Play my current 750 or so audio CDs (no, I'm not junking that much stuff, and I really don't feel like converting it all to MP3)
Can play back MP3 encoded data
Can play back DVD movies
Can record CD audio, MP3, and DVD formats as well as play them
Portability would be nice, but not a requirement. It would be nice to use this device in place of my discman in my car, my cd drive in my computer, and in addition to the cd changer with my stereo. I could do without that, but it would be nice. I wouldn't mind having to carry it around a la a ZIP drive.
If this'll only work on a computer (wouldn't be surprising, I am asking for a bit here), then cannot be Windows specific. I use BeOS about 70% of the time, Win about 20%, and Linux about 10%. 9At school it's 90%/10% Linux/Win and at work it's 60/39/1 Win/Mac/Novell), and I loathe the idea of having to boot to Windows ever time I want to use the drive. If it can't play nice with other systems, I'll keep shopping.
It seems like these are all, generally speaking, the same formats -- in that it's a spinning aluminum disc that's ready by a laser -- and it seems to me that it should be possible to merge together these different uses of the media in the software of one device. I haven't bought a DVD thus far becuase I don't want it to be part of a collection of drives (alng with cd burner etc) that do almost the same thing. That would be such a waste, and I don't have that many free sockets on my computer.
Does anyone know anything about any attempts to merge these technologies together? I'm a broke college student, but I'd be willing to invest in a device that could do all of that for me...
I also liked how at the top of the article, he takes a snipe at NTLM -- words to the effect of "NT LAN Manager, giving you an idea how old that is", then a paragraph later talks about the 20 or so year history of Kerberos. Uhh... I'm not nearly as much of an expert in these matters as a lot of you are, but I thought NT was a product of the 90s -- nevermind that component of it -- and I thought the 90s came after the 80s. So -- what's the point he's making? Old is bad but older is good? I don't get it.
That's one thing, as a semi-tangent, that bothers me about all the sniping about the 'freedom to innovate' nonsense. The marketeers are trying to get people to believe that New Is Good, without realizing that Old Is Proven. High tech stuff moves at a fast pace, yes, but a reliable old standard (like, say, TCP/IP) doesn't really have a shelf life. The fact that MS is adopting this 'old' standard is an implicit acceptance of that fact. Like Bruce Schnier [sp?] writes in his Crypto-gram newsletter, cryptography is damned hard to do by yourself in isolation; it's far better to go with open, tested protocols & standards rather than in-house. Yip all you want about your "innovations", but foisting off the Next Big Thing isn't nearly as useful to the world as coming up with open, tested, and useful tools.
Yet Once Again, Microsoft is moving forward here, but they're doing it on the backs of those that have gone before them. I'd hardly call that innovative behavior.
I invoke Godwin -- you brought up the Nazis, this thread has officially died. Next!:)
I mean yeah, it's tempting to compare an evil dictatorship to a greedy monopoly, but consider the scales here: hundreds of millions screwed on their desktops every day vs. perhaps 10 million dead in the Holocaust. It's a tempting analogy, but really isn't fair to compare much of anything to it, realistically...
Would it be possible for the offending comments cited in the attorney's letter to be posted up top with the article's relevant links? It would be a little easier than tracking them all down...
I say we pull the ol' DeCSS game and distribute these comments as widely as possible:)...and if any lawyers ask, yeah, I'm just kidding, I would never encourage anyone to violate Microsoft's intellectual property rights, because that would be a Very Bad Thing To Do.;)
If this article were posted as a comment, I'd be inclined to moderate it down as Troll material. Slashdot is really starting to annoy me: I'm as virulently anti-Microsoft as can be (slice & dice & baste & broil the fsckers, if you ask me), but this is just ridiculous.
In additon to, or perhaps I should say above & beyond my loathing for Microsoft is a deep respect for sound, rational, logical thinking. And this article shows none of that. Are email macros a lame idea? Of course. Has Microsoft handled the situation badly? I wouldn't argue that. But it's inaccurate to compare Intel's bug to an exploit against Microsft's design ineptitude.
There are some interesting points hinted at here. To draw some parallels -- are gun manufacturers responsible for gun deaths? (No.) Are auto manufacturers responsible for their design defects? (Sometimes.) Are tobacco companies responsible for smoking related deaths? (Not enough, if you ask me.)
this scenario seems to fit that pattern. Under the law as I understand it (IANAL), a company is responsible for damages directly resulting from the normal their products (not sure why Colt et al get excepted from this -- probably 2nd amendment nonsense), but indirect damages or damages caused by improper use of the product are not generally a liability. All the macro-type stuff that Microsoft allows is, while colossally stupid, probably well intended. There has to be some marketing drone in Redmond that actually thinks these things are a good idea, and the fact that someone is exploiting that "innovation" maliciously is, while predictable, not something that Microsoft is really liable for.
