Plus if your virii/worms can't touch that other partition, you have a "trusted" way to work on restoring your system in the case something bad happens without having to do the fdisk/format/reinstall sequence.
Oh come on - how long will it take someone to find a way to circumvent that? A month? Less? Going on M$'s past record, my bet is on the latter.
The fact is that it's never going to be as safe as a read only CD / DVD with the install files on it.
Your hard drive gets screwed (hardware failure, for exmaple), so you can't re-install on a new disk because you don't have the installation media?
And I suppose it also has the "feature" that it'll automatically "fix" any "corrupt" (Linux/BSD) partitions it discovers on bootup?
What a stupid, usless waste of hard drive space to save on the price of an install DVD. This just smacks of taking choices away from the user (other than the choice to boycott this kind of shit completely).
Not forgetting the Lowtech: Redundant Technology Initiative in Sheffield UK. Doing a very similar thing with recycled older hardware, making cool tech-art, and donathing machines to charities and disadvantaged people.
Really cool stuff - all brought to you with the help of Open Source Software!
AMD have been better than Intel for some time...
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AMD Back in the Black
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· Score: 5, Insightful
...however, it's not about better products, it's about mindshare of the buyers.
I've been building PCs for quite a few years now, and have nearly always used and recommended AMD processors over Intel. In my opinion, AMDs cost less, often outperform their Intel equivalents, and lead the way when it comes to new innovations.
I guess the reason they don't have a bigger market share is because a lot of the OEM companies only sell Intel, and because Joe Public only knows about MHz as a measure of speed.
Hey, I just had a great idea!! If I form a company and deliberately write insecure, malicious code with backdoors in it, I could use it to control the governments of the world and become obscenely rich!
Oh, wait... someone else has already done that, and most likely patented the idea. I don't want to get busted for patent infringement, man!
Careful before you bash Plumbers and Mechanics. I know numerous blue collar workers that earn a fantastic living.
Whoa there! I was never bashing plumbers or mechanics - merely pointing out how they can earn pretty much the same wage as me (and often a lot more) without having to go to university to get to it.
I've heard numerous tales of accountants and lawyers who quit to become blue collar workers because they could still earn a decent wage and also enjoy good quality of life. I myself considered quitting my current job to work in a music technology shop - the wages were lower, but I would have enjoyed it a lot more and still been able to pretty-much afford my current lifestyle.
For my brother (apprentice quantity surveyor) I think not going to university is absolutely the best decision he could have made. Blue collar workers are where it's at money-wise these days, and in a few years time, he will definitely be earning the same as me, if not more.
Where I work, we've just taken on a new programmer guy who has a degree, and has spent the last four years or so working in a f*cking Burger King because he couldn't find a job in computing. He's good, and his interview was good too (he's certainly not a shmuck) - it's just a simple fact that there aren't enough computing jobs around at the moment.
Maybe it's just that good in the US, because holy crap that's a high average starting salary. Here in the UK the current average computing starting wage (based on my own experience and that of my friends) is something like 20k GBP (37k USD). I have a high-pass degree in Computer Science from a well respected university, but with the current computing job climate it would be seriously hard to get a job paying more than 25k GBP (46k USD) as a starting wage. (Hell, I'm not even on that much yet - far from it!)
It's extremely annoying, given that mechanics and plumbers (or even totally unskilled jobs like shunting boxes around a warehouse, which I did for a year or so a while back) can earn you almost as much as it's possible to earn with a degree these days.
The value of degrees has been reduced due to the UK government's insane scheme to get more and more people to go to university. We don't need more people to go to university - we need to make it harder to go to university so that only the people who really want to do it (and have the skills) can go, rather than lowering the difficulty of getting a degree so that the people who loaf it through university can also get degrees. It should be HARD to get a degree - I'm not saying it was easy, but I think it could have been harder. A degree should mean something, but these days I'm not sure it really does, because "everyone has one".
My youger brother decided not to go to university, and is an apprentice quantity surveyor in the building trade. He's a very intelligent guy, but it's just not worth him getting a degree. In five years time, I will be absolutely unsurprised to hear that he's earning considerably more than me (which he almost certainly will be).
Degrees aren't all they're cracked up to be, and the "extra" money you earn for having one barely covers the cost of going to university for four years in the first place.
I'm glad I have a degree, but it's not the big money earner it's cracked up to be - jobs are just too scarce at the moment. Personally, I blame the people who did computing degrees around the time of the dot com boom because they needed a degree and heard it was "where the money was". Now, there's a surplus of computer qualified people around, meaning that plenty of us who are actually really enjoy computers and are good at what we do can't get jobs because the gold-rush crowd are still hanging around.
