You're correct in that there are two copyrights on a piece of recorded music, one for the recording and another for the underlying work. The copyright on the recording is invariably held by the record label. However, unless the composer or songwriter has explicitly assigned the rights to the underlying work, he will still hold that copyright.
The payment of royalties from a performing rights organization (e.g., ASCAP, BMI, SECAM, etc.) is always to the holder of the underlying work's copyright (the songwriter or his assignee). The use of a specific recording of a work (say, in a movie soundtrack or on a commercial spot) would entail a separate licensing agreement with the record label (who holds the rights to that recording), plus the songwriter's royalties.
There shouldn't be any significant differences between Canada and the US with regards to royalties and licensing.
Royalties are paid to the writer of a piece of music, not the performer or recording artist (unless they are one in the same).
If, for example, a band releases an album of cover tunes, the mechanical royalties from the pressing, as well as the performance royalties from airplay, go to the songwriters. If one of the songs is used in a movie, the synchronization royalties go to the writer. If a song from the album is used in a commercial advertisement, the transcription royalties go to the songwriter.
The only revenue stream a band would see from an album of cover tunes would be those contractually agreed upon from the label (a percentage of net sales less holdbacks like reserves, giveaways, and breakage).
We spend a bit over US$40B (yes, billion) on the unwinnable war on drugs.
While I agree that the so-called war on drugs is a waste of time, money, and effort, for a politician, any politician, regardless of ideology or party affiliation, to suggest a cut in funding for drug interdiction (much less de-criminalization or legalization) would be political suicide.
If a politician speaks out against this "war" on drugs, the opposition is only to happy to label him as "soft on crime". "Soft on crime" is today's equivalent of the Fifties' "Communist sympathizer".
Even beyond the political considerations, consider that $40 billion budget as a 1/10th scale model of the military budget: a fair chunk of this ends up in the hands of private corporations. They're grabbing on that money tit with both hands and never letting go, and there's an army of lobbyists to make sure the money keeps flowing.
Even though Firefox should be immune to most (though not all) instances of spyware and adware, I'd like to see some sort of active countermeasures against sites that attempt to install this shitware on a users system:
Record the offending URL and add the domain to the hosts file (as 0.0.0.0 or 127.0.0.1)
Transmit the offending URL to a DDoS botnet
Look up domain information via whois and post the administrative and billing contact e-mail addresses to Usenet for harvesting
Dial the phone numbers for administrative and billing contacts via fax gateways (every two minutes for 48 hours)
Send anonymous e-mail to the Department of Homeland Security stating that the above domain contacts are Al-Qaeda operatives seeking to subvert personal computers for an attack on the Federal Reserve Bank
Extreme? Sure. But every time WhenU or Claria or 180Solutions or DyFuCa gets dropped on someone's computer God kills a kitten. WON'T SOMEBODY THINK OF THE KITTENS?!?
The latest variations of the W32.Beagle virus might be skewing the numbers here. These variants place copies of themselves in any folder on a Windows system that contains the string "shar" (from Symantec:
Attempts to spread across file-sharing networks, such as Kazaa and iMesh, by copying itself into folders that contain the string "shar" in their names. The worm uses the following file names:
ACDSee 9.exe Adobe Photoshop 9 full.exe Ahead Nero 7.exe Matrix 3 Revolution English Subtitles.exe Microsoft Office 2003 Crack, Working!.exe Microsoft Office XP working Crack, Keygen.exe Microsoft Windows XP, WinXP Crack, working Keygen.exe Opera 8 New!.exe Porno Screensaver.scr Porno pics arhive, xxx.exe Porno, sex, oral, anal cool, awesome!!.exe Serials.txt.exe WinAmp 5 Pro Keygen Crack Update.exe WinAmp 6 New!.exe Windown Longhorn Beta Leak.exe Windows Sourcecode update.doc.exe XXX hardcore images.exe
If you count all of these infected systems that drop copies of the virus in "Shared" folders (and if my Inbox is any indication there are thousands), then you're not going to get an accurate count of actual software that's being traded on P2P networks.
Once upon a time, I would think nothing of spending a summer afternoon sitting in the shade of a tall tree with a novel and reading it from cover to cover. It was enlightenment, it was escape, it was inspiring; a good book would fill me with the ambition to become a great writer.
Alas, some time in the last ten years this habit has fallen by the wayside. I can only place partial blame on Slashdot (or the net writ large). For the last dozen years I've been involved in technical fields (IT, graphics, animation) where much of my non-billable hours have been spent reading manuals and other forms of documentation.