The Intel case is a little bit different, in that under normal usage the product would cause errors. Maybe not enough for anyone to notice, maybe not enough to bring about a lawsuit someday, but enough to be noticeable under certain conditions. I think they had a little bit more to be worried about, and their PR response was the Right Thing To Do To Cover Their Asses. A parallel gesture from Microsoft would be appreciated, but I'm hardly surprised that it hasn't been forthcoming -- like I say, they seem to genuinely believe that the benefit of these extensions outweighs the considerable burden they bring.
Slashdot is getting more & more prone to encouraging this kind of rubbish. Or maybe not -- maybe I'm just starting to notice it now. But anything that plays the Party Line gets carried along (M$ bad, open sores good, hardware neutral therefore acceptable, overclocking better, ad nauseam). I just metamoderated a perfectly reasonable post about the dangers of overclocking that had for no clear reason been marked as a Troll. Why? The person was making a perfectly reasonable argument about the subject, and raised some important points. But, the Party Line was crossed, and the result was inevitable.
Like I said at the beginning, I'm as anti-Mocrosoft as any of you ("Burn Burn! Die Die!" hahaha) but give me a fscking break, guys. An article like this hardly cuts it as news. I can think of something far worse than Microsoft has ever been: the Pack Mentality. Clearly, we're hardly above that around here...
Statistics I've seen [but can't cite now -- sorry] show that 85% of web pages are already in English[1] and that efforts to "internationalize" the web are proceeding slowly. I'd say we already have a de facto common internet language. What would you want to replace English with -- and more importantly, why would you want to replace English? People all over the world already speak it, it is the official language (in many ways) of commerce & industry, etc. I'm all for diversity, and really wish I weren't monolingual personally, but I can't help but wonder what you would gain in ditching something so well entrenched. It's ludicrous to me.
No idea what portion of the web speaks Perl, however. It might rival English, but I'm not sure:)
Hey! I just realized there's a paragraph missing from my comment! What the hell?
I noted that the address attached to my Slashdot account, st90300@jag uar1.usouthal.edu, is public and more or less open to spammers. The interesting thing about it is that, in my Slashdot profile, I'm not trying to obscure it the way pretty much everyone else [amusingly] does -- and yet I never get any spam that is traceably from Slashdot. (Nor has anyone ever emailed me for that matter.) I think the large degree of address obfuscation here must be offputting to marketers, who must see this site as poor fodder.
In any event, I had that in my previous comment as sort of an aside and now it's gone. What's going on here? If Slashdot comments are open to revision after posting, that is a serious issue that needs to be brought out in the open. If I had any idea that people would be able to muck around with what I was typing, I wouldn't bother to type it. I'd like an answer about this matter -- I have a hard time taking commentary seriously after realizing this can and does happen. Grrr....
There was a really annoying wave of Motorola spam for groups based on egroups.com last week. Not that I ever enjoy spam in the first place, but this one was pretty bad: along with the flash & html embedded in it (too bad I missed that with pine, gee that woulda sucked if I had one of them fancy new mail clients hahaha) there was a disclaimer at the bottom proclaiming that "this spam is not spam according to US code X.Y.Z so long as we provide a way for you to avoid receiving any more mailings." Aside from questioning the existence of such a law in the first place (can anyone confirm that?), if the law does exist it's intolerable -- like having a law that robbery isn't robbery so long as the robber gives the victim an option of not having it happen again. Whatever.
I've got a couple of ways to deal with spam. The first and most effective is to keep more than one email address. My main address is only available to friends, colleagues, and a mailing list or two. Another one is the "public" address, which gets used for site registrations and that sort of thing. I don't really care as much if that address gets spammed, because it's easier to ignore and filter it there. My other strategy for dealing with spam is to have a boilerplate ready for incoming junk mail. It's nice & lawyerly, and while I can no longer remember where I got it or whether it's actually accurate anymore (can't be bothered to check the US code), it's sufficiently intimidating that I assume it keeps at least some of the marketers away.
It has been pointed out to me that such a strategy might be flawed, however. for one thing, spammers can easily fake the address, so the boilerplate might go to a nonexistent or innocent party. Maybe so. More importantly, marketers might see any address that sends bck a reply -- even an 'unsubscribe' request -- as being live and worth spamming more in the future. Good point. These friends tell me that it's more effective to pass along the offending message to the kind folks at nospam.org (?- i think) instead.
Even still, sending out that boilerplate makes me feel a lot better, even if it isn't having the biggest impact. Short of carrying out my real wish (that is, to have marketing declared as a capital offense, punishable by anyone within range of the offender whether or not they are an appointed agent of the law), sending it back makes me feel a whole lot better, and I fully encourage you all to share, distribute, and use it as well...
Wow, I was impressed to see this review -- Brazil is among my top three or four favorite movies. I'd never seen it described as a hacker manifesto before, but hey, whatever -- any successful piece of artwork will rise to new interpretations, and the fact that I (for one) see most of Gilliam's movies as being anti-technology and anti-computers is, well, a trifling thing.