From Glory to Sideshow: The Space Station's Story By WILLIAM J. BROAD
Published: February 3, 2004
In 1989, when the first President George Bush announced his plan to send American astronauts back to the Moon and on to Mars, he called the proposed space station "our critical next step in all our space endeavors." It would be a base in the weightlessness of space where big rockets would be assembled and blast off on voyages of exploration: "a new bridge between the worlds."
Now, with the outpost hurtling through space 240 miles above Earth and with 16 nations struggling to complete the most challenging engineering project of all time, the station has suddenly become a $100 billion dead end.
The current President Bush made no mention of it as a steppingstone in his speech on Jan. 14 reviving the call for missions to the Moon and Mars. Instead, he spoke of it as a site of biomedical research and an "obligation" that the United States had to help finish.
Mr. Bush gave no clear indication how, or whether, the United States planned to use the station after its prospective completion in 2010. With NASA focusing its efforts and its budget on the Moon and Mars, the station's prospects are uncertain.
"I'm worried that they're going to cut off the space shuttle before we have another vehicle that can fly," said Senator Bill Nelson, a Florida Democrat who is the only current member of Congress to have flown in space. "And that will drastically reduce space station use."
What happened? How did the station go from star to sideshow? Experts cite a litany of factors: cost overruns, design changes, new perceptions of technical risk after the shuttle disasters and shifting national priorities. For instance, orbital changes to accommodate Russia after the cold war made it harder to use the station as a launching pad.
The tale has no real bad guys, the experts say, but many false promises.
"It was always a steppingstone to the stars," said Dr. Howard E. McCurdy, a space historian at American University. "It was sold as all things to all people."
Dr. Alex Roland, a former NASA historian now at Duke University, said a moral of the story was that Congress and the public needed to work harder to hold the space agency accountable for its dreams.
"They keep getting trapped in their own rhetoric," he said. "They're willing victims of it. But as public policy it's a disaster because it feeds unrealistic expectations."
At the start of the space age, visionaries invariably saw outposts in earth orbit as jumping-off points. Dr. Wernher von Braun, in a famous 1952 article, told of a huge inhabited wheel. "From this platform," he said, "a trip to the Moon itself will be just a step."
In 1968, Stanley Kubrick's movie "2001: A Space Odyssey" featured a giant outpost in Earth orbit that was a way station to the Moon and Jupiter.
Finally, after decades of fantasies, President Ronald Reagan proposed in 1984 that the United States actually build a space station. It too was envisioned as a hub for colonies on the Moon and Mars. For Mr. Reagan, the station also represented a way to challenge the Soviet Union. In the cold war, Moscow made human outposts a hallmark of its space activities.
But Congress did not vote construction money to pay for either Mr. Reagan's vision or that of the first President Bush. Not until 1993 did a new a new vision for space take shape, this one emphasizing harmony over rivalry. That September, President Bill Clinton announced that Russia had joined the station effort as a full partner. Its giant rockets were seen as a boon for the project and a good backup if the shuttles should again fail catastrophically, as the Challenger did in 1986.
"One world, one station," said Daniel S. Goldin, NASA's administrator at the time.
There was just one problem. For the Russian rockets to reach the grand unified station, it would need a different orbit.
Shuttles flying out of Florida usually go into an or
"buying music is a waste of money! Why would I do something like that?"
OK, let's put that in context. I have to say that I actually agree with her almost completely. Take into consideration that compared to DVDs and computer games, CDs offer far less bang for the buck. DVDs and games continue to fall in price, tending towards the realm of CD prices, while CDs continute to increase in price, now often costing twice as much as they did five to ten years ago.
So, in context, buying music is a waste of money, but only in the current music marketplace. Once the major labels have had their grip considerable weakened, music prices will fall to the level they should be at (hopefully with artists also taking a bigger cut from the sale of each album) and it will no longer be a waste of money compared to other forms of entertainment.
As a semi-professional musician myself - currently independent and glad of it - I have no worries whatsoever that music will once again return to being a saleable commodity, and I will be able to make money from my music when I need to. All it needs is for the market place to return to a realistic shape. The sooner the major labels lose their grip, the sooner this will happen.
Aah, but to a large extent, you've swallowed what the major labels wanted you to swallow.
We have no way of knowing how many MP3 downloads resulted in the purchase of CDs, so let me just talk about one quantifiable measure: my own experience.
Thanks to downloading one Boards Of Canada track from Kazaa out of curiosity a couple of years ago, I took a gamble and bought one of their albums. Since then, I have purchased almost everything they've ever released, including re-issues of their back catalogue. The stuff that I haven't managed to buy (because it's not available) I've got downloaded, and am more than willing to pay for now that it is "available" again so to speak. Furthermore, my purchasing frenzy extended to other artists on Warp Records, and also to other artists in similar genres on other labels.
You see, there may have been a billion Boards of Canada MP3s downloaded, but if only 1% of those downloads result in a purchase (or several, in my case) then it's money that the artist and record label would not have seen otherwise - free download or not.
