Taking a look at the PPA's of the PPA's release... A bill that would make it impossible for photographers to protect their work in any digital format is set for a hearing in the House on Wednesday, May 12. It'd be still possible for photographers to protect their work using DRM. They could apply DRM until the cows come home... it's just that people would legally be able to crack their DRM in a way that's presently illegal. Security-by-encryption will still be around, but having security-by-law to back it up when it fails would go away. Okay, that's FUD.
Known as H.R. 107, the Digital Media Consumer Rights Act would give hackers explicit permission to distribute software and hardware devices designed to defeat copyright protection technology. That's exactly true. Software like DeCSS would no longer be illegal to distribute, and in fact would be specifically authorized by this law. The PPA seems to think this is a bad thing, but that's the only problem with this claim.
Other provisions of the bill would set a dangerous precedent by making copyright owners who use anti-copying technology on music discs subject to regulation and fines from the Federal Trade Commission unless they meet extensive labeling and regulatory requirements. That's true as well, as a CD with any sort of DRM applied to it ceases to be a "Red Book" standard CD. This law would require labeling of such non-standard CDs, and that such labels not be removed until the end consumer gets the disc. There'd be fines from the FTC if such a CD is sold without being properly labeled. Again, The PPA seems to think this is a bad thing, but that's the only problem with this claim.
In short, this is a piece of legislation that undoes some of the most offensive provisions of the DMCA, which is exactly what the "groupthink" opinion of Slashdot has wanted all along...
The Spot was one of the first in and first out of the Dot-com era... it was early proof that "Oh, we'll get tons of traffic and then put up ads." business model doesn't always lead to profit.
In fact, I don't quite see where they're going to get funding from this go around either...
Yes, but how did American Idol, or anything else, go from zero to hit anyway?
Promotion is everything in media these days. The So, the real question: Will The Spot have enough of an ad budget to get some TV ads to announce the project?
Let's face it, with the explosion of blogs on the web these days... people seem to love reading about people they barely know.
So, take beautiful actors and inject scripted situations... and away they go. I'm sure this'll spin into something this go around. 1995 was just a little too early.
Really, it depends on what equipment is being used to pick up the sounds.
Think about WiFi. Your standard access point and and laptop card will work for about 300 feet. However, somebody 1000 feet away could interact with that network using a simple pringles can attenna.
The same theory basically can be applied to sound, the more directional microphone and the better it is at filtering unwanted sound, the better the signal-to-noise ratio will get. So, putting walls and other background noises into the problem will make it harder to find the signal here... but I don't think there's going to be anything that can make it truely physically impossible from longer distances, just very hard to make it nearly impossible.
Even if the FBI/NSA can't manage to decode your data, the fact remains if they get to look at your HD via a warrent and they discover 20 GB of encrypted data rather than anything readable, they know you're hiding something from their view.
That discovery encrypted data can still be used as evidence in justifying further warrants... while discovering 20 GB of Britney Spears music in readable form would most likely cause the investigation to give up on worrying about the contents of that hard drive.
No modern drive truely copies on the fly anymore. Remember the days when so much as moving your mouse could cause underrun errors that resulted in coasters? Those went away when burners got enough on-board cache memory to be able to not worry about running out of data unexpectedly, it'd be able to notice when it's buffer is about to run out with enough time to avoid making a coaster.
Likewise, the modern reader is smart enough not to return errant frames unless the error just happens to have also corrupted the CRC value and/or the math just happened to check. Not terribly likely, and if it did happen, the disc is likely already near-dead and not going to cooperate with copying anyway.
Burning from an HD image will usually turn out to be faster, but it's not going to be less error-prone.
Or perhaps are you looking for advice on disk pirating devices and you used a recent (and duplicate)/. article as an excuse to slip under the radar?
Those burn-seven-at-a-time CD burners smell like devices that would only be bought by software pirates. Why would anybody want to buy and then use one of those, when you could just send your master CD to a fulfillment operation that duplicates CDs for a living?
When you need more than 2000 copies of the same CD, the price those places charge per disc starts to become about the same as the price of CD-Rs, never mind the cost you'd have to pay an employee to supervise the burning process. The pros have got the $10,000ish machines to do the work.