I saw enough good reviews here that I'll refrain from rehashing a lot of the same material. But I think it's worth noting that if you really liked Brazil, you might want to go back and watch it as the middle piece of a three part trilogy, with the first part being Time Bandits and the third being The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.
From a certain point of view, the three movies describe the childhood, adhulthood, and old age of a single archtypical character, and his trials and tribulations in the modern world. Time Bandits, of course, shows him as a small, imaginitive boy who gets no affection from his television addicted parents, and not enough diversion from his toys and games. Brazil presents the same character as a middle aged man, still imaginitive, but being withered down by the bureaucracy and lack of social connection he has felt his whole life. Finally, Baron Munchausen shows him as an old man, scorned and ignored by the people around him, but still taking refuge in his fertile mind and his brilliant stories.
There is a definite distopian theme running through each, with common elements all through them: impersonal interactions with others, oppressive and pervasive technologies, etc.
There's also some neat little shifts if you view the movies this way -- for one thing, they seem to be chronologically backwards, with TB in the 80s, B earlier in the century, and BM a century or more ago. It is as if the protagonist is regressing to an earlier time as he gets older, at least in hims mind.
Anyway. Yeha. Kickass movies. Gonna have to go rent/buy them soon, now that I've read this. Too bad I don't have DVD. Hmmm....
Does anyone know anything about porting BeOS to current PowerPC systems? Apple isn't giving them enough information about the system architecture to produce a reasonable stable & effetive system, so the OS is basically dying off on current Mac hardware-- which I think is a shame to see. Read here to get the idea. I'm assuming that if people have Linux running on the platform then someone outside of Apple must have enough information about the system architecture to do effective ports. Does anyone have any idea how feasible it would be to apply information gained by the Linux developers and apply it to a current PPC based BeOS port?
A successful tool is one that was used to do something undreamt of by its author --Stephen C. Johnson
Ok. So you're not interested in the stock market, don't know anything about it, and don't feel like reading about it. Personally, I could care less about Quake and really don't feel like reading whatever Carmack has to say this week. Someone else out there is maybe sick of some other topic or topics that run on Slashdot from time to time.
But the fact of the matter is that Slashdot has become a large and diverse community site -- bigger than I think the creators of the site intended, and certainly beyond what they can really control now. (Hello first posters, gritty pants people, and other trolls).
The fact of the matter is that the stock collapse is an important story, even if you don't feel like reading about it. The stock market of the 90s has been very bizarre, growing in value far beyond the ability of corporations to repay the investment, and it had to be obvious that something had to give eventually. If the market falls by half over the coming days and weeks, that will restore sanity and long term stability, but at the same time it will hurt a whole lot of people. The parallels between the 20s leading up to 1929's crash and the 90s leading up to this (or else, if we recover from this now, a bigger and more permanent crash that I for one think is inevitable and not too far off on the horizon) are striking and certainly at least as newsworthy as a frickin' video game console and it's possible hard drive.
I have a hard time sympathizing with you on this one, CmdrTaco. You don't think this is interesting, yeah, well, fine. But a lot of other people surely do, and if this "community site" is to remain relevant to "the community", you must be willing to run stories that interest them as well as yourself.
That isn't just some generic name, it's a reference to Jonathan Swift, author of (among other things) Gulliver's Travels. He wrote an extremely funny essay titled A Modest Proposal, which has not at all modest recommendations about how best to feed Ireland. I wouldn't be surprised if that's what these authors had in mind when they chose the title of their paper...
Yeah, I meant her. It isn't every day that a story about my slash-namesake comes up, so I had to play it up somehow. Heh...
Friends and I were actually discussing this recently. My understanding is that Babbage was able to build the Difference Engine (DE), but not the Analytical Engine (AE). The Science Museum in London has now replicated part of the DE, but the AE has never been built by anyone and there is some question of whether it could be built at all. The AE was an order of magnitude more complex than the DE, and some of the gears would be under so much stress that even modern materials couldn't handle it, nevermind the brass that Babbage would have used.
Does anyone know anything more about this? I find it interesting that no one has tried to implement Babbage's machines, with the partial exception of this exhibit now. Everyone in the computer industry (and elsewhere of course) owes quite a bit to those original designs, but no one has ever really tried them out to see if they would work, with the exception of components of the smaller machine now.
I think it would be interesting to see what a functional AE would have been capable of doing. It may be nothing remarkable by modern standards, but as a historical example I think it would be priceless. This industry has earned a whole lot of money for a whole lot of people; surely some group of people out there could afford to finance a project like the construction of an AE. And who knows -- maybe some slashdotter could get Linux running on it for publicity... hahaha
Do you have any idea how long I've been waiting for this? Oh, sure, I come up with this whole computer idea you lot are so enamoured with, and a whole industry springs up around it with all these little gadgets and knick-knacks, and yet it takes over a century for anyone to get me a printer? Pah!
Don't do me any favors kids, I'll just build it myself out of this coffin. Ingrates!