Now I consider myself lucky if I read ten novels in a year. Prior to 1994 I'd read five or six times that number. And my reading material tends to books that lend themselves to fragmentation, like anthologies or collections (A Bukowski Reader comes to mind here). In terms of pure word count, I really think that I read more than ever. But how much intellectual nourishment can I derive from a Cisco IOS manual?
It all comes down to a time management problem, I suppose. I take my work home with me and I shouldn't. Ever hopeful to return to my former voraciousness, I still scour used bookstores for volumes I haven't yet read: The Name of the Rose awaits, as does The Cuckoo's Egg and Delillo's Underworld.
Aw, hell. I'm pulling all of my power strips and throwing them in a closet for the weekend. It's going to be a beautiful weekend here on Cape Cod and I've got a stack of books to read.
Current car: '95 Olds Cutlass Ciera station wagon (3.1L V6). Mileage: 19 to 24 MPG, mostly 1 to 3 mile trips in moderate traffic, occasional 75 to 250 mile highway trips. I spend about $10/week in gas on the average, and a trip from my home on Cape Cod to Boston and back (150 miles) costs about $12.
Last car: '89 Ford Festiva (nicknamed "The Escape Pod", 1.3L I4). Mileage: estimated 40 MPG, all short trips (home to supermarket once each week, plus monthly trips to the MicroCenter computer store). I'd put about $5 of gas into it every two months, though I probably lost more than I used from evaporation through a hole in the gas tank. It was a "disposable car", meant to last through one summer. I ended up driving it for three years. Buzzy, dangerous, but fun.
I used to drive cabs for Boston Cab, back in the '80s. It was my day job for a few years while I did the rock 'n' roll habitrail thang. Mostly Chevy Impalers and Ford Crown Vics (some ex-police cars with 4bbl 305 or 351...wicked fast even with 100K on the odometer), some Checker Marathons (w/MOPAR 225 I6), occasionally a Volare, New Yorker, or K-Car. Average 10 MPG, with a 80/20 mix of city/highway. Lots of idling in traffic, on taxi stands, plenty of "point 'n' squirt" driving. Gotta love that rear wheel drive...
I've got a lead foot, so I expect that my mileage is going to suffer. Still, going from the Festiva to the Ciera wagon last year was sort of jarring, having my gas expenditures multiplied by 16. Part of that was moving from the city to the Cape, where I have to drive every day (as mentioned above, the Festiva wouldn't leave my driveway much more than once a week). Still, I think I'd get nearly 40 MPG or so from the Festiva these days (even without a patched gas tank).
Oh, and after I bought the Ciera for $2K used (with 64K miles on it), I sold the Festiva to a friend for a dollar. It was that or junk the poor thing. I do miss that little car.
Damn, you're right. Shame on me for using heavy machinery like whois while drinking.
Let this be a lesson to all you boys and grrrls out there: if you're thinking of posting to Slashdot while you're drinking, take the car out for a nice long drive to clear your head first.
Gah! The Russian Mob! Well, I'm all for killing spammers, but in SOVIET RUSSIA spammer kills YOU!
Okay, who owns that netblock?
$ whois 207.107.162.252 Sprint Canada Inc. NETBLK-SPRINTCAN-BLK3 (NET-207-107-0-0-1) 207.107.0.0 - 207.107.255.255 Western Inventory Service NET-WESTERNIN-107-163 (NET-207-107-162-0-1) 207.107.162.0 - 207.107.163.255
Canadians! Back-bacon eating, toque-wearing, Stanley-Cup-losing Canadians. I'd rather take on 25,000,000 Canadians any day than mess with the Russkie Mafia.
Hmmm...I knew UUNET would pop up somewhere. There are a couple of MTI Software results on Google; one sells support and service for OpenVMS systems, the other sells bulk e-mail software. I think it's the latter...
Administrative Contact:
Bentley, Nick nick@mtisoftware.com
4577 Gunn Highway #161
Tampa, FL 33624
US
813-968-1531
Technical Contact:
Li, Jonathan jonathan@123cheapdomains.com
920 Cranbrook Court, Suite #7
Davis, Ca 95616
US
1-415-682-3859
Florida. It figures. First in spam, first in hanging chads, first in the hearts of the nation.
