Spamazon has sucked for at least as long as spamming has been their m.o. I almost choked when I read Katz's remark about Spamazon being "ethical". But fatbrain.com and (barnesandnoble|bn).com are also spammers, so they suck mightily too.
For online book-buying, I hear good things about Powell's.
Cost breakdown here, on the question of how can CD "clubs" sell for a low price: CD Club FAQ: Ethical Issues. It does not, however, get down as far as exactly how much the artist gets, or how big a cut goes to producers, the label execs. But interesting as much as it does analyze.
Record albums (LPs, maybe you've seen one) were more expensive than cassettes, because cassettes were more easily worn out.
Digitally recorded vinyl albums (late 70s, early 80s) were for the audiophile, and cost more than the usual analog recordings, because of the (some think) superior sound quality.
So when CDs came out, here you had something with digital rather than analog sound, and that will outlast a vinyl album. So people were willing to pay more.
Nowadays, of course, the actual CD costs less than $1 U.S. So it's hard to say why the big record labels ratchet up the prices, other than greed.
Just like telnetting anywhere else. Once logged in, at their prompt, you'd type, whois domain-name.foo
I just pinged rs.internic.net, and the server responds. But if you try to telnet in--to either subdomain--it just hangs. I successfully telnetted to two other places, so the problem is not on my end. Looks like it's broken on purpose by NSI. Arrogant jerks.
And read on. Part 6 of Yah??'s TOS, on "member conduct", immediately goes on to say:
Yahoo does not control the Content posted via the Service and, as such, does not guarantee the accuracy, integrity or quality of such Content. You understand that by using the Service, you may be exposed to Content that is offensive, indecent or objectionable.
Under no circumstances will Yahoo be liable in any way for any Content, including, but not limited to, for any errors or omissions in any Content, or for any loss or damage of any kind incurred as a result of the use of any Content posted, emailed or otherwise transmitted via the Service.
So they claim the right to modify (damned Geocities popups and watermarks), sublicense your works in perpetuity, and create derivative works in any form until hell freezes over. They can sell ads on your "free" page. They can sell your original content to anyone they please, or they can change it and sell it. You need not be acknowledged as the author.
But if there's any legal trouble, you take the fall. Yah??!/Geocities is claiming to own your work but not to be liable for it.
What a deal, eh?
I don't know of a good free webhosting alternative offhand, but maybe people jumping ship could find something at The Free Webpage Provider Review .
I checked it out on Netscape 3.04 running on WinNT4. I should add that I have Java and JavaScript disabled, and go through 2 proxies (Junkbuster and LPWA). So the first proxy lies about my browser and OS, and the second proxy strips out the reference to OS. So as far as Micros~1 knows, I'm using Netscape 3.something Gold, but they don't have an OS mentioned.
The first time I went there, I got about 19K of the page, but blank page below all the images at the top. I thought this was FrontPlague's infamous omission of the closing table tag. But when I viewed source, I found that transmission of data had been cut off mid-sentence. Hmm. So I hit "reload", and promptly got a (bogus) 404 message.
Full name, town, state. So farewell to any privacy about personal information, plus no indication of content of your domain unless you're a k12 school.
An analogy: this might seem way off-topic, but I believe there is some similarity. This sort of argument reminds me of some of the opponents of women's ordination, the ones who say that women who favor such a thing are self-centered and that they should solve all the world's other problems first. How well-off and selfish these women must be to think about this issue when millions are battling poverty and hunger. Or so the argument goes.
Here's a news flash for you, buddy. Injustice and oppression are real, even when there are other evils in this world.
Needing a reality check? The Me Generation? These kids are selfish brats who think they deserve to be pampered? Yeah, right. Even white male suburban teenagers are human beings, and even they ought to be treated with human dignity. If babies in the Third World are dying of malnutrition, that still does not make it morally justifiable to subject people who are financially more comfortable to daily physical, sexual, and psychological assault.
Nobody deserves to get beat up. Not even a middle-class geek.