There was a statistic a few years ago that all of the world's media (& most of its industrial output) was controled by about half a dozen mega conglomerates -- General Electric, etc. I haven't seen a follow up on this, but the leadin article asserts it could come down to 2 or 3, and that number seems to fit the trend.
This is absolutely unacceptable.
The ability to distribute information through the population is critical to the maintainence and control of society, and allowing it to come into the hands of those whose stated purpose is making shareholders (i.e. not regular people, workers, the environment, etc) happy can only be dangerous.
Implicitly, if that one party gets control over things, the rest of us tend to get screwed over -- after all, they are looking after their interests, not yours and mine. Why would they bother to do anything that helps the other 90% of the American and 99% of the global population, unless maybe it happens to be as a side effect of an activity that is otherwise purely profitable to themselves.
The mass media are already too homogenous. It's bread & circuses all over again: we get fed a steady diet of nothing worth watching, and not enough people are complaining about it. And while, yes, the digital new media are somewhat immune to the influence of the old media, still the danger is present.
We really can't ignore this or allow it to go unchecked. Read up. Read Noam Chomsky's "Manufacturing Consent". Listen to Disposeable Heroes of Hiphoprisy's Drug of a Nation. Watch C-Span rather than Jerry Springer; Adbusters rather (or in additon to;-) Slashdot; wave signs, write letters, make web pages, consider civil disobedience and acts of anarchy a la "Fight Club" -- but whatever you do, fight back and make a difference.
We need it, badly. We're on the wrong track these days...
I'd write more, and more cogently, but I'm too tired right now...
Doesn't this like completely break the scheme for TLDs as being three letters for groups of some kind (amorphous but understandable -- com gov mil net org) and two letters for countries? I guess it was a bit up in the air, and maybe I don't really know the spec on it (RFC anyone?), but this just seems.... I dunno. If I were from Tuvalu, I think I'd be annoyed right now...
I'm a bit surprised that the lead article didn't split hairs about the whole {h|cr}acker thing. Are we growing up and learning to cut a little slack? Nah, this is Slashdot -- probably just an oversight...
Here's hoping I don't get marked down as redundant -- 336 posts at the moment and I'm browsing in Lynx, so I don't have time at the moment to see if anyone mentioned this already, but...
There is a difference between freedom and liberty. Freedom is the absolute right to do something or to not be compelled to do something. Liberty, rather than an absolute right, is the granted right to do or not do something.
There are very many liberties in the USA, but few if any freedoms.
Speech is one of them. It's actually a slight misnomer to claim that we have free speech here. We do not. What we have is the liberty of free speech, in that we are protected in what we say, within certain parameters, but there are limits to that right.
For example, in the classic case, it is illegal to yell "Fire!" in a crowded theatre, as it would cause the audience undue duress. Likewise, there are slanders and libels, the main difference (if I remember right) being that one is verbal and the other written. The defense to accusations of libel is the truth: if you say something bad about somone but can prove it, you're okay; otherwise it is libel and you can be prosecuted and sentenced accordingly.
I'm not sure what the exact infringement here would be, but I can almost guarantee that writing malicious code like a virus would be unprotected speech. It causes undue duress to third parties, like yelling "Fire", so it might be handled that way -- but IANAL, just a student & speculator.
I'd be curious to learn what areas of the law protect people who's work causes indirect harm, e.g. gunmakers. If someone were to shoot me, I could go after the shooter but not the gun company, though obviously they must have known their product could be used in this way. This sounds really familiar and I'm almost positive there's a term for it; in any event, any legal clauses such as this may also come into play here, as the virus writer could arguably be making a weapon, even is s/he were not necessarily the one that deployed or used it against someone.
Anyway, the point is that while the constitution guarantees speech rights, it's generally dealing more with liberties from persecution and protection of creative expression, but not that which would cause proximate harm to another person such as "Fire" in the theatre or slandering someone's reputation -- or in this case, screwing up somebody else's computer. The law may be insane, but it's not stupid. Usually. Er, no further comment.
Gamers can return their illegitimate software wither via mail from April 1, or through 8,000 Seven-Eleven stores soon. PlayStation2 will now ship in Japan with software that does not support the playing of foreign DVDs.
Um, are Japanese 7-11s that different from the ones here in America? I certainly wouldn't expect to go to one here to buy or return electronic equipment of any kind -- might get a Frostie maybe, but certainly not a Playstation console.
I know this is semi-offtopic, but that paragraph has me extrmemly curious now. I'm picturing these strange Nipponese convenience stores, with the Nascar imagery I'm used to replaced with Hello Kitty and the rack of porno mags (unsaleable to persons under 18) replaced with glittering Playstation decks (unavailable for export to the USA without a DOD-or-whatever-it-is munitions license. Heh -- we're not so different after all... hahaha
Well yeah, but we might also have competition (or an oligarchy, like the "always marching in lockstep" airlines...). That might make a difference here -- bloat presumably can't last if they can't monopolistically defend themselves like they can now.