Personally, I think the best long term storage for a Slashdot reader would to be to build a home RAID server. Hard drives fail, but they rarely fail all at once. That's why a designed-for-redundancy RAID is perfect for this situation.
You don't really need to be concerned about hot-swapping, because you can afford your pictures being unavailable for the hour or so while you're swapping out a failed HD every few years.
For casual use, the best CD-R duplicator out there is most likely to throw a cheap no-name CD-ROM drive into your computer next to your favorite burner. If you have a DVR-ROM drive next to your CD burner, you're also all set. It's just about as good as it gets for 1-to-1 copying.
There are some standalone devices that live to do nothing more than copy... but with prices Checking in at close to $400 you might as well buy a Sub-$500 PC that has both a reader and a burner right out of the box if you're too lazy to build one from the parts yourself. Afterall, for the extra $100 you get a functional PC instead of the one-trick pony of a device that consists of nothing more than a reader and writer with firmware in between.
If you're publishing content on CDs, then you might be able to justify the cost of getting a one-to-many CD copier device... but think carefully about how often you're actually going to use it before taking the dive. It may be cheaper and easier to just outsource the project to a fulfillment house that does that kind of thing for a living. However, for this particular question's situation of making a one-to-one digital copy every few years to restart the aging clock, having one-to-many capability just isn't going to help much.
Really, that's what this box is all about... letting a user call up Comcast support and have the support tech tunnel into the router and change settings. Not useful to a Slashdot geek, but it's very useful to the luser who doesn't even know what an IP quad is...
From the press release... Users who sign up for the service can receive a Linksys wireless gateway, along with network adapters for connecting up to five computers, professional installation, multiple levels of security, and increased downstream speed of up to 4Mbps.
Comcast's current peak downstream bandwidth for most customers is 3 Mbps. So, so far Comcast is actually offering to tweak upwards the bandwidth of people who pay for this service.
Of course, I've rarely found a website (other than my own) that actually feeds me data at a speed that's anywhere near 3 Mbps, so that extra space within 3 to 4 Mbps is rarely going to be used. Still, if you are somebody who frequenly maxes out the downstream on a Comcast modem, this might be of interest to you.
Nah, it's just a case that something that was a free service is about to become a $9.99 a month service. Either pay the fee for real IP space, or set yourself up a NAT server. An off-the-shelf $50 consumer router will do the job as a DHCP and NAT server just fine...
Yea, you won't complain until Comcast won't give you service unless you have "compliant" hardware
However, Comcast can't require you use their cable modem to connect to their system. That's simply against FCC rules. The FCC usually hates it when the service provider starts mandating that only their hardware be used.
(Think... If they could, wouldn't they be doing that already?)
There's no way that Comcast can require users of their cable Internet services to use cable modems provided by them. The FCC simply doesn't allow that...
So long you buy your own DOCSIS-compatible modem, you can attach whatever hardware to your network you want.
Sure, the/. user won't want this in their house...
But the user who is too dumb to configure WiFi without Comcast's help needs this. This technology could let Comcast's techs lock down any access point who's not running WEP, and see to it that all the devices the customer has are taking their DHCP assignments properly. Of course, anybody reading this will know how to do these administrative tasks on their own, but those who are clueless can have trust Comcast configure their router and firewall to optimal settings.
If this cuts down the number of worm-vunerable computers on the Internet by letting those who don't know what they're doing hand the controls over to Comcast, I won't complain.
TechTV has one thing G4 wishes it has... distribution. TechTV is presently in four times as many homes as G4 at the moment.
However, those distribution contracts all void themselves if Comcast totally changes the content, so they're going to have to keep at least some of TechTV's shows if they don't want to wind up in court...
Comcast didn't quite get 100% of the network... Echostar still holds a stake in the network so we're sure that the resulting station will still be on Dish Network. The post-merger network will also inherit TechTV's contract with DirecTV that should keep it there for at least a few years.
FCC rules require that any cable-company owned network that is not exclusively delivered by landlines must be made available to other signal providers without discrimination. So, it's not likely they can play keep-away like they do so with some of their regional news and sports channels.