I read/. for 2 days with threshhold set at -1, and I must say that the moderators are doing an excellent job.
I find the editorial comments (reasons for moderating a post up or down) annoying and distracting. If the powers that be want moderators to think before changing a post's point value, OK, but I would prefer that the moderator's stated reason not be part of the display to other readers.
I also notice that you don't say explicitly in the new guidelines which kinds of posts deserve a 3, 4, or 5. Oops. Even general examples would help. What distinguishes a "4" from a "3"?
There is an option in "Preferences" to never see the slashdot.org department. Now you just have to get Rob and his army of trained mammals to stick to that department for news about/.
No hints necessary, though I am a "Latin". I have an M.A. and M.Div., church history and spirituality.
"Navel-gazing" comes from the controversy over the "physical technique" of hesychasm. It is to be prayer of the heart and of the mind, and to that end, Ps.-Symeon recommends sitting with chin on chest and with eyes fixed on the navel. Others suggest that the inner or outer "gaze" be focused on the heart.
Oops, I was mistaken. I foolishly read the RIAA PR before reading the court decision. The RIAA is acting as the agent of recording companies and copyright holders here. They collect and distribute this new kind of performance royalty, even for non-members.
RIAA originally asked for 41.5%.
Prior to the 1995 Act, the copyright holders (composer, lyricist, publisher) were already entitled to royalties for the use of music. What the 1995 Act does is to give the recording companies a cut too, for a specialized sort of performance right.
IANAL, but from reading the court's decision, it does not seem to me that this royalty structure applies to all audio music transmitted via satellite or cable. The ruling seems to directly affect only commercial subscription services. Nothing says that this is completely irrelevant to other transmission of music, though, since the decision itself refers to an earlier ruling on jukeboxes.
RIAA does not get any royalties directly. The royalties go to the recording company of a particular artist. It is the recording companies who are members of the RIAA, which is a trade association.
Congress got involved by passing the Digital Performance Right in Sound Recordings Act of 1995. The Library of Congress, through the Copyright Office, is federally authorized to set royalty rates for cable and satellite transmission of music. The RIAA immediately started squealing. Evidently the LOC originally determined that 5% was a fair royalty, but the RIAA believed that digital subscription music services (like MUZAK, in its cable/satellite form) should pony up 40% or more, on the same model as cable television networks, who pay handsome royalties for the license to broadcast motion pictures.
The RIAA, BTW, does not mention this recent court decision on their web page. Imagine that.
We do have a team out thinking through what kind of strategy is appropriate to make our source code, or parts of it, more available to customers so they can be more effective in what they do.
I predict that Microsoft will decide that revealing the actual source code is unnecessary, and that the best way to keep outside developers working on MS/Windows apps is business as usual. Host workshops, promote books for programmers on Windows "tricks", sell pointy-clicky GUI tools, but certainly don't let anyone outside see the code itself.
If this conjecture is correct, then the only other thinking that Micros~1 will do about "open source" is how to discredit and crush it. Notice how, early in the article, Ballmer is embarrassed to even use the term.
However, this insistence on calling any OS that uses GNU anything a GNU(tm) system is just plain childish.
I work on an IRIX computer that has the gcc. So I guess that would make it IRIGNUX. I also work on a Windows NT box that uses GNU regex and some GPLed proggies. So does that make it GNUONT (Gnu's Not Unix Or NT)? Somebody alert His Gatesness!
However, DejaNews^H^H^H^H.com has no postings yet in news.admin.net-abuse.sightings with the NSI bluff, so I suspect that those of us who do whois from a *NIX prompt only started getting served this rider within the past day or two.
That said, the so-called "agreement" is absolute hogwash.
No one agreed to it. Except NSI, of course.
Cannot reproduce? So I can't report spam?
Cannot modify? That means Rob or any other domain owner cannot ever get a new e-mail account, meatspace address, phone number, or FAX. Get serious.
IANAL, but I think that as a government monopoly for lo these many years, the whois database should be public domain, just as it is not possible to copyright government documents in the U.S.