Slice and dice, that's what I say -- they've already tried settling a couple years ago and look where we are now: back where we started, if not in an even worse position. I'm not sure what the best solution is here. Opening their code won't necessarily halt their predatory tactics, and breaking the company up into different divisions (OS, desktop applications, server applications, etc) seems clumsy and problematic. But if it hurts MS to do it, so be it -- we've had enough of this, and punative action is called for.
Actually, upon reflection (if it isn't obvious, I haven't really considered what the court should do before just now), I'd be happy just to see them change their marketing strategy. It would be nice to stop hearing parroting about how much Microsoft has innovated and improved technology and done so much to bring it into our homes -- and nevermind the Mac, nevermind Tim Berners-Lee, nevermind the 1001 things that they've re-implemented badly. I'd be happy just to see them clueing people into what a shoddy (but admittedly powerful) pack of imitators they've been.
Call it a public apology for lameness, I guess. I'd like to see that...
Just what do these people think they can accomplish with their juvenile acts of vandalism?
Easy: they get a lot of people's attention very quickly, just like e-marketers do. And that, of course, is the whole point here -- they're trying to make a point to a lot of people very quickly. Looks to me like it's working.
Writing a book about it is in this case pretty much pointless -- anyone that picks up the book is probably a sympathizer in the first place. Making a web site will only draw so many hits unless it becomes a meme (which has actually begun to happen in this case, just as it did with Mahir et al). Taking to the streets with posters is just... so... non-digital, I can't really take that seriously for this effort.
No, I think Mr Lowry is on the right track here -- these pseudo-ads are great, and I hope to see them pop up all over the place. San Francisco, Boston, London, everywhere. We're in the midst of a gold rush with a dirty little secret: there ain't no gold to be found! It's time that news became a bit more well known, even if it does kick your startup in the belly. Sorry guys, them's the breaks -- the party needs to end & we need to clean up the mess we've made.
Wow, one of Harl's poems got used as the example. I'm impressed -- he's a really cool guy, and smart as hell. Pasting from an email this morning (sorry Harl):
I doubt I'll be performing in Silicon Valey somehow. The program does sync the disk on a unix system though. I guess system calls are cheating a *bit*. However, I've replaced the sync command on one of my unix machines with this poem as a wrapper, so it runs the poem whenever a sync request is made.
Slashdot Mirror
It seems like these are all, generally speaking, the same formats -- in that it's a spinning aluminum disc that's ready by a laser -- and it seems to me that it should be possible to merge together these different uses of the media in the software of one device. I haven't bought a DVD thus far becuase I don't want it to be part of a collection of drives (alng with cd burner etc) that do almost the same thing. That would be such a waste, and I don't have that many free sockets on my computer.
Does anyone know anything about any attempts to merge these technologies together? I'm a broke college student, but I'd be willing to invest in a device that could do all of that for me...
That's one thing, as a semi-tangent, that bothers me about all the sniping about the 'freedom to innovate' nonsense. The marketeers are trying to get people to believe that New Is Good, without realizing that Old Is Proven. High tech stuff moves at a fast pace, yes, but a reliable old standard (like, say, TCP/IP) doesn't really have a shelf life. The fact that MS is adopting this 'old' standard is an implicit acceptance of that fact. Like Bruce Schnier [sp?] writes in his Crypto-gram newsletter, cryptography is damned hard to do by yourself in isolation; it's far better to go with open, tested protocols & standards rather than in-house. Yip all you want about your "innovations", but foisting off the Next Big Thing isn't nearly as useful to the world as coming up with open, tested, and useful tools.
Yet Once Again, Microsoft is moving forward here, but they're doing it on the backs of those that have gone before them. I'd hardly call that innovative behavior.
I mean yeah, it's tempting to compare an evil dictatorship to a greedy monopoly, but consider the scales here: hundreds of millions screwed on their desktops every day vs. perhaps 10 million dead in the Holocaust. It's a tempting analogy, but really isn't fair to compare much of anything to it, realistically...
I say we pull the ol' DeCSS game and distribute these comments as widely as possible :) ...and if any lawyers ask, yeah, I'm just kidding, I would never encourage anyone to violate Microsoft's intellectual property rights, because that would be a Very Bad Thing To Do. ;)
Of course, indie has always been the way to go... :)
In additon to, or perhaps I should say above & beyond my loathing for Microsoft is a deep respect for sound, rational, logical thinking. And this article shows none of that. Are email macros a lame idea? Of course. Has Microsoft handled the situation badly? I wouldn't argue that. But it's inaccurate to compare Intel's bug to an exploit against Microsft's design ineptitude.