So, to sum up, we have an Axis of Evil: Russians, Canadians, and Floridians, all conspiring to deploy Weapons of Mass E-mail Destruction. Gimme a couple of days to throw together a Powerpoint presentation for the UN Security Council and maybe we can get a posse...err, a coalition together.
How do you get these worms? This sounds incredulous...
Here's a snippet of the log from my Linksys router:
00:00:26 TCP from 200.63.154.32:4927 to XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX:445 00:00:29 TCP from 68.219.231.103:2712 to XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX:445 00:00:29 TCP from 200.63.154.32:4927 to XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX:445 00:00:32 TCP from 68.219.231.103:2712 to XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX:445 00:00:42 TCP from 68.144.136.248:3225 to XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX:445 00:00:59 TCP from 81.185.113.170:3646 to XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX:445 00:01:36 TCP from 68.144.169.29:2873 to XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX:445 00:01:52 TCP from 4.41.255.6:3139 to XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX:445 00:02:07 TCP from 200.223.92.184:4958 to XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX:445 00:02:08 TCP from 68.94.121.110:3927 to XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX:445 00:02:10 TCP from 200.223.92.184:4958 to XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX:445 00:02:11 TCP from 68.94.121.110:3927 to XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX:445 00:02:19 TCP from 81.218.207.145:4814 to XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX:445 00:02:28 TCP from 80.198.29.151:4015 to XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX:445 00:02:48 TCP from 63.230.237.96:3181 to XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX:445 00:03:00 TCP from 209.50.93.166:4294 to XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX:445 00:03:12 TCP from 24.80.105.49:2350 to XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX:445
The timestamp is hours:minutes:seconds. XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX is my WAN address (redacted), an East Coast Verizon DSL line. Port 445 is probably being targetted by W32.Sasser.
Sixteen attempts in 3 minutes and 12 seconds.
A couple of things are interesting about this log excerpt. First, there are no attempts from the 141.154.* netblock (where my WAN address resides). Second, I usually see a number of different ports listed (139, 1025, 1026, 1080, 3129, 5000), from both viruses and people probing for open proxies. Then again, it's Sunday night. I've noticed that virus traffic is higher during business hours in the US.
Interesting stuff. What I wonder about is if Japan had been taked by conventional forces from the US, UK and Russia, would we have goten a divided country like with Germany? A Communist North Japan and a democratic South? Would there have been a "Tokyo wall"?
There is in fact a Russian-Japanese dispute over the Kurile Islands, the most northern part of the Japanese archipelago. And Russia has a claim on Sakhalin Island that dates back a hundred years.
As for the invasion of the Japanese Home Islands by US and UK forces, at the time of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, plans were being finalized for Operation CORONET and Operation OLYMPIC, the invasions of southern Kyushu and central Honshu respectively (late '45 and early '46). Losses were projected to be in the order of 250,000 Allied casualties. In anticpation of these invasions, the Japanese government intended to arm civilians with antiquated small arms, bamboo spears, and satchel charges for disabling armor (basically suicide bombings, Kamikazes without planes). Figure one or two million civilian casualties.
Allied plans also called for "softening" the invasion beaches with nuclear weapons. Conventional aerial and sea bombardment hadn't been very effective at Iwo Jima and Okinawa.
And though the Soviets declared war on Japan on the very day that Nagasaki had been nuked, there is some question as to whether they would have been able to mount an effective seaborne invasion. Two factors come into play: experience and infrastructure. The US had been in the invasion business for three years, since Guadalcanal. The US Navy and the UK Royal Navy had a cadre of experienced personnel and a fleet of landing craft unmatched by any other armed forces. Though the Soviet Red Army had some limited sealift capacity, chances are that they would have played to their own strengths and consolidated their gains on the Korean Peninsula and in Manchuria. For all their shortcomings with amphibious landings, the Red Army were unmatched when it came to a land war.
I'm not saying that the Soviets couldn't open a northern front in the Japanese archipelago, since they did have a foothold. I do think that they would have gone for the low-hanging fruit on mainland Asia.
It would also have been interesting to see what would have happened had the Japanese been successful at Midway.
I think it would have been the same war, only about a year longer.
Let's posit that the Japanese sink two of three US Navy carriers, only lose two of their own, and that Midway is occupied.
Take a look at this map. Midway is within range of USAAF land-based bombers flying out of Hawaii. It's also a long way from the Home Islands, which entails a supply line problem. In 1942, US Navy fleet submarines were still plagued with defective torpedoes, but that problem was solved within a year. 1943 would have been an unpleasant year for Japanese troops on Midway: starving, thirsty, and living in bombshelters.