P2P and Internet Radio are the goose that laid the golden egg for independent artists and records labels - they are the radio station for stuff that doesn't get played on the radio, and allow Joe Public to chop and change musical tastes, and experiment with stuff they would never even have heard of before.
Independent labels who don't subscribe to the payola system operated by the RIAA have benefitted hugely from the ability to get their music out there to the masses - whether for free or otherwise, if the music is good, fans will spring up for it, and will most likely spend money on it at some point or other.
The major labels are scared about losing control - because for once, people can actually discover new (independent) music for themselves, and have a much greater freedom to escape from the prescribed "hits" played by the likes of MTV and Clearchannel affiliated radio stations.
Is it easier to pay a very very reasonable price for some unrestricted MP3s that you can download immediately, or to hunt around on a shady P2P network looking for files in order to get them for free? I would say yes, much much easier. If it takes me two days to track down all the tracks from an album that I could just buy for $8 or whatever, then I'd be a fool to waste my time trying to get it for "free". My time is most certainly NOT free to me!
There will always be "kids" who will download free music because they can't afford to pay for it - but in that case, they wouldn't have paid for it in the first place anyway. Kids grow up, get jobs, and remember the music that they like - and then they buy it. The trouble with modern pop music is that artists are ten-a-penny and are never around for more than a year or two - long term appeal is not a concern in pop music.
Independent labels work better because they take the trouble to release top quality music with longevity. Boards of Canada's music will still be great in 10 years time, when Britney Spears and whoever else will have long been forgotten about.
Pop music relies on cheap fads to sell huge quantities for a short period of time. It needs market control and censorship of all alternative sources of music to maintain it's iron grip on the music that we can and can't hear. The reason for it's declining sales compared to increasing sales for independent labels is simply because of it's limited short term appeal. So yes, MP3s possibly do spell the death of such prescribed fake institutions as "The Top 10" and so on, but to the benefit of far far more interesting things.
A crappy, overpriced pop single that is only designed to be listened to and enjoyed for a month or two has no chance against a top quality album at an affordable price, that will still take your breath away in 10 years time.
The reason the major labels are losing money, is because their payola racket and attrocious designer-hit "music" simply cannot compete in the lo
Next we have Linux users violating the EULA for the X-Box and tinkering with it so that it can run Linux.
Why on earth any sane person would want to take a bitching game machine like X-box and ruin it by installing Linux is a mystery to me.
But that's a big question about ownership of the box. If you buy an Xbox and want to break it (by smashing it with a hammer, for example) then who is to stop you? It's your Xbox, right?
So, if you want to "break" it by attempting to install other software on it, then why should you not be allowed to? It's your Xbox, after all, and if you break it, it's your problem.
Trying to prevent people doing unintended things with equipment that they own is ridiculous. Sure, you can make it illegal, but there is no point in making laws that people are just not going to follow, since that only serves to bring the rest of the law into disrepute.
You may not understand why someone would want to run Linux on their Xbox, but really - why should Microsoft (or you, or anyone else) give a shit what anybody wants to do with their own Xbox? They stumped up the cash to buy it in the first place, therefore it's their choice what they do with it.
The DMCA is a stupid law that serves no good purpose whatsoever, and by it's very existence deserves to be disobeyed. Using a machine for something other than it's original intended purpose is a totally different ballpark to copyright infringement, and should not be illegal.
The government that governs best, governs least.
Why buy mid-range?
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The Return of S3
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Mid-range graphics cards seem a slightly pointless purchase, given that you can buy top-of-the-range cards from 6 months ago for a fraction of their original prices (not to mention the second hand prices).
Why buy something mediocre but brand new, when you could buy something that absolutely kicked ass six months ago for a similar amount of money?
So take the free tools you have been given, run with them, be innovative and turn them into something new.
If you can't be innovative, you'll never compete against anything anyway - you'll just go on re-inventing the wheel for the rest of your days.
It doesn't mean less programmers required, just less run-of-the mill "programmers" required. If you can be imaginative and innovate, you will always be able to compete.
MP3.com worked fantastically for a while, but ultimately a stupid interface, too much commercialism, having to sign up every time you downloaded something (why not just allow you to create a perpetual username?), and lack of any peer review system meant that it's signal-to noise-ratio was just too high for most people to bother with. (Plus the signup thing - even with fake details - was just too much of a drag.)
What's needed is not outright censorship of music that doesn't fit your taste (like the record companies do), but just a slashdot-style moderation and meta-moderation system for music. That way, every artist can still be heard, and people who want to just download the "best" stuff can find it easily enough.
A system we're planning over at Ampfea will do something along these lines. We're currently a rather music-technology-geek friendly community, but we're working on making our site a lot more accesible to average Joe as well.