There are some interesting points hinted at here. To draw some parallels -- are gun manufacturers responsible for gun deaths? (No.) Are auto manufacturers responsible for their design defects? (Sometimes.) Are tobacco companies responsible for smoking related deaths? (Not enough, if you ask me.)
this scenario seems to fit that pattern. Under the law as I understand it (IANAL), a company is responsible for damages directly resulting from the normal their products (not sure why Colt et al get excepted from this -- probably 2nd amendment nonsense), but indirect damages or damages caused by improper use of the product are not generally a liability. All the macro-type stuff that Microsoft allows is, while colossally stupid, probably well intended. There has to be some marketing drone in Redmond that actually thinks these things are a good idea, and the fact that someone is exploiting that "innovation" maliciously is, while predictable, not something that Microsoft is really liable for.
The Intel case is a little bit different, in that under normal usage the product would cause errors. Maybe not enough for anyone to notice, maybe not enough to bring about a lawsuit someday, but enough to be noticeable under certain conditions. I think they had a little bit more to be worried about, and their PR response was the Right Thing To Do To Cover Their Asses. A parallel gesture from Microsoft would be appreciated, but I'm hardly surprised that it hasn't been forthcoming -- like I say, they seem to genuinely believe that the benefit of these extensions outweighs the considerable burden they bring.
Slashdot is getting more & more prone to encouraging this kind of rubbish. Or maybe not -- maybe I'm just starting to notice it now. But anything that plays the Party Line gets carried along (M$ bad, open sores good, hardware neutral therefore acceptable, overclocking better, ad nauseam). I just metamoderated a perfectly reasonable post about the dangers of overclocking that had for no clear reason been marked as a Troll. Why? The person was making a perfectly reasonable argument about the subject, and raised some important points. But, the Party Line was crossed, and the result was inevitable.
Like I said at the beginning, I'm as anti-Mocrosoft as any of you ("Burn Burn! Die Die!" hahaha) but give me a fscking break, guys. An article like this hardly cuts it as news. I can think of something far worse than Microsoft has ever been: the Pack Mentality. Clearly, we're hardly above that around here...
No idea what portion of the web speaks Perl, however. It might rival English, but I'm not sure :)
I noted that the address attached to my Slashdot account, st90300@jag uar1.usouthal.edu, is public and more or less open to spammers. The interesting thing about it is that, in my Slashdot profile, I'm not trying to obscure it the way pretty much everyone else [amusingly] does -- and yet I never get any spam that is traceably from Slashdot. (Nor has anyone ever emailed me for that matter.) I think the large degree of address obfuscation here must be offputting to marketers, who must see this site as poor fodder.
In any event, I had that in my previous comment as sort of an aside and now it's gone. What's going on here? If Slashdot comments are open to revision after posting, that is a serious issue that needs to be brought out in the open. If I had any idea that people would be able to muck around with what I was typing, I wouldn't bother to type it. I'd like an answer about this matter -- I have a hard time taking commentary seriously after realizing this can and does happen. Grrr....
I've got a couple of ways to deal with spam. The first and most effective is to keep more than one email address. My main address is only available to friends, colleagues, and a mailing list or two. Another one is the "public" address, which gets used for site registrations and that sort of thing. I don't really care as much if that address gets spammed, because it's easier to ignore and filter it there. My other strategy for dealing with spam is to have a boilerplate ready for incoming junk mail. It's nice & lawyerly, and while I can no longer remember where I got it or whether it's actually accurate anymore (can't be bothered to check the US code), it's sufficiently intimidating that I assume it keeps at least some of the marketers away.
It has been pointed out to me that such a strategy might be flawed, however. for one thing, spammers can easily fake the address, so the boilerplate might go to a nonexistent or innocent party. Maybe so. More importantly, marketers might see any address that sends bck a reply -- even an 'unsubscribe' request -- as being live and worth spamming more in the future. Good point. These friends tell me that it's more effective to pass along the offending message to the kind folks at nospam.org (?- i think) instead.
Even still, sending out that boilerplate makes me feel a lot better, even if it isn't having the biggest impact. Short of carrying out my real wish (that is, to have marketing declared as a capital offense, punishable by anyone within range of the offender whether or not they are an appointed agent of the law), sending it back makes me feel a whole lot better, and I fully encourage you all to share, distribute, and use it as well...
I saw enough good reviews here that I'll refrain from rehashing a lot of the same material. But I think it's worth noting that if you really liked Brazil, you might want to go back and watch it as the middle piece of a three part trilogy, with the first part being Time Bandits and the third being The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.
From a certain point of view, the three movies describe the childhood, adhulthood, and old age of a single archtypical character, and his trials and tribulations in the modern world. Time Bandits, of course, shows him as a small, imaginitive boy who gets no affection from his television addicted parents, and not enough diversion from his toys and games. Brazil presents the same character as a middle aged man, still imaginitive, but being withered down by the bureaucracy and lack of social connection he has felt his whole life. Finally, Baron Munchausen shows him as an old man, scorned and ignored by the people around him, but still taking refuge in his fertile mind and his brilliant stories.
There is a definite distopian theme running through each, with common elements all through them: impersonal interactions with others, oppressive and pervasive technologies, etc.