Most of the time, the show originates from an old barn renovated into a radio studio on his property but just outside of his house. An ISDN line is used to relay his voice back to the studio so he can hear his callers and get the screening data from the producers.
The show presently is only heard on KFI 640 in Los Angeles, but that station streams its content on its website. KFI is owned by Clear Channel, so there is a possiblity that the show may be distributed by the Premire Radio Networks if it catches on. Right now's a rating sweep month... so we'll know shortly how well he's doing.
Everybody got notices today that says at face value that 60 days from now their jobs won't exist. However, that doesn't promise that everybody's a goner...
See, the WARN act requires that when a downsizing of this scale is going to happen, the employer must give 60 days notice to everybody they're letting go. However, imagine the moral at an office where 2/3 of the people get the notice and the other 1/3 don't... fighting is sure to ensue during the two months before the cutback.
So, in reality... today's news doesn't really tell us what Comcast is planning. They very well could keep the shows alive, but send the jobs who don't affect the content (PR people, master control techs, salespeople, etc.) to LA.
The real answer will come exactly 60 days from now...
Unfortunately, that press release list is worthless because it starts with "such as" so shows named on that list might not survive, and shows not on that list might make it.
There's really no clue as to which shows are in or out yet...
All five women involved (Morgan Webb from X-Play, Sarah Lane from The Screen Savers, Melanie Kim from TechLive/Fresh Gear, Laura Swisher from Unscrewed, Cat Schwartz from Call For Help) were sent offers to pose. All five declined.
However, in order for Slashdot to have an opinion on a product, it first has to be made...
Mossberg's early reviews can end up killing a company so that its later products never come out. He can reject things in the theory stages that way.
I think Cringley is well aware that he's better known as a historian than a journalist. His greatest works were two documentaires that covered things well after they happened.
Slashdot Mirror
Taking a look at the PPA's of the PPA's release...
A bill that would make it impossible for photographers to protect their work in any digital format is set for a hearing in the House on Wednesday, May 12.
It'd be still possible for photographers to protect their work using DRM. They could apply DRM until the cows come home... it's just that people would legally be able to crack their DRM in a way that's presently illegal. Security-by-encryption will still be around, but having security-by-law to back it up when it fails would go away. Okay, that's FUD.
Known as H.R. 107, the Digital Media Consumer Rights Act would give hackers explicit permission to distribute software and hardware devices designed to defeat copyright protection technology.
That's exactly true. Software like DeCSS would no longer be illegal to distribute, and in fact would be specifically authorized by this law. The PPA seems to think this is a bad thing, but that's the only problem with this claim.
Other provisions of the bill would set a dangerous precedent by making copyright owners who use anti-copying technology on music discs subject to regulation and fines from the Federal Trade Commission unless they meet extensive labeling and regulatory requirements.
That's true as well, as a CD with any sort of DRM applied to it ceases to be a "Red Book" standard CD. This law would require labeling of such non-standard CDs, and that such labels not be removed until the end consumer gets the disc. There'd be fines from the FTC if such a CD is sold without being properly labeled. Again, The PPA seems to think this is a bad thing, but that's the only problem with this claim.
In short, this is a piece of legislation that undoes some of the most offensive provisions of the DMCA, which is exactly what the "groupthink" opinion of Slashdot has wanted all along...
Figures that Slashdot would talk about a piece of proposed legislation without linking to the actual text of the bill in question...
Here's The bill's test on the Thomas system. and here's the list of 15 representatives co-sponsoring the bill.
Read the bill for yourself, then you can think for yourself about what it's going to do if passed.
The Spot was one of the first in and first out of the Dot-com era... it was early proof that "Oh, we'll get tons of traffic and then put up ads." business model doesn't always lead to profit.
In fact, I don't quite see where they're going to get funding from this go around either...
Yes, but how did American Idol, or anything else, go from zero to hit anyway?
Promotion is everything in media these days. The So, the real question: Will The Spot have enough of an ad budget to get some TV ads to announce the project?