Retaking Midway would have been difficult, no doubt, and would have drawn assets needed in the Southwest Pacific, but it would not have been as hard as Tarawa or Iwo Jima, places where the terrain favored the defender, and the Japanese had years to dig in and prepare for an invasion.
The loss of two carriers would have been quite a blow to the US Navy but, to put this into perspective, by 1945 the United States had built 137 carriers (around 30 full sized hulls and the rest smaller escort carriers). The Japanese built 13. The US had a commensurate advantage in aircraft production and the training of personnel.
Finally, there was the matter of the US having broken the Japanese JN-25 naval code, part of the reason the US Navy could anticipate Japan's moves towards Midway. Even after this defeat, the Japanese Navy didn't change their codebooks, leading to the intercept of Admiral Yamamoto's transport plane in 1943. A victory at Midway wouldn't have changed this.
Now, I do admit that this raises the question as to whether the war in Europe would have been lengthened by a setback at Midway. Would Berlin have been the target for the first atomic weapon? Would the Soviets have stopped at the Elbe? The Soviets adopted a stance of neutrality towards Japan until 1945; would they have entered the theatre earlier?
The Cold War battle lines were drawn by WWII. I think that adding 12 to 18 months to the war changes those lines.
Autodesk 3DStudio R4 (for DOS, from 1994, which I still use now and again) has a plug-in which does mesh optimization, simplifying objects by combining faces that are nearly co-planar. Depending on the complexity of the object, a savings of between 30% and 70% can be achieved.
Yes, I RTFA, and I don't see how this is such a big deal. Now, if I could reduce face count by 90% with no loss of detail...
I agree that there's more to Linux than Linus, but I think I can explain this emphasis on the man rather than his work.
It's part of our culture to look for the human interest angle in any story. It's a staple of news, entertainment, and pretty much any form of mass media. It transforms the abstract to the concrete.
Part of the Linus/Linux appeal, especially among/. readers, is that Mr. Torvalds is an intelligent, well-spoken, down-to-earth person. There's nothing extraordinary about him. He's not a Stephen Hawking super-genius with a nuclear-powered exoskeleton. Linux was the child of an undergraduate with a 386 and an itch to scratch. All the rest was a matter of circumstance (i.e., the AT&T vs. BSD litigation, availability of GNU utilities and Minix, growth of the Internet, etc.). If Linus hadn't done it, it's quite possible that someone else could or would have.
And that's the appeal: any number of people could have created Linux; it took no special talents or extraordinary effort. But Linus is the one who did it, and he told the world about it, and that was the spark that lit the fire. The story has a sort of indie rock DIY ethos about it, which speaks to another cultural phenomenon, that of the lone inventor, the rugged individualist. Of course, Linux is a massively collaborative effort but it took one bored undergrad to get it started.
And this the appeal: it could have been anyone out there. What started in a Finnish dorm room is now something that IBM is willing to back to the tune of billions of dollars. It's the quintessential garage band success story.
Yeah, this story is verging on the over-the-top. What's next, Linus endorses the Atkins Diet? But it's a human interest story and Slashdot is no different from your local news in this respect.
Germans dropped some first bombs to London accidentaly, English answered with massive bombings targetted to civilians.
The "accident" to which you refer, a flight of Luftwaffe bombers dropping their load on London having strayed off course during the Battle of Britain is true, of course. But the Blitz that followed, as well as the V-Weapons (V-1, V-2), were far from accidental.
And while the USAAF and RAF embraced the aerial part of "Total War", it was Germany that pioneered this tactic, starting in WWI with the shelling of Paris and the aerial attacks on London (via airplane and Zeppelin). This tactic was refined during the Spanish Civil War (c.f., Guernica, an event immortalized by Picasso), which was a dress rehearsal for the Luftwaffe.
In fact, the first bombs that fell on Berlin in WWII were French, dropped from a converted mail plane dubbed the Jules Verne, in May 1940.
Yes, the US and UK dropped tons of ordnance on Germany. But the only thing that kept Nazi Germany from replying in kind was the Luftwaffe's lack of heavy bombers. A prototype of something called the Amerika Bomber was built by Junkers, but Germany lacked the industrial infrastructure to build them in significant numbers. The Luftwaffe's assets were largely medium bombers.