I agree that adolescence is a difficult, awkward, confusing time for most anybody. Wanting to fit in, wondering if anybody really likes you.
It's harder for those who are on the bottom of the food chain, who feel like they're on the outside looking in.
But to add the pressure of a witch hunt, on the slimmest of pretexts, that targets kids who are "different" in appearance, abilities, or social skills is just too much.
To all you kids out there, I just want to say: hang on, it does get better. I know, easy to say, and doesn't help you much now. I have been through that hell. I am so old that the harassment wasn't even computer-related. (small joke). I didn't look right. I wasn't rich or popular or athletic. I wasn't a drama queen or a student government type. I didn't have to put up with physical abuse like some of you, but I was definitely harassed for being different. And lived to tell the story.
5 years after high school, many of your classmates will have bumped into real life. The one or two who still think they're all it, you will find amusing. College, if you go, is a chance to re-invent yourself, where nobody knows what you're "supposed to" be like.
For right now, cherish your friends. Follow your dreams. Do stuff that makes you feel good, like biking or swimming or getting that high score in your favorite computer game or learning to play a musical instrument. If you're smart, don't act dumb. If you're not the college type, that's cool too, but do something you like, something you're good at, not something you hate just because you think there might be lots of money in it. And you don't have to take any bull about the way you look or dress, or the games you like to play. Don't knock yourself out trying to be "popular". It's not worth it. And remember, hate is not the way to go. If you hate people, they won, because you become like their mirror, and they control you. So hang on for dear life, and it will get better.
He's using a Micros~1 product, probably Micros~1 Word, to write his articles. So they're not really in plain text, and it's hard to catch the proprietary characters. The question marks you and I see are Micros~1's misnamed "smart quotes". They are in a dec range with behavior undefined in ASCII, ISO Latin-1, and Unicode... so anything can happen on another OS.
Seriously, the AA stuff about being out of control, powerless, a slave to the addictive substance, does have some relevance to companies and IT departments that take that first oh-so-easy step and then get entangled and dependent on one push^H^H^H^Hsupplier.
24/7 Linux tech support, with guaranteed response times, from a reputable "name" like Hewlett Packard is certainly good news. It should ease the greater use of Linux in the corporate world.
And as a side benefit, this blows a great big hole in the FUDmeisters' case against Linux as an OS suitable for business.
I dimly remember from my first logic course (before another one in symbolic logic) that "A false premise justifies any conclusion." What this means is that given a conditional statement which is true, if you then negate the premise, any conclusion could be true. For example, let us say that the statement, "If it rains tomorrow, I will go to the movies," is true. And if it doesn't rain tomorrow? I might or might not go. Either conclusion could be true or false. A false premise justifies any conclusion.
What has this to do with the article? The false premise is that Linux is a completely different OS than UNIX. This fundamental mistake undermines their whole article. If Linux is actually in most respects a form of UNIX, which I believe it is, then we can conclude with the article that Linux skills alone won't cut it, because they say that UNIX skills alone won't cut it. Or we can say with the article that Linux is a UNIX and UNIX isn't going away, therefore Linux skills are valuable. Or... well, you get the idea.
For reasons known perhaps only to the author, this article opposes Linux to UNIX in terms of skills and knowledge. This is a false dichotomy. Many of the pro-UNIX people quoted learned their way around Linux, and I should think that a good grasp of the fundamentals of any UNIX (or UNIX-like) OS is readily transferable to another UNIX OS. I do not go into a panic switching between Linux and IRIX, for example.
If one believes that Linux is UNIX for all practical purposes, this article is actually quite encouraging, because it tells us that UNIX skills are in demand, that Linux is a great way to learn networking, configuration, and sysadmin stuff, and that businesses are considering Linux as a low-cost, reliable UNIX OS.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed.
Spamazon has sucked for at least as long as spamming has been their m.o. I almost choked when I read Katz's remark about Spamazon being "ethical". But fatbrain.com and (barnesandnoble|bn).com are also spammers, so they suck mightily too.
