevant
Yes, actually it is irrelevant, and will be as long as freely available and/or open source tools are available to use/create/etc. the format. Proprietary doesn't necessarily mean closed.
As well, what happened to your sense of humor? Perhaps that cubicle is really starting to get to you?
There is no cubicle here - just an office w/ multiple windows, but thanks.
IMHO, PDFs or links, especially unlabelled ones, are less than professional.
Yes, it certainly is unprofessional for a
Look Sparky, if you are so &*%# worried about it, then - before you click on the link - place the mouse pointer (the li'l thingie that you move around the screen to click stuff) on the link. See the full URL displayed at the bottom of your browser window? Look at it carefully. If at the end of this URL you see a p and a d followed by an f, back slowly away from the link. There, you're all better; that mean ol' PDF won't bother you any more...
PS "Less than professional" On
Imagine a record with holes you can fill with plastic pins - spin the record, and hear what you just made! It would exercise the children's sense of rythm and logic.
The first thing that popped into my head was that gadget/toy that consists of a rectangular frame filled with small parallel metal rods; the rods can move in Y (but not in X) to make 3-D images of objects. Often they are used to make replicas of people's faces. What the heck are they called?? Grrr.
Anyway, picture a record-like disc of these movable rods. The child can move the rods, fix them in place and then play the creation. This fits with your idea: the disc would be heavier but the rods would be captive (and thus much harder for the child to lose them)
Hell, make it a standalone unit while you're at it, and make cardridges that hold the samples. Drums, guitars, voices, bird sounds, car sounds, etc.
With a simple process for converting the audio to a sound file and a USB port for exporting the child's music.
the only numbers they talk about are $9 or $19/month, which are neither even near the small fee they talk about.
A person's definition of "small fee" tends to increase along with disposable income. At the same time, if an individual derives a great amount of utility/enjoyment from $SERVICE, then the fee might be considered small when compared to utility/enjoyment derived (regardless of disposable income), i.e. "bang for the buck".
(Yes, I combined "bang", "buck", "enjoyment" and "$SERVICE". Please focus.)
You don't believe the MeetUp fee is money well spent? That's quite all right: spend your money elsewhere, don't spend it at all, do whatever works for you. To each his own and all that. (For the record, I don't use MeetUp either.)
Cheers!
So our ISP (U of R computing services) not only disconnected him from the network,
So you get your Internet feed through Uni computing services - noted.
but refused to let him back on the network unless he agreed to give them his computer and let *them* run an antivirus scan on it , after which it would be returned.
That's actually not a bad idea. They want to be sure that the system in question is no longer a problem. I'm sure you can see where a user would have motivation to lie about the scan if it would get him back on the network.
but the point is that our ISP can not only watch your internet traffic(as they have been), but if you "get a virus" they can disconnect you and demand they have access to all your personal files at will.
Blows my mind.
Re: watching traffic, disconnecting users - re-read the Terms of Service you signed when you accepted their Internet access; I suspect you will find they've had these capabilities all along.
However, your comment about demand... access to all your personal files at will is completely ridiculous.
First, computing services will only need to examine your PC if it causing a problem for other users; if things have gotten to this point you are either unable or unwilling to maintain the machine yourself and have effectively abdicated this responsibility.
Second, you probably already gave them permission to require such a scan when you agreed to the ToS (see above).
Third, who says your personal files have to remain on the machine if/when you turn it in for virus scanning?? Your roommate was told to deliver the computer; he can sanitize it before he does so. (This should be obvious.)
The University is not a commercial ISP. They provide the Internet access as a tool for you to use to further your education. It is a shared resource, and if you are causing problems they can rectify said problems as necessary based on the ToS. If you don't like their ToS you are free to go back to dial-up or pay for a T1.
really? by reading slashdot, it feels more like devolution to me!
OMG u R teh st00p1D!!11!eleventy-leven!!WTFBBQQED!!111!
Gah - how can people actually communicate that way? That sentence alone (such as it was) made me feel icky.
Perhaps Coneasfast is correct...
Turner acknowledges that binary-only drivers are a sore spot with free software purists, but says he'd "rather have a fully functional, if closed, Nvidia driver than a reverse-engineered one that limps along."
I would have to agree with this - at least as far as my own systems are concerned. I appreciate the idea (and ideals) of F/OSS but do not pursue that single idea doggedly enough to ignore functionality. No single ideology can encompass all possible situations; open source can - and must, in many cases - co-exist peacefully next to closed source and commercial software.
I told Torvalds, you will rue the day, you will rue the day you used BitKeeper, but noooooo
Chris Knight: "Rue the day? Who talks like that??"
Such a good movie
maybe Asimov's vision of a robot-filled future isn't so far off...
Huxley
Sounds like a brave new world.
along with yellowcake nuclear material
Mmmmm, yellowcake... Nuculicious... *drool*
[IANAL but have researched this issue to some extent. No statements I make should be construed as legal advice.]
Organizations should establish data retention and destruction policies and follow them consistently.
Suppose an organization has a policy that states that a) all email older than N days will be purged from the server and b) all email must remain on the server (i.e. no local storage of messages). Another party initiates legal action based on an email sent on $DATE and the discovery process begins. If the order comes through on the (N+1) day for the organization to produce its email, the organization will be in the clear because it followed its own already-established policy. However, if the order comes in on the (N-1) day and the organization purges older email early, it [the org.] will be in hot water.
However, the organization must be sure that it includes all sources of this information. Does the site backup/restore policy parallel the 90-day destruction rule? Many sites pull a set of tapes/media from the rotation once a month or so and put it aside for archival purposes. If the site policy is to destroy email but the backup tapes are available...
IIRC this was a serious mistake on the parts of Enron and Arthur Andersen: they had no such destruction policies in place and began deleting sensitive items only after they knew proceedings were about to begin.
Obviously, this has the potential for increasing storage capacity.
I suspect it could also improve read/write speed. If the bits are stacked vertically, it seems that the read/write head should parse the stacked bits in parallel instead of the current serial fashion.
Let's see if I can dodge the lameness filter...
bit 0 ----\
bit 1 ----\\
bit 2 ----\\\
bit 3 ----\\\\
---------read/write connection (electrical connection back to controller)
bit 4 ----////
bit 5 ----///
bit 6 ----//
bit 7 ----/
To provide additional anti-lameness filter text, I shall mention that the article was rather short on technical detail and Hitachi may in fact already be doing this.
This means that it can take the work that electrical engines don't like, low speed high torque work.
On the contrary, that is exactly the kind of work that electrical motors handle well. Many electric motors - particularly the kind used in industrial applications - offer something close to 100% of peak torque at 0 (zero) RPM.
From the article here that describes the 2005 Toyota Prius:
Thanks to the electric motor's 295 pound-feet of torque at 0 rpm from the engine, the Prius launches without hesitation.
On this page we see the description of a dynamometer used to test electric motors. This excerpt describes the units suitable for testing:
The I-300E electric motor dynamometer is rated at (200 H.R - 149 K.W.) at 1160 RPM, (300 H.P. 224 KW at 3600 RPM), 1050 Ft. lbs. torque - 1425 NM) at 0-1000 RPM. This unit comes standard with a balanced high speed driveline and shield and enables full horsepower-kilowatt testing in the 1800-3600 RPM range. A shear pin release is built into the unit for protection from harmonic vibration and possible torque overload. The unit has a maximum torque rating of 1050 ft. lbs. which occurs at 0 RPM - 1000 RPM. This enables the unit to check torque load of the new high torque/low RPM motors.