Finally, after the war, the USAAF conducted something called the Strategic Bombing Survey, an assessment of the effectiveness of their heavy bombing strategy. It concluded that the results fell short of pre-war predictions. Enemy morale was never broken. Industrial output was not completely crippled (e.g., machine tools were found to be more durable than the factories that housed them). Given the human cost of the bombing campaign, it would be hard to term this a success. The only plus is that defending against the USAAF and RAF bombers meant that the Germans had to devote 250,000 troops to man thousands of 88mm AA pieces that might have otherwise been used against Allied tanks (the 88 was a dual-purpose weapon).
About 12 years ago, at the New Music Seminar in NYC (it was more of a trade show than a seminar at that point), I saw a demo of exactly what you're describing: a kiosk that would burn CDs to order. Juke-box interface, custom artwork, etc. It was called iMusic or eKiosk or something suitably bland and forgettable. Not more than six months after I saw that demo these were deployed at a number of Tower Records stores.
It failed miserably.
Part of the problem was that this was the late '80s/early '90s and Moore's Law hadn't caught up with the concept. Expensive hard disks limited the amount of music available. Early CD burning tech led to long waits and unreliable discs that wouldn't play in everyone's CD players. On top of this all, it cost more to rent the floor space in the record store than it did to construct these kiosks.
I also think that the developers of the kiosk overestimated the market for what is essentially a digital "mix tape". Most customers of large record stores (and discount stores like [K-|Wal-]Mart) just want to grab the latest pop sensation from the rack without having to choose artist, song, order, or wait for their disc to be burned.
While I think the kiosk would be more cost-effective were it built with today's tech (or even last year's), due to the greater commoditization of pop music (as compared to 1990), the grab 'n' go factor is even bigger.
I remember the puffery on the news about Tiannamen and the great things that the internet was doing for democracy.
I don't remember any puffery about Tienanmen Square and the Internet because there was no puffery about Tienanmen Square and the Internet.
The protests in Tienanmen Square took place in 1989, before even news agencies and television networks were wired, much less Chinese students.
I do recall that fax machines were crucial for the Chinese democracy movement in terms of getting their message out to the rest of the world. And foreign news agencies filed their reports via portable satellite uplinks (for very large values of "portable": 15 or 20 suitcases of equipment) and by hand-carrying video tapes out of the country.
Without equating the two morally, I wonder at the treatment of images leaked from Iraq by modern media and the control entrenched powers have to stifle reporting.
Before the recent Iraq war, foreign reporters arriving in Baghdad to cover the conflict were required by the Iraqi government to surrender their satellite phones and video equipment (the latter now contained in a single suitcase). Reporters managed to skirt these restrictions, like NPR's Anne Garrels, who kept her sat phone.
If anything, an internet connection is easier for a government to block or filter (c.f., Great Firewall of China) than a satellite uplink.
What CAN you actually do with PS (or the Gimp for that matter)? Seriously, I'm fairly clueless about photo editing software, can someone explain this simply to me?
What can't you do with Photoshop? Why, just today I grafted Barbara Bush's face on to Jenna Jamison's body...
But seriously, it's a bitmap editor. You can create and edit bitmaps. Resize and color correct digital photos. Generate textures for 3D models. Create graphic links and banners for web pages. Make files with editable text that can be imported into Illustrator. Browse directories and make contact sheets. Record a macro that crops or resizes a whole folder of images. Convert from one format to another. Clipping paths. Alpha channels. Duotones. CMYK. Barbara Bush's head on Jenna Jamison's body, with a k3wl lens flare effect.
And on the Mac your choice of sound card is: the one supplied.
Unless you're looking to do pro audio. Then you'd want a Mac-compatible card from CreamWare, Alesis, Digidesign, Event, Lucid, Ensoniq, Opcode, Lexicon, RME, Lucid, Sonorus, Echo, or M-Audio, among others.
What, did you think that all those Macs in recording studios were using the built-in audio to run ProTools?
Slashdot Mirror
Why, just last night I wrote a little program that load tests Google.
Regards,
Arthur MyDoom, Jr.
You're correct in that there are two copyrights on a piece of recorded music, one for the recording and another for the underlying work. The copyright on the recording is invariably held by the record label. However, unless the composer or songwriter has explicitly assigned the rights to the underlying work, he will still hold that copyright.
The payment of royalties from a performing rights organization (e.g., ASCAP, BMI, SECAM, etc.) is always to the holder of the underlying work's copyright (the songwriter or his assignee). The use of a specific recording of a work (say, in a movie soundtrack or on a commercial spot) would entail a separate licensing agreement with the record label (who holds the rights to that recording), plus the songwriter's royalties.