For online book-buying, I hear good things about Powell's.
Lumber Cartel(TINLC) #487
RISCy Business sez: "Linux has no place ... as your 1,000,000 hit/hour webserver."
And just how many webservers get a million hits per hour?
Cost breakdown here, on the question of how can CD "clubs" sell for a low price: CD Club FAQ: Ethical Issues. It does not, however, get down as far as exactly how much the artist gets, or how big a cut goes to producers, the label execs. But interesting as much as it does analyze.
Record albums (LPs, maybe you've seen one) were more expensive than cassettes, because cassettes were more easily worn out.
Digitally recorded vinyl albums (late 70s, early 80s) were for the audiophile, and cost more than the usual analog recordings, because of the (some think) superior sound quality.
So when CDs came out, here you had something with digital rather than analog sound, and that will outlast a vinyl album. So people were willing to pay more.
Nowadays, of course, the actual CD costs less than $1 U.S. So it's hard to say why the big record labels ratchet up the prices, other than greed.
EisPick asks, "When you say telnet access, do you mean the *nix whois command?"
Nope. Our earlier astute observer is referring to another (former) way to get at whois, via telnet. At the prompt, you would type,
telnet rs.internic.net
or
telnet whois.internic.net
Just like telnetting anywhere else. Once logged in, at their prompt, you'd type,
whois domain-name.foo
I just pinged rs.internic.net, and the server responds. But if you try to telnet in--to either subdomain--it just hangs. I successfully telnetted to two other places, so the problem is not on my end. Looks like it's broken on purpose by NSI. Arrogant jerks.
And read on. Part 6 of Yah??'s TOS, on "member conduct", immediately goes on to say:
So they claim the right to modify (damned Geocities popups and watermarks), sublicense your works in perpetuity, and create derivative works in any form until hell freezes over. They can sell ads on your "free" page. They can sell your original content to anyone they please, or they can change it and sell it. You need not be acknowledged as the author.
But if there's any legal trouble, you take the fall. Yah??!/Geocities is claiming to own your work but not to be liable for it.
What a deal, eh?
I don't know of a good free webhosting alternative offhand, but maybe people jumping ship could find something at The Free Webpage Provider Review .
As for directories, long live the ODP!
Incendiary asked:
Very interesting.
I checked it out on Netscape 3.04 running on WinNT4. I should add that I have Java and JavaScript disabled, and go through 2 proxies (Junkbuster and LPWA). So the first proxy lies about my browser and OS, and the second proxy strips out the reference to OS. So as far as Micros~1 knows, I'm using Netscape 3.something Gold, but they don't have an OS mentioned.
The first time I went there, I got about 19K of the page, but blank page below all the images at the top. I thought this was FrontPlague's infamous omission of the closing table tag. But when I viewed source, I found that transmission of data had been cut off mid-sentence. Hmm. So I hit "reload", and promptly got a (bogus) 404 message.
.us domains are free and ugly.
They look like:
john.robert.smith.podunk.arkansas.us
Full name, town, state. So farewell to any privacy about personal information, plus no indication of content of your domain unless you're a k12 school.
Maybe register.com got slashdotted already.
When I go there, all I see is,
Go away.
An analogy: this might seem way off-topic, but I believe there is some similarity. This sort of argument reminds me of some of the opponents of women's ordination, the ones who say that women who favor such a thing are self-centered and that they should solve all the world's other problems first. How well-off and selfish these women must be to think about this issue when millions are battling poverty and hunger. Or so the argument goes.
Here's a news flash for you, buddy. Injustice and oppression are real, even when there are other evils in this world.
Needing a reality check? The Me Generation? These kids are selfish brats who think they deserve to be pampered? Yeah, right. Even white male suburban teenagers are human beings, and even they ought to be treated with human dignity. If babies in the Third World are dying of malnutrition, that still does not make it morally justifiable to subject people who are financially more comfortable to daily physical, sexual, and psychological assault.
