Yeah I did read the article and I'm aware that there was no running iTunes service at that point, but there were registered domains (and probably rumors) - at that point it was very easy to do extensive domain listings (even for domains with no dns). Discovering domains registered to large companies and grabbing equivalent or similar names in other registries was actually a mini-industry for a short time.
I'm giving the guy the benefit of the doubt, but it is entirely possible that he was aware that Apple was working on a music service to be called iTunes and registered the domain as a result - either way is plausible and it will be up to the registrar (and probably ultimately the British court system) to decide if he is squatting or not.
Oh come on - the original poster was completely over the top in blaming MS for all the ills of the Internet, but can you honestly claim that IE is not a rotten piece of software. I'm not talking about market share here, I'm talking ease of use and features and security - IE was better than Netscape during those awful 4.x releases, but at this point IE is a solid last as far as browsers go.
I'd think games would be a great use. I'll just pull some numbers out of my ass and say that in 10 years programmable 1 Gig carts for a handheld like the GBA are commercially viable - if you could add this kind of wireless into a handheld then you would essentially have a terminal with a fairly large local storage and unlimited size game, you'd have to worry about the in memory size and IO speed - but the game content itself could be upgraded or released in installments and synched to the current 'play field window' - every evening or when within range of the base unit (which has effectively unlimited storage). My only worry is that nintendo and other game companies may hesitate to place cart programmers and the like within the clutches of users who might use them to pirate content.
You can already see some developments in this direction with link cables to hook handhelds together or to a base station, with wireless it could be made nearly invisible to users.
You have to remember that this was early 2000 also, everything was still e-this and i-that, it is very possible that this guy came up with the name independent of any knowledge of Apple's music service.
I'd think Apple would want to stay far far away from Trademark and name disputes wrt the music biz - doesn't Apple Records still have lawsuits going because Apple Computers violated their agreement to stay out of the music biz with that name?
Re:There's a name for these people.
on
Given Up to Spyware?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
They're called morons.
Or shills.
I'm reasonably certain that at least some of those people in forums chiding users that complain about spyware are not actual users. They'd probably be an employee of either the spyware firm, the software firm, or a PR firm hired by one or the other of them. One guy with multiple identities could put on quite a show of support for spyware being the price of "free" software, if the forum is operated by on behalf of the software company then admin and editorial access could easily make the messages more visible and easily quash any well spoken dissent.
I don't know that you actually ever purge information from your mind (short of actual damage), but you can lose it into long term memory where you need some help to recall it. That is why you can search google and get the details on an API call or whatever, someone who never learned the foundation skills would not get nearly as much out of it.
I think this applies to child learning as well. Computers are great at providing instant feedback and wide ranging (but often shallow) knowledge, but the web and newsgroups are not a place to learn foundations. I don't believe computers are harmful to learning by themselves, if they are it is because of the tendency of people to treat them as a magical learning box and ignore essentials or allow them to be a distraction.
In themselves computers are nothing more than a tool that can become a toy, or an encyclopedia, or a TV, or set of flashcards, or whatever.
The only kids that are going to influenced to the good solely by the presence of a computer are those interested enough to want to learn to program. They are going to pick up a lot of skills that can be applied to problem solving and learning.
Wish I'd bothered to keep a copy of that license around, but the one I had certainly did not give you any redistribution rights (binary or source) - this was made very clear by the license. They may have changed it at some point or you might just be trolling yourself.
I realize completely that no large company is a 'hive mind', but usually they do have marketing and legal departments that present a somewhat unified company face to the world and Sun doesn't seem to do that. It could be because they are still an engineering company (kinda), which means their execs mistakenly believe they are engineers and don't really realize that their public statements are viewed as company policy, who knows - I've seen plenty of smart people move to management and middle management and become complete morons within 6 months, maybe it happens with execs too.
I don't understand why you were 'offtopic' on that, but whatever.