There shouldn't be any significant differences between Canada and the US with regards to royalties and licensing.
k.
Royalties are paid to the writer of a piece of music, not the performer or recording artist (unless they are one in the same).
If, for example, a band releases an album of cover tunes, the mechanical royalties from the pressing, as well as the performance royalties from airplay, go to the songwriters. If one of the songs is used in a movie, the synchronization royalties go to the writer. If a song from the album is used in a commercial advertisement, the transcription royalties go to the songwriter.
The only revenue stream a band would see from an album of cover tunes would be those contractually agreed upon from the label (a percentage of net sales less holdbacks like reserves, giveaways, and breakage).
k.
While I agree that the so-called war on drugs is a waste of time, money, and effort, for a politician, any politician, regardless of ideology or party affiliation, to suggest a cut in funding for drug interdiction (much less de-criminalization or legalization) would be political suicide.
If a politician speaks out against this "war" on drugs, the opposition is only to happy to label him as "soft on crime". "Soft on crime" is today's equivalent of the Fifties' "Communist sympathizer".
Even beyond the political considerations, consider that $40 billion budget as a 1/10th scale model of the military budget: a fair chunk of this ends up in the hands of private corporations. They're grabbing on that money tit with both hands and never letting go, and there's an army of lobbyists to make sure the money keeps flowing.
k.
Dance Dance Revolution of the Proletariat.
k.
No, no, the question was "who came up with the name Pentium?" not "how is US foreign policy formulated?".
k.
Extreme? Sure. But every time WhenU or Claria or 180Solutions or DyFuCa gets dropped on someone's computer God kills a kitten. WON'T SOMEBODY THINK OF THE KITTENS?!?
k.
If you count all of these infected systems that drop copies of the virus in "Shared" folders (and if my Inbox is any indication there are thousands), then you're not going to get an accurate count of actual software that's being traded on P2P networks.
k.
Once upon a time, I would think nothing of spending a summer afternoon sitting in the shade of a tall tree with a novel and reading it from cover to cover. It was enlightenment, it was escape, it was inspiring; a good book would fill me with the ambition to become a great writer.
Alas, some time in the last ten years this habit has fallen by the wayside. I can only place partial blame on Slashdot (or the net writ large). For the last dozen years I've been involved in technical fields (IT, graphics, animation) where much of my non-billable hours have been spent reading manuals and other forms of documentation.
Now I consider myself lucky if I read ten novels in a year. Prior to 1994 I'd read five or six times that number. And my reading material tends to books that lend themselves to fragmentation, like anthologies or collections (A Bukowski Reader comes to mind here). In terms of pure word count, I really think that I read more than ever. But how much intellectual nourishment can I derive from a Cisco IOS manual?
It all comes down to a time management problem, I suppose. I take my work home with me and I shouldn't. Ever hopeful to return to my former voraciousness, I still scour used bookstores for volumes I haven't yet read: The Name of the Rose awaits, as does The Cuckoo's Egg and Delillo's Underworld.
Aw, hell. I'm pulling all of my power strips and throwing them in a closet for the weekend. It's going to be a beautiful weekend here on Cape Cod and I've got a stack of books to read.
k.
Someone beat you to it.
k.
Current car: '95 Olds Cutlass Ciera station wagon (3.1L V6). Mileage: 19 to 24 MPG, mostly 1 to 3 mile trips in moderate traffic, occasional 75 to 250 mile highway trips. I spend about $10/week in gas on the average, and a trip from my home on Cape Cod to Boston and back (150 miles) costs about $12.
Last car: '89 Ford Festiva (nicknamed "The Escape Pod", 1.3L I4). Mileage: estimated 40 MPG, all short trips (home to supermarket once each week, plus monthly trips to the MicroCenter computer store). I'd put about $5 of gas into it every two months, though I probably lost more than I used from evaporation through a hole in the gas tank. It was a "disposable car", meant to last through one summer. I ended up driving it for three years. Buzzy, dangerous, but fun.
I used to drive cabs for Boston Cab, back in the '80s. It was my day job for a few years while I did the rock 'n' roll habitrail thang. Mostly Chevy Impalers and Ford Crown Vics (some ex-police cars with 4bbl 305 or 351...wicked fast even with 100K on the odometer), some Checker Marathons (w/MOPAR 225 I6), occasionally a Volare, New Yorker, or K-Car. Average 10 MPG, with a 80/20 mix of city/highway. Lots of idling in traffic, on taxi stands, plenty of "point 'n' squirt" driving. Gotta love that rear wheel drive...