Let's face it, with the explosion of blogs on the web these days... people seem to love reading about people they barely know.
So, take beautiful actors and inject scripted situations... and away they go. I'm sure this'll spin into something this go around. 1995 was just a little too early.
Really, it depends on what equipment is being used to pick up the sounds.
Think about WiFi. Your standard access point and and laptop card will work for about 300 feet. However, somebody 1000 feet away could interact with that network using a simple pringles can attenna.
The same theory basically can be applied to sound, the more directional microphone and the better it is at filtering unwanted sound, the better the signal-to-noise ratio will get. So, putting walls and other background noises into the problem will make it harder to find the signal here... but I don't think there's going to be anything that can make it truely physically impossible from longer distances, just very hard to make it nearly impossible.
Even if the FBI/NSA can't manage to decode your data, the fact remains if they get to look at your HD via a warrent and they discover 20 GB of encrypted data rather than anything readable, they know you're hiding something from their view.
That discovery encrypted data can still be used as evidence in justifying further warrants... while discovering 20 GB of Britney Spears music in readable form would most likely cause the investigation to give up on worrying about the contents of that hard drive.
No modern drive truely copies on the fly anymore. Remember the days when so much as moving your mouse could cause underrun errors that resulted in coasters? Those went away when burners got enough on-board cache memory to be able to not worry about running out of data unexpectedly, it'd be able to notice when it's buffer is about to run out with enough time to avoid making a coaster.
Likewise, the modern reader is smart enough not to return errant frames unless the error just happens to have also corrupted the CRC value and/or the math just happened to check. Not terribly likely, and if it did happen, the disc is likely already near-dead and not going to cooperate with copying anyway.
Burning from an HD image will usually turn out to be faster, but it's not going to be less error-prone.
Or perhaps are you looking for advice on disk pirating devices and you used a recent (and duplicate) /. article as an excuse to slip under the radar?
Those burn-seven-at-a-time CD burners smell like devices that would only be bought by software pirates. Why would anybody want to buy and then use one of those, when you could just send your master CD to a fulfillment operation that duplicates CDs for a living?
When you need more than 2000 copies of the same CD, the price those places charge per disc starts to become about the same as the price of CD-Rs, never mind the cost you'd have to pay an employee to supervise the burning process. The pros have got the $10,000ish machines to do the work.
Personally, I think the best long term storage for a Slashdot reader would to be to build a home RAID server. Hard drives fail, but they rarely fail all at once. That's why a designed-for-redundancy RAID is perfect for this situation.
You don't really need to be concerned about hot-swapping, because you can afford your pictures being unavailable for the hour or so while you're swapping out a failed HD every few years.
For casual use, the best CD-R duplicator out there is most likely to throw a cheap no-name CD-ROM drive into your computer next to your favorite burner. If you have a DVR-ROM drive next to your CD burner, you're also all set. It's just about as good as it gets for 1-to-1 copying.
There are some standalone devices that live to do nothing more than copy... but with prices Checking in at close to $400 you might as well buy a Sub-$500 PC that has both a reader and a burner right out of the box if you're too lazy to build one from the parts yourself. Afterall, for the extra $100 you get a functional PC instead of the one-trick pony of a device that consists of nothing more than a reader and writer with firmware in between.
If you're publishing content on CDs, then you might be able to justify the cost of getting a one-to-many CD copier device... but think carefully about how often you're actually going to use it before taking the dive. It may be cheaper and easier to just outsource the project to a fulfillment house that does that kind of thing for a living. However, for this particular question's situation of making a one-to-one digital copy every few years to restart the aging clock, having one-to-many capability just isn't going to help much.
Really, that's what this box is all about... letting a user call up Comcast support and have the support tech tunnel into the router and change settings. Not useful to a Slashdot geek, but it's very useful to the luser who doesn't even know what an IP quad is...
From the press release...
Users who sign up for the service can receive a Linksys wireless gateway, along with network adapters for connecting up to five computers, professional installation, multiple levels of security, and increased downstream speed of up to 4Mbps.
Comcast's current peak downstream bandwidth for most customers is 3 Mbps. So, so far Comcast is actually offering to tweak upwards the bandwidth of people who pay for this service.