Not that it will make much money (if any) but it'll be a damn good system!
Seems to me that is the real issue, people that own a Tivo are much, much less likely to watch something 'cause nothing better is on'.
Do we really need Tivo though? If nothing better is on, why not simply switch off the TV and do something else instead?
Dependence on TV as a non-stop source of entertainment has basically eroded our ability to get off our asses and find something else to do. Too many people would rather watch utter crap on TV than switch it off and partake in another activity.
I'm not quite down with the "burn your TV" crowd, but if you don't watch TV in a selective manner already, then you've more than succumbed to the addiction.
Adverts or not, we don't need Tivo - we just need to watch less crap on TV in general.
That's not quite what I meant though. I was talking more about detecting exploitable machines as soon as they attempt to connect to the network, rather than blocking machines that are already sending out "evil" packets.
For example, running a series of tests against a machine to see if it is susceptable to the RPC exploit (and so on) before allowing it to connect to your network, and then disallowing it access until it's security is tightened.
This way, each machine would be forced to have a sensible security policy in place before being allowed to connect to the Internet - a kind of "internet roadworthiness" test to make sure that you can't just connect any old piece of crap to a public network and expect it not to get exploited.
I'm sure there's a way of doing this without going the Palladium ("trusted" / proprietary) route. It wouldn't need to be built in at the hardware level or anything, just a series of tests to ensure that machines connecting to the Internet have at least some semblence of a security policy in place.
If anything, it could at least alert users of unpatched Windows boxes that they are totally open to exploits, or alert people running open relays and so on.
The more I read about stuff like the DCMA (now some uber-DCMA is in force in the UK and other parts of Europe too), the more I long to move to a country where this kind of shit just isn't going on, where the government represents it's people (not it's corporate backers) and where true democracy reigns.
The only problem is that I'm pretty much certain that such a place is merely a figment of my imagination, and that actually the whole world is just one big fucked up place in this day and age.
We're stuck with this shit now, so we either have to deal with it (actively or passively), ignore it (bad idea), stop being such idealists (not necessarily possible) or kill ourselves.
Personally, I'm trying hard to go with the "doing something about it while not getting too depressed over it all" angle, but it's not easy. We have to fight for the stuff that we believe in, and that can be both rewarding and taxing on a daily basis.
Maybe Cisco could work to block packets from insecure, unpatched Windows machines for currently known exploits?
That would pretty much kill the cause of the problem at it's root, although I'm sure it would introduce a whole bunch of other problems that I haven't thought of yet!
(Here's just one problem - how would you get to windowsupdate.com if all your packets were being blocked?)
Even if this isn't the world as they want it, they need to figure out how to exploit (my emphasis) it as best they can.
That just about hits the nail on the head. When are people (including the recording artists themselves) going to realise that the likes of the RIAA are only out for their own financial gain?
They don't care about good music, they certainly don't care about consumers, they don't even care about the majority of recording artists, preferring the elite few. No, the RIAA only cares about exploitation.
RIAA mission number one is to make money off other people's backs through a monopolistic payola system that retains near ultimate control over what we can and can't listen to, and exploits everyone it comes into contact with along the way - from the artists themselves, to the consumers of the finished product. It's all about money.
The only way we can stop this bullshit is to stop buying their products. How? By using The RIAA Radar of course!
Over at Ampfea, we've been doing the opposite of MP3.com for quite a while. OK, so we're not as big and we're mostly for electronic music, but there's room to grow with our users to provide the music that they want, all virtually free (we have free mirrors, or you can buy bandwidth to download from the main site), all legal.
Ampfea is great because it's a community (with a real sense of community spirit), not a company. It really is just music for the sake of music, and it's damn good music too.
We also have a mailing list that sends out direct MP3 links to the newest music from the community - like getting a free hit of totally fresh music a few times a week. To sign up for that, go here.
MP3.com has sucked for years - it's been the Microsoft of the online music world - all for it's own financial gain.
Ampfea is the Linux of the online music world - anything from the community is for the community, and that's NEVER going to change.
Instead of renaming themselves in a pathetic attempt to remove their undeniable links with spyware, why not just stop writing spyware, and instead write a piece of software that's actually useful for something.
That way, people will download their software based on it's own merit, rather than having the new Claria spyware drive-by installed on them in the same fashion that the Gator spyware currently is.
Changing your name to disassociate yourself from your past activities is something career criminals like to do. In this case it is nothing short of a total admission of guilt.
Slashdot Mirror
Plus if your virii/worms can't touch that other partition, you have a "trusted" way to work on restoring your system in the case something bad happens without having to do the fdisk/format/reinstall sequence.
Oh come on - how long will it take someone to find a way to circumvent that? A month? Less? Going on M$'s past record, my bet is on the latter.
The fact is that it's never going to be as safe as a read only CD / DVD with the install files on it.