There's also some neat little shifts if you view the movies this way -- for one thing, they seem to be chronologically backwards, with TB in the 80s, B earlier in the century, and BM a century or more ago. It is as if the protagonist is regressing to an earlier time as he gets older, at least in hims mind.
Anyway. Yeha. Kickass movies. Gonna have to go rent/buy them soon, now that I've read this. Too bad I don't have DVD. Hmmm....
Does anyone know anything about porting BeOS to current PowerPC systems? Apple isn't giving them enough information about the system architecture to produce a reasonable stable & effetive system, so the OS is basically dying off on current Mac hardware-- which I think is a shame to see. Read here to get the idea. I'm assuming that if people have Linux running on the platform then someone outside of Apple must have enough information about the system architecture to do effective ports. Does anyone have any idea how feasible it would be to apply information gained by the Linux developers and apply it to a current PPC based BeOS port?
Ok. So you're not interested in the stock market, don't know anything about it, and don't feel like reading about it. Personally, I could care less about Quake and really don't feel like reading whatever Carmack has to say this week. Someone else out there is maybe sick of some other topic or topics that run on Slashdot from time to time.
But the fact of the matter is that Slashdot has become a large and diverse community site -- bigger than I think the creators of the site intended, and certainly beyond what they can really control now. (Hello first posters, gritty pants people, and other trolls).
The fact of the matter is that the stock collapse is an important story, even if you don't feel like reading about it. The stock market of the 90s has been very bizarre, growing in value far beyond the ability of corporations to repay the investment, and it had to be obvious that something had to give eventually. If the market falls by half over the coming days and weeks, that will restore sanity and long term stability, but at the same time it will hurt a whole lot of people. The parallels between the 20s leading up to 1929's crash and the 90s leading up to this (or else, if we recover from this now, a bigger and more permanent crash that I for one think is inevitable and not too far off on the horizon) are striking and certainly at least as newsworthy as a frickin' video game console and it's possible hard drive.
I have a hard time sympathizing with you on this one, CmdrTaco. You don't think this is interesting, yeah, well, fine. But a lot of other people surely do, and if this "community site" is to remain relevant to "the community", you must be willing to run stories that interest them as well as yourself.
That isn't just some generic name, it's a reference to Jonathan Swift, author of (among other things) Gulliver's Travels. He wrote an extremely funny essay titled A Modest Proposal, which has not at all modest recommendations about how best to feed Ireland. I wouldn't be surprised if that's what these authors had in mind when they chose the title of their paper...
Friends and I were actually discussing this recently. My understanding is that Babbage was able to build the Difference Engine (DE), but not the Analytical Engine (AE). The Science Museum in London has now replicated part of the DE, but the AE has never been built by anyone and there is some question of whether it could be built at all. The AE was an order of magnitude more complex than the DE, and some of the gears would be under so much stress that even modern materials couldn't handle it, nevermind the brass that Babbage would have used.
Does anyone know anything more about this? I find it interesting that no one has tried to implement Babbage's machines, with the partial exception of this exhibit now. Everyone in the computer industry (and elsewhere of course) owes quite a bit to those original designs, but no one has ever really tried them out to see if they would work, with the exception of components of the smaller machine now.
I think it would be interesting to see what a functional AE would have been capable of doing. It may be nothing remarkable by modern standards, but as a historical example I think it would be priceless. This industry has earned a whole lot of money for a whole lot of people; surely some group of people out there could afford to finance a project like the construction of an AE. And who knows -- maybe some slashdotter could get Linux running on it for publicity... hahaha
Don't do me any favors kids, I'll just build it myself out of this coffin. Ingrates!
Somebody get me Ada, we've got work to do...
This is absolutely unacceptable.
The ability to distribute information through the population is critical to the maintainence and control of society, and allowing it to come into the hands of those whose stated purpose is making shareholders (i.e. not regular people, workers, the environment, etc) happy can only be dangerous.
Implicitly, if that one party gets control over things, the rest of us tend to get screwed over -- after all, they are looking after their interests, not yours and mine. Why would they bother to do anything that helps the other 90% of the American and 99% of the global population, unless maybe it happens to be as a side effect of an activity that is otherwise purely profitable to themselves.
The mass media are already too homogenous. It's bread & circuses all over again: we get fed a steady diet of nothing worth watching, and not enough people are complaining about it. And while, yes, the digital new media are somewhat immune to the influence of the old media, still the danger is present.
We really can't ignore this or allow it to go unchecked. Read up. Read Noam Chomsky's "Manufacturing Consent". Listen to Disposeable Heroes of Hiphoprisy's Drug of a Nation. Watch C-Span rather than Jerry Springer; Adbusters rather (or in additon to ;-) Slashdot; wave signs, write letters, make web pages, consider civil disobedience and acts of anarchy a la "Fight Club" -- but whatever you do, fight back and make a difference.
We need it, badly. We're on the wrong track these days...