I agree that Sun is schizophrenic wrt open source - one minute they love it, the next it is stealing jobs or doomed to fail or whatever. Also, I remember to get ahold of the solaris 8 source you had to sign a contract and couldn't do anything other than look at the code - no local changes, certainly no distribution or discussion with anyone (even within my company) who had not signed the contract. I wound checking their libc source a couple times to verify 2.6/2.8 compatibility of some software and that is about it. That license made it nearly useless.
Exactly and even the worst code can be run through a tool that will let you jump to the important parts and figure out the magic. I've cloned a "magical" feature both ways - by painstaking disassembly, traces, and reads of memory dumps and by taking existing rotten code and figuring out what it does. The second is the far easier option.
I did and the followups were more about murder and abortion than lycos and their spam solution. Only one follow up thread stayed on topic, although that thread itself did contain two or three on-topic posts.
You can make an analogy involving any two subjects "work" and create a case for how it applies, that does not make it a good or fit analogy. Any analogy that involves political or ethical hot buttons is a thinly veiled appeal to emotion, because people ignore the mapping or correspondence - they see only the issues that get them worked up.
Thus ends todays object lesson on why argument by analogy is a bad idea.
Rape, abortion, adoption? Do you even listen when you talk? Those issues are 1000 times more difficult and important than spam and you degrade those issues (and those facing them) by using them in an inane analogy about punishing spammers.
You are not comparing apples and oranges here, you are comparing 'the history of 16th century textile production advances' with 'the scent of red wine'.
Seems like this could very easily lose viewers - as far as I can tell television is mildly psychologically addictive, and the easiest way to break such an addiction is to have the possibility of accessing it removed for a week. Of who knows how many viewers who are "cheated" of the ending to a show that was massively hyped you have to wonder how many of them will realize they are no worse off for having missed it. From there it is a pretty easy step to losing interest and not watching anymore at all.
I'm almost certain that any loses incurred in this manner will be claimed as loses due to piracy. Most executives have their heads jammed so far up their asses I'm surprised their sycophants managed to fit their tongues in - so marketing and research will back up anything the network executives want to believe.
When is the last time you went to an unlicensed professional in a "licensed" profession whom you did not personally know?
If you are building a deck or working on a motorcycle or taking care of a headache you will use off the shelf tools or amateur help, more difficult tasks require a professional. I dislike arguing by analogy, but in the case of making software development a profession it is apt to compare it with existing professions.
Much software is so complicated and essential that it should be treated like an engineering project, designed by professionals and built according to exacting standards. The vast majority of software for non-business or government use would not require those kind of standards.
I think that requiring government IT decision makers and programmers to be licensed (and subject to losing that license for malpractice) would go a long way toward avoiding the sort of day-to-day incompetence and junkware that currently runs so much of our essential infrastructure.
Look at it this way - would a professional subject to losing his license have chosen Diebold for much of the US voting system? Would the incompetence of the low bidder have stalled the UK pension system had careers been on the line? Those sorts of systems need to be designed, selected, and deployed by professionals.
I don't understand why people are so diametrically opposed to the idea of making software development into a profession. The sensible case, rather than the strawman case, does not require all software to be built by licensed professionals - but software for some jobs would be required to be developed by people recognized as qualified to do. Government contracts often dictate development processes and standards already - it makes sense that the software tools themselves used for essential work be developed according to as high a standard.
The blackhole routing and refuse smtp lists could easily be considered an attack - this is often the argument of those scumbag spammers that sue the providers of such lists. The DDOS method is a little too active an attack method for me to consider it anything but vigilanteism.
What I'd really like to see is the "big players" agree to a non-patented set of extensions and plan a reasonable deployment schedule, with provisions for hosts that fail to upgrade, interoperability for the overlap during which the old and new systems are deployed, and all involved technologies which have been award a patent be dontated to the public. The patents and lawsuits are holding us back here, but the dicksizing over who gets to own the blueprint for new infrastructure will hold us back longer.