What a fucking joke that is!!
Your hard drive gets screwed (hardware failure, for exmaple), so you can't re-install on a new disk because you don't have the installation media?
And I suppose it also has the "feature" that it'll automatically "fix" any "corrupt" (Linux/BSD) partitions it discovers on bootup?
What a stupid, usless waste of hard drive space to save on the price of an install DVD. This just smacks of taking choices away from the user (other than the choice to boycott this kind of shit completely).
Not forgetting the Lowtech: Redundant Technology Initiative in Sheffield UK. Doing a very similar thing with recycled older hardware, making cool tech-art, and donathing machines to charities and disadvantaged people.
Really cool stuff - all brought to you with the help of Open Source Software!
...however, it's not about better products, it's about mindshare of the buyers.
I've been building PCs for quite a few years now, and have nearly always used and recommended AMD processors over Intel. In my opinion, AMDs cost less, often outperform their Intel equivalents, and lead the way when it comes to new innovations.
I guess the reason they don't have a bigger market share is because a lot of the OEM companies only sell Intel, and because Joe Public only knows about MHz as a measure of speed.
Hey, I just had a great idea!! If I form a company and deliberately write insecure, malicious code with backdoors in it, I could use it to control the governments of the world and become obscenely rich!
Oh, wait... someone else has already done that, and most likely patented the idea. I don't want to get busted for patent infringement, man!
Damn... back to the drawing board.
SAMBA Is Not An Emulator...
Mu-Sly is not a dictionary! Still, my bad on the choice of words. You knew what I meant though, dag nammit!
Not only does Samba 3 support Active Directory (see "Major New Features" on that page), but it's also 2.5 times faster than Win2k3 Server in the same role, and scales up considerably better as well.
Kinda funny how Samba kicks the shit out of the thing it was designed to emulate, once again showing that Open Source is A Good Thing(tm).
Careful before you bash Plumbers and Mechanics. I know numerous blue collar workers that earn a fantastic living.
Whoa there! I was never bashing plumbers or mechanics - merely pointing out how they can earn pretty much the same wage as me (and often a lot more) without having to go to university to get to it.
I've heard numerous tales of accountants and lawyers who quit to become blue collar workers because they could still earn a decent wage and also enjoy good quality of life. I myself considered quitting my current job to work in a music technology shop - the wages were lower, but I would have enjoyed it a lot more and still been able to pretty-much afford my current lifestyle.
For my brother (apprentice quantity surveyor) I think not going to university is absolutely the best decision he could have made. Blue collar workers are where it's at money-wise these days, and in a few years time, he will definitely be earning the same as me, if not more.
Where I work, we've just taken on a new programmer guy who has a degree, and has spent the last four years or so working in a f*cking Burger King because he couldn't find a job in computing. He's good, and his interview was good too (he's certainly not a shmuck) - it's just a simple fact that there aren't enough computing jobs around at the moment.
Maybe it's just that good in the US, because holy crap that's a high average starting salary. Here in the UK the current average computing starting wage (based on my own experience and that of my friends) is something like 20k GBP (37k USD). I have a high-pass degree in Computer Science from a well respected university, but with the current computing job climate it would be seriously hard to get a job paying more than 25k GBP (46k USD) as a starting wage. (Hell, I'm not even on that much yet - far from it!)
It's extremely annoying, given that mechanics and plumbers (or even totally unskilled jobs like shunting boxes around a warehouse, which I did for a year or so a while back) can earn you almost as much as it's possible to earn with a degree these days.
The value of degrees has been reduced due to the UK government's insane scheme to get more and more people to go to university. We don't need more people to go to university - we need to make it harder to go to university so that only the people who really want to do it (and have the skills) can go, rather than lowering the difficulty of getting a degree so that the people who loaf it through university can also get degrees. It should be HARD to get a degree - I'm not saying it was easy, but I think it could have been harder. A degree should mean something, but these days I'm not sure it really does, because "everyone has one".
My youger brother decided not to go to university, and is an apprentice quantity surveyor in the building trade. He's a very intelligent guy, but it's just not worth him getting a degree. In five years time, I will be absolutely unsurprised to hear that he's earning considerably more than me (which he almost certainly will be).
Degrees aren't all they're cracked up to be, and the "extra" money you earn for having one barely covers the cost of going to university for four years in the first place.
I'm glad I have a degree, but it's not the big money earner it's cracked up to be - jobs are just too scarce at the moment. Personally, I blame the people who did computing degrees around the time of the dot com boom because they needed a degree and heard it was "where the money was". Now, there's a surplus of computer qualified people around, meaning that plenty of us who are actually really enjoy computers and are good at what we do can't get jobs because the gold-rush crowd are still hanging around.