I'd write more, and more cogently, but I'm too tired right now...
Doesn't this like completely break the scheme for TLDs as being three letters for groups of some kind (amorphous but understandable -- com gov mil net org) and two letters for countries? I guess it was a bit up in the air, and maybe I don't really know the spec on it (RFC anyone?), but this just seems.... I dunno. If I were from Tuvalu, I think I'd be annoyed right now...
whatever
s/pedantism/pedantry/, no?
I'm a bit surprised that the lead article didn't split hairs about the whole {h|cr}acker thing. Are we growing up and learning to cut a little slack? Nah, this is Slashdot -- probably just an oversight...
Here's hoping I don't get marked down as redundant -- 336 posts at the moment and I'm browsing in Lynx, so I don't have time at the moment to see if anyone mentioned this already, but...
There is a difference between freedom and liberty. Freedom is the absolute right to do something or to not be compelled to do something. Liberty, rather than an absolute right, is the granted right to do or not do something.
There are very many liberties in the USA, but few if any freedoms.
Speech is one of them. It's actually a slight misnomer to claim that we have free speech here. We do not. What we have is the liberty of free speech, in that we are protected in what we say, within certain parameters, but there are limits to that right.
For example, in the classic case, it is illegal to yell "Fire!" in a crowded theatre, as it would cause the audience undue duress. Likewise, there are slanders and libels, the main difference (if I remember right) being that one is verbal and the other written. The defense to accusations of libel is the truth: if you say something bad about somone but can prove it, you're okay; otherwise it is libel and you can be prosecuted and sentenced accordingly.
I'm not sure what the exact infringement here would be, but I can almost guarantee that writing malicious code like a virus would be unprotected speech. It causes undue duress to third parties, like yelling "Fire", so it might be handled that way -- but IANAL, just a student & speculator.
I'd be curious to learn what areas of the law protect people who's work causes indirect harm, e.g. gunmakers. If someone were to shoot me, I could go after the shooter but not the gun company, though obviously they must have known their product could be used in this way. This sounds really familiar and I'm almost positive there's a term for it; in any event, any legal clauses such as this may also come into play here, as the virus writer could arguably be making a weapon, even is s/he were not necessarily the one that deployed or used it against someone.
Anyway, the point is that while the constitution guarantees speech rights, it's generally dealing more with liberties from persecution and protection of creative expression, but not that which would cause proximate harm to another person such as "Fire" in the theatre or slandering someone's reputation -- or in this case, screwing up somebody else's computer. The law may be insane, but it's not stupid. Usually. Er, no further comment.
Um, are Japanese 7-11s that different from the ones here in America? I certainly wouldn't expect to go to one here to buy or return electronic equipment of any kind -- might get a Frostie maybe, but certainly not a Playstation console.
I know this is semi-offtopic, but that paragraph has me extrmemly curious now. I'm picturing these strange Nipponese convenience stores, with the Nascar imagery I'm used to replaced with Hello Kitty and the rack of porno mags (unsaleable to persons under 18) replaced with glittering Playstation decks (unavailable for export to the USA without a DOD-or-whatever-it-is munitions license. Heh -- we're not so different after all... hahaha
Slice and dice, that's what I say -- they've already tried settling a couple years ago and look where we are now: back where we started, if not in an even worse position. I'm not sure what the best solution is here. Opening their code won't necessarily halt their predatory tactics, and breaking the company up into different divisions (OS, desktop applications, server applications, etc) seems clumsy and problematic. But if it hurts MS to do it, so be it -- we've had enough of this, and punative action is called for.
Actually, upon reflection (if it isn't obvious, I haven't really considered what the court should do before just now), I'd be happy just to see them change their marketing strategy. It would be nice to stop hearing parroting about how much Microsoft has innovated and improved technology and done so much to bring it into our homes -- and nevermind the Mac, nevermind Tim Berners-Lee, nevermind the 1001 things that they've re-implemented badly. I'd be happy just to see them clueing people into what a shoddy (but admittedly powerful) pack of imitators they've been.
Call it a public apology for lameness, I guess. I'd like to see that...
Easy: they get a lot of people's attention very quickly, just like e-marketers do. And that, of course, is the whole point here -- they're trying to make a point to a lot of people very quickly. Looks to me like it's working.
Writing a book about it is in this case pretty much pointless -- anyone that picks up the book is probably a sympathizer in the first place. Making a web site will only draw so many hits unless it becomes a meme (which has actually begun to happen in this case, just as it did with Mahir et al). Taking to the streets with posters is just... so... non-digital, I can't really take that seriously for this effort.
No, I think Mr Lowry is on the right track here -- these pseudo-ads are great, and I hope to see them pop up all over the place. San Francisco, Boston, London, everywhere. We're in the midst of a gold rush with a dirty little secret: there ain't no gold to be found! It's time that news became a bit more well known, even if it does kick your startup in the belly. Sorry guys, them's the breaks -- the party needs to end & we need to clean up the mess we've made.