Spammers really are scum - they are thieves and parasites, but attacking them as lycos does is counterproductive - they thrive in an environment of lies and cowardly attacks. People say a technological solution is impossible (or has already failed); I disagree. Corporate ego and silly patents are to blame for the failure to find a technological solution within the last 6 years that it has been obvious that spam is a problem - find a way to the ego and patents and I think a technological solution could be 50% in place within 18 months.
Well he had been playing a campaign with his friends since the mid 70s and with his daughter since the early 80s when I joined the group - so I think he pretty much had created his own game at that point.:)
I agree that D&D was overly simplistic in some parts and excruciatingly detailed in a couple odd spots - I just loved it for the world it evoked. Once I found games that tended more to heroic melodrama (Champions) and role playing (Amber) I moved on to those. I even had a fun Shadowrun campaign for several months, but it fell apart quickly when we added some powergamers to the group (and since the worst of them was someone's SO it impossible to chuck em).
My belief is pretty much that the rules give you some structure to build on - but provided the group is good the rules are close to invisible while you play.
The problem is that AD&D/d20 is designed for/around a specific style of gaming, and does not work well elsewhere without a serious addition of house rules.
The best DM I ever played with rarely used dice in his games and had a ton of custom rules, I think that is a pretty common experience with roleplayers and D&D. D&D after all is pretty much a direct adaptation from a tabletop wargame ruleset and more suited for hack and slash than roleplay.
I never made it through a single session of that game without killing or permanently crippling a PC - pretty much decided me against it right there.
It's not that I am into powergames or opposed to killing characters, but as a GM I rarely killed characters or important NPCs - and when I did it was a huge story deal. Since my favorite games were Champions and Amber that attitude meshed pretty well with the games. Rolemaster, Warhamer FRP, Shadowrun, and Cyberpunk could be fun, but far too deadly for a heroic game.
My only real reference here is second-hand experience - a friend was a state cop and I've worked directly for and with plenty of people with varying law enforcement backgrounds. One of the constants in the "cop stories" is fishing for information by various means. You are probably correct that smart cops would hesitate to put vague threats and fishing requests in writing, but plenty of people who should know better have been trained by email to treat written communication as informal.
In my country cable is a lot cheaper than in america and it also has no advertisement.
I'm gonna be an asshole here and ask the obvious question - sure it may be commercial free, but is there anything worth watching?
American TV is a wasteland - but there is so much money floating around that occasionally shows get made that I like (course those do seem to get cancelled awfully quick too). And someone must like those stupid reality shows and boyband infomercials.
It's an entirely different thing, if they tried to gave the impression, they can force the request without subpoena, but there was no mention of that in the article.
Cops of any variety always try that little trick. I imagine they have ever since police forces became something other than the enforcers of the head thug and became subject to civil law themselves.
Fyodor is right here to refuse an improperly formed request out of hand - I believe the FBI as a whole to be the "good guys" but there is a real need to keep em honest by never making it trivial for them to invade the privacy of any private citizen if the US.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm giving the guy the benefit of the doubt, but it is entirely possible that he was aware that Apple was working on a music service to be called iTunes and registered the domain as a result - either way is plausible and it will be up to the registrar (and probably ultimately the British court system) to decide if he is squatting or not.
Oh come on - the original poster was completely over the top in blaming MS for all the ills of the Internet, but can you honestly claim that IE is not a rotten piece of software. I'm not talking about market share here, I'm talking ease of use and features and security - IE was better than Netscape during those awful 4.x releases, but at this point IE is a solid last as far as browsers go.
You can already see some developments in this direction with link cables to hook handhelds together or to a base station, with wireless it could be made nearly invisible to users.
I'd think Apple would want to stay far far away from Trademark and name disputes wrt the music biz - doesn't Apple Records still have lawsuits going because Apple Computers violated their agreement to stay out of the music biz with that name?