From Glory to Sideshow: The Space Station's Story
By WILLIAM J. BROAD
Published: February 3, 2004
In 1989, when the first President George Bush announced his plan to send American astronauts back to the Moon and on to Mars, he called the proposed space station "our critical next step in all our space endeavors." It would be a base in the weightlessness of space where big rockets would be assembled and blast off on voyages of exploration: "a new bridge between the worlds."
Now, with the outpost hurtling through space 240 miles above Earth and with 16 nations struggling to complete the most challenging engineering project of all time, the station has suddenly become a $100 billion dead end.
The current President Bush made no mention of it as a steppingstone in his speech on Jan. 14 reviving the call for missions to the Moon and Mars. Instead, he spoke of it as a site of biomedical research and an "obligation" that the United States had to help finish.
Mr. Bush gave no clear indication how, or whether, the United States planned to use the station after its prospective completion in 2010. With NASA focusing its efforts and its budget on the Moon and Mars, the station's prospects are uncertain.
"I'm worried that they're going to cut off the space shuttle before we have another vehicle that can fly," said Senator Bill Nelson, a Florida Democrat who is the only current member of Congress to have flown in space. "And that will drastically reduce space station use."
What happened? How did the station go from star to sideshow? Experts cite a litany of factors: cost overruns, design changes, new perceptions of technical risk after the shuttle disasters and shifting national priorities. For instance, orbital changes to accommodate Russia after the cold war made it harder to use the station as a launching pad.
The tale has no real bad guys, the experts say, but many false promises.
"It was always a steppingstone to the stars," said Dr. Howard E. McCurdy, a space historian at American University. "It was sold as all things to all people."
Dr. Alex Roland, a former NASA historian now at Duke University, said a moral of the story was that Congress and the public needed to work harder to hold the space agency accountable for its dreams.
"They keep getting trapped in their own rhetoric," he said. "They're willing victims of it. But as public policy it's a disaster because it feeds unrealistic expectations."
At the start of the space age, visionaries invariably saw outposts in earth orbit as jumping-off points. Dr. Wernher von Braun, in a famous 1952 article, told of a huge inhabited wheel. "From this platform," he said, "a trip to the Moon itself will be just a step."
In 1968, Stanley Kubrick's movie "2001: A Space Odyssey" featured a giant outpost in Earth orbit that was a way station to the Moon and Jupiter.
Finally, after decades of fantasies, President Ronald Reagan proposed in 1984 that the United States actually build a space station. It too was envisioned as a hub for colonies on the Moon and Mars. For Mr. Reagan, the station also represented a way to challenge the Soviet Union. In the cold war, Moscow made human outposts a hallmark of its space activities.
But Congress did not vote construction money to pay for either Mr. Reagan's vision or that of the first President Bush. Not until 1993 did a new a new vision for space take shape, this one emphasizing harmony over rivalry. That September, President Bill Clinton announced that Russia had joined the station effort as a full partner. Its giant rockets were seen as a boon for the project and a good backup if the shuttles should again fail catastrophically, as the Challenger did in 1986.
"One world, one station," said Daniel S. Goldin, NASA's administrator at the time.
There was just one problem. For the Russian rockets to reach the grand unified station, it would need a different orbit.
Shuttles flying out of Florida usually go into an or
"buying music is a waste of money! Why would I do something like that?"
OK, let's put that in context. I have to say that I actually agree with her almost completely. Take into consideration that compared to DVDs and computer games, CDs offer far less bang for the buck. DVDs and games continue to fall in price, tending towards the realm of CD prices, while CDs continute to increase in price, now often costing twice as much as they did five to ten years ago.
So, in context, buying music is a waste of money, but only in the current music marketplace. Once the major labels have had their grip considerable weakened, music prices will fall to the level they should be at (hopefully with artists also taking a bigger cut from the sale of each album) and it will no longer be a waste of money compared to other forms of entertainment.
As a semi-professional musician myself - currently independent and glad of it - I have no worries whatsoever that music will once again return to being a saleable commodity, and I will be able to make money from my music when I need to. All it needs is for the market place to return to a realistic shape. The sooner the major labels lose their grip, the sooner this will happen.
Aah, but to a large extent, you've swallowed what the major labels wanted you to swallow.
We have no way of knowing how many MP3 downloads resulted in the purchase of CDs, so let me just talk about one quantifiable measure: my own experience.
Thanks to downloading one Boards Of Canada track from Kazaa out of curiosity a couple of years ago, I took a gamble and bought one of their albums. Since then, I have purchased almost everything they've ever released, including re-issues of their back catalogue. The stuff that I haven't managed to buy (because it's not available) I've got downloaded, and am more than willing to pay for now that it is "available" again so to speak. Furthermore, my purchasing frenzy extended to other artists on Warp Records, and also to other artists in similar genres on other labels.