Of course, I've rarely found a website (other than my own) that actually feeds me data at a speed that's anywhere near 3 Mbps, so that extra space within 3 to 4 Mbps is rarely going to be used. Still, if you are somebody who frequenly maxes out the downstream on a Comcast modem, this might be of interest to you.
Nah, it's just a case that something that was a free service is about to become a $9.99 a month service. Either pay the fee for real IP space, or set yourself up a NAT server. An off-the-shelf $50 consumer router will do the job as a DHCP and NAT server just fine...
Yea, you won't complain until Comcast won't give you service unless you have "compliant" hardware
However, Comcast can't require you use their cable modem to connect to their system. That's simply against FCC rules. The FCC usually hates it when the service provider starts mandating that only their hardware be used.
(Think... If they could, wouldn't they be doing that already?)
There's no way that Comcast can require users of their cable Internet services to use cable modems provided by them. The FCC simply doesn't allow that...
So long you buy your own DOCSIS-compatible modem, you can attach whatever hardware to your network you want.
Sure, the /. user won't want this in their house...
But the user who is too dumb to configure WiFi without Comcast's help needs this. This technology could let Comcast's techs lock down any access point who's not running WEP, and see to it that all the devices the customer has are taking their DHCP assignments properly. Of course, anybody reading this will know how to do these administrative tasks on their own, but those who are clueless can have trust Comcast configure their router and firewall to optimal settings.
If this cuts down the number of worm-vunerable computers on the Internet by letting those who don't know what they're doing hand the controls over to Comcast, I won't complain.
TechTV has one thing G4 wishes it has... distribution. TechTV is presently in four times as many homes as G4 at the moment.
However, those distribution contracts all void themselves if Comcast totally changes the content, so they're going to have to keep at least some of TechTV's shows if they don't want to wind up in court...
Comcast didn't quite get 100% of the network... Echostar still holds a stake in the network so we're sure that the resulting station will still be on Dish Network. The post-merger network will also inherit TechTV's contract with DirecTV that should keep it there for at least a few years.
FCC rules require that any cable-company owned network that is not exclusively delivered by landlines must be made available to other signal providers without discrimination. So, it's not likely they can play keep-away like they do so with some of their regional news and sports channels.
Most of the time, the show originates from an old barn renovated into a radio studio on his property but just outside of his house. An ISDN line is used to relay his voice back to the studio so he can hear his callers and get the screening data from the producers.
The show presently is only heard on KFI 640 in Los Angeles, but that station streams its content on its website. KFI is owned by Clear Channel, so there is a possiblity that the show may be distributed by the Premire Radio Networks if it catches on. Right now's a rating sweep month... so we'll know shortly how well he's doing.
Everybody got notices today that says at face value that 60 days from now their jobs won't exist. However, that doesn't promise that everybody's a goner...
See, the WARN act requires that when a downsizing of this scale is going to happen, the employer must give 60 days notice to everybody they're letting go. However, imagine the moral at an office where 2/3 of the people get the notice and the other 1/3 don't... fighting is sure to ensue during the two months before the cutback.
So, in reality... today's news doesn't really tell us what Comcast is planning. They very well could keep the shows alive, but send the jobs who don't affect the content (PR people, master control techs, salespeople, etc.) to LA.
The real answer will come exactly 60 days from now...
Unfortunately, that press release list is worthless because it starts with "such as" so shows named on that list might not survive, and shows not on that list might make it.
There's really no clue as to which shows are in or out yet...
All five women involved (Morgan Webb from X-Play, Sarah Lane from The Screen Savers, Melanie Kim from TechLive/Fresh Gear, Laura Swisher from Unscrewed, Cat Schwartz from Call For Help) were sent offers to pose. All five declined.
However, in order for Slashdot to have an opinion on a product, it first has to be made... Mossberg's early reviews can end up killing a company so that its later products never come out. He can reject things in the theory stages that way.
Boy, I bet Cringely is pissed.
I think Cringley is well aware that he's better known as a historian than a journalist. His greatest works were two documentaires that covered things well after they happened.