I've got a lead foot, so I expect that my mileage is going to suffer. Still, going from the Festiva to the Ciera wagon last year was sort of jarring, having my gas expenditures multiplied by 16. Part of that was moving from the city to the Cape, where I have to drive every day (as mentioned above, the Festiva wouldn't leave my driveway much more than once a week). Still, I think I'd get nearly 40 MPG or so from the Festiva these days (even without a patched gas tank).
Oh, and after I bought the Ciera for $2K used (with 64K miles on it), I sold the Festiva to a friend for a dollar. It was that or junk the poor thing. I do miss that little car.
k.
Damn, you're right. Shame on me for using heavy machinery like whois while drinking.
Let this be a lesson to all you boys and grrrls out there: if you're thinking of posting to Slashdot while you're drinking, take the car out for a nice long drive to clear your head first.
k.
Okay, who owns send-safe.com?Gah! The Russian Mob! Well, I'm all for killing spammers, but in SOVIET RUSSIA spammer kills YOU!
Okay, who owns that netblock?Canadians! Back-bacon eating, toque-wearing, Stanley-Cup-losing Canadians. I'd rather take on 25,000,000 Canadians any day than mess with the Russkie Mafia.
Now, who hosts www.send-safe.com?Hmmm...I knew UUNET would pop up somewhere. There are a couple of MTI Software results on Google; one sells support and service for OpenVMS systems, the other sells bulk e-mail software. I think it's the latter...Florida. It figures. First in spam, first in hanging chads, first in the hearts of the nation.
So, to sum up, we have an Axis of Evil: Russians, Canadians, and Floridians, all conspiring to deploy Weapons of Mass E-mail Destruction. Gimme a couple of days to throw together a Powerpoint presentation for the UN Security Council and maybe we can get a posse...err, a coalition together.
k.
Here's a snippet of the log from my Linksys router:The timestamp is hours:minutes:seconds. XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX is my WAN address (redacted), an East Coast Verizon DSL line. Port 445 is probably being targetted by W32.Sasser.
Sixteen attempts in 3 minutes and 12 seconds.
A couple of things are interesting about this log excerpt. First, there are no attempts from the 141.154.* netblock (where my WAN address resides). Second, I usually see a number of different ports listed (139, 1025, 1026, 1080, 3129, 5000), from both viruses and people probing for open proxies. Then again, it's Sunday night. I've noticed that virus traffic is higher during business hours in the US.
k.
There is in fact a Russian-Japanese dispute over the Kurile Islands, the most northern part of the Japanese archipelago. And Russia has a claim on Sakhalin Island that dates back a hundred years.
As for the invasion of the Japanese Home Islands by US and UK forces, at the time of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, plans were being finalized for Operation CORONET and Operation OLYMPIC, the invasions of southern Kyushu and central Honshu respectively (late '45 and early '46). Losses were projected to be in the order of 250,000 Allied casualties. In anticpation of these invasions, the Japanese government intended to arm civilians with antiquated small arms, bamboo spears, and satchel charges for disabling armor (basically suicide bombings, Kamikazes without planes). Figure one or two million civilian casualties.
Allied plans also called for "softening" the invasion beaches with nuclear weapons. Conventional aerial and sea bombardment hadn't been very effective at Iwo Jima and Okinawa.
And though the Soviets declared war on Japan on the very day that Nagasaki had been nuked, there is some question as to whether they would have been able to mount an effective seaborne invasion. Two factors come into play: experience and infrastructure. The US had been in the invasion business for three years, since Guadalcanal. The US Navy and the UK Royal Navy had a cadre of experienced personnel and a fleet of landing craft unmatched by any other armed forces. Though the Soviet Red Army had some limited sealift capacity, chances are that they would have played to their own strengths and consolidated their gains on the Korean Peninsula and in Manchuria. For all their shortcomings with amphibious landings, the Red Army were unmatched when it came to a land war.
I'm not saying that the Soviets couldn't open a northern front in the Japanese archipelago, since they did have a foothold. I do think that they would have gone for the low-hanging fruit on mainland Asia.
k.
I think it would have been the same war, only about a year longer.
Let's posit that the Japanese sink two of three US Navy carriers, only lose two of their own, and that Midway is occupied.