Nobody deserves to get beat up. Not even a middle-class geek.
I read /. for 2 days with threshhold set at -1, and I must say that the moderators are doing an excellent job.
I find the editorial comments (reasons for moderating a post up or down) annoying and distracting. If the powers that be want moderators to think before changing a post's point value, OK, but I would prefer that the moderator's stated reason not be part of the display to other readers.
I also notice that you don't say explicitly in the new guidelines which kinds of posts deserve a 3, 4, or 5. Oops. Even general examples would help. What distinguishes a "4" from a "3"?
There is an option in "Preferences" to never see the slashdot.org department. Now you just have to get Rob and his army of trained mammals to stick to that department for news about /.
No hints necessary, though I am a "Latin". I have an M.A. and M.Div., church history and spirituality.
"Navel-gazing" comes from the controversy over the "physical technique" of hesychasm. It is to be prayer of the heart and of the mind, and to that end, Ps.-Symeon recommends sitting with chin on chest and with eyes fixed on the navel. Others suggest that the inner or outer "gaze" be focused on the heart.
Oops, I was mistaken. I foolishly read the RIAA PR before reading the court decision. The RIAA is acting as the agent of recording companies and copyright holders here. They collect and distribute this new kind of performance royalty, even for non-members.
RIAA originally asked for 41.5%.
Prior to the 1995 Act, the copyright holders (composer, lyricist, publisher) were already entitled to royalties for the use of music. What the 1995 Act does is to give the recording companies a cut too, for a specialized sort of performance right.
IANAL, but from reading the court's decision, it does not seem to me that this royalty structure applies to all audio music transmitted via satellite or cable. The ruling seems to directly affect only commercial subscription services. Nothing says that this is completely irrelevant to other transmission of music, though, since the decision itself refers to an earlier ruling on jukeboxes.
RIAA does not get any royalties directly. The royalties go to the recording company of a particular artist. It is the recording companies who are members of the RIAA, which is a trade association.
Congress got involved by passing the Digital Performance Right in Sound Recordings Act of 1995. The Library of Congress, through the Copyright Office, is federally authorized to set royalty rates for cable and satellite transmission of music. The RIAA immediately started squealing. Evidently the LOC originally determined that 5% was a fair royalty, but the RIAA believed that digital subscription music services (like MUZAK, in its cable/satellite form) should pony up 40% or more, on the same model as cable television networks, who pay handsome royalties for the license to broadcast motion pictures.
The RIAA, BTW, does not mention this recent court decision on their web page. Imagine that.
An Anonymous Coward asked,
It does go through the Copyright Office. But the Copyright Office is part of the Library of Congress.
Ballmer says,
I predict that Microsoft will decide that revealing the actual source code is unnecessary, and that the best way to keep outside developers working on MS/Windows apps is business as usual. Host workshops, promote books for programmers on Windows "tricks", sell pointy-clicky GUI tools, but certainly don't let anyone outside see the code itself.
If this conjecture is correct, then the only other thinking that Micros~1 will do about "open source" is how to discredit and crush it. Notice how, early in the article, Ballmer is embarrassed to even use the term.
I have a great deal of respect for RMS.
However, this insistence on calling any OS that uses GNU anything a GNU(tm) system is just plain childish.
I work on an IRIX computer that has the gcc. So I guess that would make it IRIGNUX. I also work on a Windows NT box that uses GNU regex and some GPLed proggies. So does that make it GNUONT (Gnu's Not Unix Or NT)? Somebody alert His Gatesness!
On the web-based interface, NSI has been slapping on their bogus "agreement" since at least 22 March 1999. See this post from news.admin.net-abuse.email.
However, DejaNews^H^H^H^H.com has no postings yet in news.admin.net-abuse.sightings with the NSI bluff, so I suspect that those of us who do whois from a *NIX prompt only started getting served this rider within the past day or two.
That said, the so-called "agreement" is absolute hogwash.
IANAL, but I think that as a government monopoly for lo these many years, the whois database should be public domain, just as it is not possible to copyright government documents in the U.S.