You see, there may have been a billion Boards of Canada MP3s downloaded, but if only 1% of those downloads result in a purchase (or several, in my case) then it's money that the artist and record label would not have seen otherwise - free download or not.
P2P and Internet Radio are the goose that laid the golden egg for independent artists and records labels - they are the radio station for stuff that doesn't get played on the radio, and allow Joe Public to chop and change musical tastes, and experiment with stuff they would never even have heard of before.
Independent labels who don't subscribe to the payola system operated by the RIAA have benefitted hugely from the ability to get their music out there to the masses - whether for free or otherwise, if the music is good, fans will spring up for it, and will most likely spend money on it at some point or other.
The major labels are scared about losing control - because for once, people can actually discover new (independent) music for themselves, and have a much greater freedom to escape from the prescribed "hits" played by the likes of MTV and Clearchannel affiliated radio stations.
Is it easier to pay a very very reasonable price for some unrestricted MP3s that you can download immediately, or to hunt around on a shady P2P network looking for files in order to get them for free? I would say yes, much much easier. If it takes me two days to track down all the tracks from an album that I could just buy for $8 or whatever, then I'd be a fool to waste my time trying to get it for "free". My time is most certainly NOT free to me!
There will always be "kids" who will download free music because they can't afford to pay for it - but in that case, they wouldn't have paid for it in the first place anyway. Kids grow up, get jobs, and remember the music that they like - and then they buy it. The trouble with modern pop music is that artists are ten-a-penny and are never around for more than a year or two - long term appeal is not a concern in pop music.
Independent labels work better because they take the trouble to release top quality music with longevity. Boards of Canada's music will still be great in 10 years time, when Britney Spears and whoever else will have long been forgotten about.
Pop music relies on cheap fads to sell huge quantities for a short period of time. It needs market control and censorship of all alternative sources of music to maintain it's iron grip on the music that we can and can't hear. The reason for it's declining sales compared to increasing sales for independent labels is simply because of it's limited short term appeal. So yes, MP3s possibly do spell the death of such prescribed fake institutions as "The Top 10" and so on, but to the benefit of far far more interesting things.
A crappy, overpriced pop single that is only designed to be listened to and enjoyed for a month or two has no chance against a top quality album at an affordable price, that will still take your breath away in 10 years time.
The reason the major labels are losing money, is because their payola racket and attrocious designer-hit "music" simply cannot compete in the lo
Next we have Linux users violating the EULA for the X-Box and tinkering with it so that it can run Linux.
Why on earth any sane person would want to take a bitching game machine like X-box and ruin it by installing Linux is a mystery to me.
But that's a big question about ownership of the box. If you buy an Xbox and want to break it (by smashing it with a hammer, for example) then who is to stop you? It's your Xbox, right?
So, if you want to "break" it by attempting to install other software on it, then why should you not be allowed to? It's your Xbox, after all, and if you break it, it's your problem.
Trying to prevent people doing unintended things with equipment that they own is ridiculous. Sure, you can make it illegal, but there is no point in making laws that people are just not going to follow, since that only serves to bring the rest of the law into disrepute.
You may not understand why someone would want to run Linux on their Xbox, but really - why should Microsoft (or you, or anyone else) give a shit what anybody wants to do with their own Xbox? They stumped up the cash to buy it in the first place, therefore it's their choice what they do with it.
The DMCA is a stupid law that serves no good purpose whatsoever, and by it's very existence deserves to be disobeyed. Using a machine for something other than it's original intended purpose is a totally different ballpark to copyright infringement, and should not be illegal.
The government that governs best, governs least.
Mid-range graphics cards seem a slightly pointless purchase, given that you can buy top-of-the-range cards from 6 months ago for a fraction of their original prices (not to mention the second hand prices).
Why buy something mediocre but brand new, when you could buy something that absolutely kicked ass six months ago for a similar amount of money?
So take the free tools you have been given, run with them, be innovative and turn them into something new.
If you can't be innovative, you'll never compete against anything anyway - you'll just go on re-inventing the wheel for the rest of your days.
It doesn't mean less programmers required, just less run-of-the mill "programmers" required. If you can be imaginative and innovate, you will always be able to compete.
These numbers don't make sense.
Ahh, but they do make sense, because as Benjamin Disraeli said: "There are lies, damn lies, and statistics."
MP3.com worked fantastically for a while, but ultimately a stupid interface, too much commercialism, having to sign up every time you downloaded something (why not just allow you to create a perpetual username?), and lack of any peer review system meant that it's signal-to noise-ratio was just too high for most people to bother with. (Plus the signup thing - even with fake details - was just too much of a drag.)
What's needed is not outright censorship of music that doesn't fit your taste (like the record companies do), but just a slashdot-style moderation and meta-moderation system for music. That way, every artist can still be heard, and people who want to just download the "best" stuff can find it easily enough.