Or shills.
I'm reasonably certain that at least some of those people in forums chiding users that complain about spyware are not actual users. They'd probably be an employee of either the spyware firm, the software firm, or a PR firm hired by one or the other of them. One guy with multiple identities could put on quite a show of support for spyware being the price of "free" software, if the forum is operated by on behalf of the software company then admin and editorial access could easily make the messages more visible and easily quash any well spoken dissent.
I think this applies to child learning as well. Computers are great at providing instant feedback and wide ranging (but often shallow) knowledge, but the web and newsgroups are not a place to learn foundations. I don't believe computers are harmful to learning by themselves, if they are it is because of the tendency of people to treat them as a magical learning box and ignore essentials or allow them to be a distraction.
In themselves computers are nothing more than a tool that can become a toy, or an encyclopedia, or a TV, or set of flashcards, or whatever. The only kids that are going to influenced to the good solely by the presence of a computer are those interested enough to want to learn to program. They are going to pick up a lot of skills that can be applied to problem solving and learning.
Wish I'd bothered to keep a copy of that license around, but the one I had certainly did not give you any redistribution rights (binary or source) - this was made very clear by the license. They may have changed it at some point or you might just be trolling yourself.
I realize completely that no large company is a 'hive mind', but usually they do have marketing and legal departments that present a somewhat unified company face to the world and Sun doesn't seem to do that. It could be because they are still an engineering company (kinda), which means their execs mistakenly believe they are engineers and don't really realize that their public statements are viewed as company policy, who knows - I've seen plenty of smart people move to management and middle management and become complete morons within 6 months, maybe it happens with execs too.
I agree that Sun is schizophrenic wrt open source - one minute they love it, the next it is stealing jobs or doomed to fail or whatever. Also, I remember to get ahold of the solaris 8 source you had to sign a contract and couldn't do anything other than look at the code - no local changes, certainly no distribution or discussion with anyone (even within my company) who had not signed the contract. I wound checking their libc source a couple times to verify 2.6/2.8 compatibility of some software and that is about it. That license made it nearly useless.
Exactly and even the worst code can be run through a tool that will let you jump to the important parts and figure out the magic. I've cloned a "magical" feature both ways - by painstaking disassembly, traces, and reads of memory dumps and by taking existing rotten code and figuring out what it does. The second is the far easier option.
I did and the followups were more about murder and abortion than lycos and their spam solution. Only one follow up thread stayed on topic, although that thread itself did contain two or three on-topic posts.
You can make an analogy involving any two subjects "work" and create a case for how it applies, that does not make it a good or fit analogy. Any analogy that involves political or ethical hot buttons is a thinly veiled appeal to emotion, because people ignore the mapping or correspondence - they see only the issues that get them worked up.
Rape, abortion, adoption? Do you even listen when you talk? Those issues are 1000 times more difficult and important than spam and you degrade those issues (and those facing them) by using them in an inane analogy about punishing spammers.
You are not comparing apples and oranges here, you are comparing 'the history of 16th century textile production advances' with 'the scent of red wine'.
I'm almost certain that any loses incurred in this manner will be claimed as loses due to piracy. Most executives have their heads jammed so far up their asses I'm surprised their sycophants managed to fit their tongues in - so marketing and research will back up anything the network executives want to believe.
If you are building a deck or working on a motorcycle or taking care of a headache you will use off the shelf tools or amateur help, more difficult tasks require a professional. I dislike arguing by analogy, but in the case of making software development a profession it is apt to compare it with existing professions.
Much software is so complicated and essential that it should be treated like an engineering project, designed by professionals and built according to exacting standards. The vast majority of software for non-business or government use would not require those kind of standards.
I think that requiring government IT decision makers and programmers to be licensed (and subject to losing that license for malpractice) would go a long way toward avoiding the sort of day-to-day incompetence and junkware that currently runs so much of our essential infrastructure.