It looks to be by the same guys who created Fast FTP Search... which went downhill when it was bought by Lycos.
I agree that adolescence is a difficult, awkward, confusing time for most anybody. Wanting to fit in, wondering if anybody really likes you.
It's harder for those who are on the bottom of the food chain, who feel like they're on the outside looking in.
But to add the pressure of a witch hunt, on the slimmest of pretexts, that targets kids who are "different" in appearance, abilities, or social skills is just too much.
To all you kids out there, I just want to say: hang on, it does get better. I know, easy to say, and doesn't help you much now. I have been through that hell. I am so old that the harassment wasn't even computer-related. (small joke). I didn't look right. I wasn't rich or popular or athletic. I wasn't a drama queen or a student government type. I didn't have to put up with physical abuse like some of you, but I was definitely harassed for being different. And lived to tell the story.
5 years after high school, many of your classmates will have bumped into real life. The one or two who still think they're all it, you will find amusing. College, if you go, is a chance to re-invent yourself, where nobody knows what you're "supposed to" be like.
For right now, cherish your friends. Follow your dreams. Do stuff that makes you feel good, like biking or swimming or getting that high score in your favorite computer game or learning to play a musical instrument. If you're smart, don't act dumb. If you're not the college type, that's cool too, but do something you like, something you're good at, not something you hate just because you think there might be lots of money in it. And you don't have to take any bull about the way you look or dress, or the games you like to play. Don't knock yourself out trying to be "popular". It's not worth it. And remember, hate is not the way to go. If you hate people, they won, because you become like their mirror, and they control you. So hang on for dear life, and it will get better.
He's using a Micros~1 product, probably Micros~1 Word, to write his articles. So they're not really in plain text, and it's hard to catch the proprietary characters. The question marks you and I see are Micros~1's misnamed "smart quotes". They are in a dec range with behavior undefined in ASCII, ISO Latin-1, and Unicode... so anything can happen on another OS.
Day One: "Hi, I'm Joe, and I'm an NT addict."
Hee hee.
Seriously, the AA stuff about being out of control, powerless, a slave to the addictive substance, does have some relevance to companies and IT departments that take that first oh-so-easy step and then get entangled and dependent on one push^H^H^H^Hsupplier.
Excellent!
24/7 Linux tech support, with guaranteed response times, from a reputable "name" like Hewlett Packard is certainly good news. It should ease the greater use of Linux in the corporate world.
And as a side benefit, this blows a great big hole in the FUDmeisters' case against Linux as an OS suitable for business.
I dimly remember from my first logic course (before another one in symbolic logic) that "A false premise justifies any conclusion." What this means is that given a conditional statement which is true, if you then negate the premise, any conclusion could be true. For example, let us say that the statement, "If it rains tomorrow, I will go to the movies," is true. And if it doesn't rain tomorrow? I might or might not go. Either conclusion could be true or false. A false premise justifies any conclusion.
What has this to do with the article? The false premise is that Linux is a completely different OS than UNIX. This fundamental mistake undermines their whole article. If Linux is actually in most respects a form of UNIX, which I believe it is, then we can conclude with the article that Linux skills alone won't cut it, because they say that UNIX skills alone won't cut it. Or we can say with the article that Linux is a UNIX and UNIX isn't going away, therefore Linux skills are valuable. Or... well, you get the idea.
For reasons known perhaps only to the author, this article opposes Linux to UNIX in terms of skills and knowledge. This is a false dichotomy. Many of the pro-UNIX people quoted learned their way around Linux, and I should think that a good grasp of the fundamentals of any UNIX (or UNIX-like) OS is readily transferable to another UNIX OS. I do not go into a panic switching between Linux and IRIX, for example.
If one believes that Linux is UNIX for all practical purposes, this article is actually quite encouraging, because it tells us that UNIX skills are in demand, that Linux is a great way to learn networking, configuration, and sysadmin stuff, and that businesses are considering Linux as a low-cost, reliable UNIX OS.