A system we're planning over at Ampfea will do something along these lines. We're currently a rather music-technology-geek friendly community, but we're working on making our site a lot more accesible to average Joe as well.
Not that it will make much money (if any) but it'll be a damn good system!
Seems to me that is the real issue, people that own a Tivo are much, much less likely to watch something 'cause nothing better is on'.
Do we really need Tivo though? If nothing better is on, why not simply switch off the TV and do something else instead?
Dependence on TV as a non-stop source of entertainment has basically eroded our ability to get off our asses and find something else to do. Too many people would rather watch utter crap on TV than switch it off and partake in another activity.
I'm not quite down with the "burn your TV" crowd, but if you don't watch TV in a selective manner already, then you've more than succumbed to the addiction.
Adverts or not, we don't need Tivo - we just need to watch less crap on TV in general.
That's not quite what I meant though. I was talking more about detecting exploitable machines as soon as they attempt to connect to the network, rather than blocking machines that are already sending out "evil" packets.
For example, running a series of tests against a machine to see if it is susceptable to the RPC exploit (and so on) before allowing it to connect to your network, and then disallowing it access until it's security is tightened.
This way, each machine would be forced to have a sensible security policy in place before being allowed to connect to the Internet - a kind of "internet roadworthiness" test to make sure that you can't just connect any old piece of crap to a public network and expect it not to get exploited.
I'm sure there's a way of doing this without going the Palladium ("trusted" / proprietary) route. It wouldn't need to be built in at the hardware level or anything, just a series of tests to ensure that machines connecting to the Internet have at least some semblence of a security policy in place.
If anything, it could at least alert users of unpatched Windows boxes that they are totally open to exploits, or alert people running open relays and so on.
Fucked?
In a word: yes.
The more I read about stuff like the DCMA (now some uber-DCMA is in force in the UK and other parts of Europe too), the more I long to move to a country where this kind of shit just isn't going on, where the government represents it's people (not it's corporate backers) and where true democracy reigns.
The only problem is that I'm pretty much certain that such a place is merely a figment of my imagination, and that actually the whole world is just one big fucked up place in this day and age.
We're stuck with this shit now, so we either have to deal with it (actively or passively), ignore it (bad idea), stop being such idealists (not necessarily possible) or kill ourselves.
Personally, I'm trying hard to go with the "doing something about it while not getting too depressed over it all" angle, but it's not easy. We have to fight for the stuff that we believe in, and that can be both rewarding and taxing on a daily basis.
(So, the razor blades it is then...)
Maybe Cisco could work to block packets from insecure, unpatched Windows machines for currently known exploits? That would pretty much kill the cause of the problem at it's root, although I'm sure it would introduce a whole bunch of other problems that I haven't thought of yet! (Here's just one problem - how would you get to windowsupdate.com if all your packets were being blocked?)
Even if this isn't the world as they want it, they need to figure out how to exploit (my emphasis) it as best they can.
That just about hits the nail on the head. When are people (including the recording artists themselves) going to realise that the likes of the RIAA are only out for their own financial gain?
They don't care about good music, they certainly don't care about consumers, they don't even care about the majority of recording artists, preferring the elite few. No, the RIAA only cares about exploitation.
RIAA mission number one is to make money off other people's backs through a monopolistic payola system that retains near ultimate control over what we can and can't listen to, and exploits everyone it comes into contact with along the way - from the artists themselves, to the consumers of the finished product. It's all about money.
The only way we can stop this bullshit is to stop buying their products. How? By using The RIAA Radar of course!
Damn, I was about to say the same thing!
Over at Ampfea, we've been doing the opposite of MP3.com for quite a while. OK, so we're not as big and we're mostly for electronic music, but there's room to grow with our users to provide the music that they want, all virtually free (we have free mirrors, or you can buy bandwidth to download from the main site), all legal.
Ampfea is great because it's a community (with a real sense of community spirit), not a company. It really is just music for the sake of music, and it's damn good music too.
To start downloading music, this page is a good start.
We also have a mailing list that sends out direct MP3 links to the newest music from the community - like getting a free hit of totally fresh music a few times a week. To sign up for that, go here.
MP3.com has sucked for years - it's been the Microsoft of the online music world - all for it's own financial gain.
Ampfea is the Linux of the online music world - anything from the community is for the community, and that's NEVER going to change.
Interested?
Instead of renaming themselves in a pathetic attempt to remove their undeniable links with spyware, why not just stop writing spyware, and instead write a piece of software that's actually useful for something.
That way, people will download their software based on it's own merit, rather than having the new Claria spyware drive-by installed on them in the same fashion that the Gator spyware currently is.
Changing your name to disassociate yourself from your past activities is something career criminals like to do. In this case it is nothing short of a total admission of guilt.
Has the US finally realised that it's laws are unenforcable overseas?
(I was beginning to wonder when that would happen.)