Look at it this way - would a professional subject to losing his license have chosen Diebold for much of the US voting system? Would the incompetence of the low bidder have stalled the UK pension system had careers been on the line? Those sorts of systems need to be designed, selected, and deployed by professionals.
I don't understand why people are so diametrically opposed to the idea of making software development into a profession. The sensible case, rather than the strawman case, does not require all software to be built by licensed professionals - but software for some jobs would be required to be developed by people recognized as qualified to do. Government contracts often dictate development processes and standards already - it makes sense that the software tools themselves used for essential work be developed according to as high a standard.
The blackhole routing and refuse smtp lists could easily be considered an attack - this is often the argument of those scumbag spammers that sue the providers of such lists. The DDOS method is a little too active an attack method for me to consider it anything but vigilanteism.
What I'd really like to see is the "big players" agree to a non-patented set of extensions and plan a reasonable deployment schedule, with provisions for hosts that fail to upgrade, interoperability for the overlap during which the old and new systems are deployed, and all involved technologies which have been award a patent be dontated to the public. The patents and lawsuits are holding us back here, but the dicksizing over who gets to own the blueprint for new infrastructure will hold us back longer.
Spammers really are scum - they are thieves and parasites, but attacking them as lycos does is counterproductive - they thrive in an environment of lies and cowardly attacks. People say a technological solution is impossible (or has already failed); I disagree. Corporate ego and silly patents are to blame for the failure to find a technological solution within the last 6 years that it has been obvious that spam is a problem - find a way to the ego and patents and I think a technological solution could be 50% in place within 18 months.
I agree that D&D was overly simplistic in some parts and excruciatingly detailed in a couple odd spots - I just loved it for the world it evoked. Once I found games that tended more to heroic melodrama (Champions) and role playing (Amber) I moved on to those. I even had a fun Shadowrun campaign for several months, but it fell apart quickly when we added some powergamers to the group (and since the worst of them was someone's SO it impossible to chuck em).
My belief is pretty much that the rules give you some structure to build on - but provided the group is good the rules are close to invisible while you play.
The best DM I ever played with rarely used dice in his games and had a ton of custom rules, I think that is a pretty common experience with roleplayers and D&D. D&D after all is pretty much a direct adaptation from a tabletop wargame ruleset and more suited for hack and slash than roleplay.
I never made it through a single session of that game without killing or permanently crippling a PC - pretty much decided me against it right there.
It's not that I am into powergames or opposed to killing characters, but as a GM I rarely killed characters or important NPCs - and when I did it was a huge story deal. Since my favorite games were Champions and Amber that attitude meshed pretty well with the games. Rolemaster, Warhamer FRP, Shadowrun, and Cyberpunk could be fun, but far too deadly for a heroic game.
You need to get a little more shrill and throw some moral outrage in there and you've got comedy gold.
My only real reference here is second-hand experience - a friend was a state cop and I've worked directly for and with plenty of people with varying law enforcement backgrounds. One of the constants in the "cop stories" is fishing for information by various means. You are probably correct that smart cops would hesitate to put vague threats and fishing requests in writing, but plenty of people who should know better have been trained by email to treat written communication as informal.
I'm gonna be an asshole here and ask the obvious question - sure it may be commercial free, but is there anything worth watching?
American TV is a wasteland - but there is so much money floating around that occasionally shows get made that I like (course those do seem to get cancelled awfully quick too). And someone must like those stupid reality shows and boyband infomercials.
Cops of any variety always try that little trick. I imagine they have ever since police forces became something other than the enforcers of the head thug and became subject to civil law themselves.
Fyodor is right here to refuse an improperly formed request out of hand - I believe the FBI as a whole to be the "good guys" but there is a real need to keep em honest by never making it trivial for them to invade the privacy of any private citizen if the US.
Actually I don't think it does anymore - it used to be at least partially funded by NASA but was made completely private in the 90's.