Take a look at this map. Midway is within range of USAAF land-based bombers flying out of Hawaii. It's also a long way from the Home Islands, which entails a supply line problem. In 1942, US Navy fleet submarines were still plagued with defective torpedoes, but that problem was solved within a year. 1943 would have been an unpleasant year for Japanese troops on Midway: starving, thirsty, and living in bombshelters.
Retaking Midway would have been difficult, no doubt, and would have drawn assets needed in the Southwest Pacific, but it would not have been as hard as Tarawa or Iwo Jima, places where the terrain favored the defender, and the Japanese had years to dig in and prepare for an invasion.
The loss of two carriers would have been quite a blow to the US Navy but, to put this into perspective, by 1945 the United States had built 137 carriers (around 30 full sized hulls and the rest smaller escort carriers). The Japanese built 13. The US had a commensurate advantage in aircraft production and the training of personnel.
Finally, there was the matter of the US having broken the Japanese JN-25 naval code, part of the reason the US Navy could anticipate Japan's moves towards Midway. Even after this defeat, the Japanese Navy didn't change their codebooks, leading to the intercept of Admiral Yamamoto's transport plane in 1943. A victory at Midway wouldn't have changed this.
Now, I do admit that this raises the question as to whether the war in Europe would have been lengthened by a setback at Midway. Would Berlin have been the target for the first atomic weapon? Would the Soviets have stopped at the Elbe? The Soviets adopted a stance of neutrality towards Japan until 1945; would they have entered the theatre earlier?
The Cold War battle lines were drawn by WWII. I think that adding 12 to 18 months to the war changes those lines.
k.
Autodesk 3DStudio R4 (for DOS, from 1994, which I still use now and again) has a plug-in which does mesh optimization, simplifying objects by combining faces that are nearly co-planar. Depending on the complexity of the object, a savings of between 30% and 70% can be achieved.
Yes, I RTFA, and I don't see how this is such a big deal. Now, if I could reduce face count by 90% with no loss of detail...
k.
Inventor Eli Whitney Applys For "One-Click" Cotton Gin Patent
Pianists Seek Curbs on Player Piano Technology
"Roll Sharing" Circles Seen as Threat to Recital Revenues
Unsolicited Telegraph Messages on the Rise
So-called "Lard" Telegrams Now Comprise 60% of Traffic, Operators Say
Utah Granted Statehood
Gov. McBride Lays Claim to Concept of Statehood, Says Other States Owe $6.99 Each
(I think The Onion does this better than me.)
k.
I agree that there's more to Linux than Linus, but I think I can explain this emphasis on the man rather than his work.
/. readers, is that Mr. Torvalds is an intelligent, well-spoken, down-to-earth person. There's nothing extraordinary about him. He's not a Stephen Hawking super-genius with a nuclear-powered exoskeleton. Linux was the child of an undergraduate with a 386 and an itch to scratch. All the rest was a matter of circumstance (i.e., the AT&T vs. BSD litigation, availability of GNU utilities and Minix, growth of the Internet, etc.). If Linus hadn't done it, it's quite possible that someone else could or would have.
It's part of our culture to look for the human interest angle in any story. It's a staple of news, entertainment, and pretty much any form of mass media. It transforms the abstract to the concrete.
Part of the Linus/Linux appeal, especially among
And that's the appeal: any number of people could have created Linux; it took no special talents or extraordinary effort. But Linus is the one who did it, and he told the world about it, and that was the spark that lit the fire. The story has a sort of indie rock DIY ethos about it, which speaks to another cultural phenomenon, that of the lone inventor, the rugged individualist. Of course, Linux is a massively collaborative effort but it took one bored undergrad to get it started.
And this the appeal: it could have been anyone out there. What started in a Finnish dorm room is now something that IBM is willing to back to the tune of billions of dollars. It's the quintessential garage band success story.
Yeah, this story is verging on the over-the-top. What's next, Linus endorses the Atkins Diet? But it's a human interest story and Slashdot is no different from your local news in this respect.
k.
The "accident" to which you refer, a flight of Luftwaffe bombers dropping their load on London having strayed off course during the Battle of Britain is true, of course. But the Blitz that followed, as well as the V-Weapons (V-1, V-2), were far from accidental.
And while the USAAF and RAF embraced the aerial part of "Total War", it was Germany that pioneered this tactic, starting in WWI with the shelling of Paris and the aerial attacks on London (via airplane and Zeppelin). This tactic was refined during the Spanish Civil War (c.f., Guernica, an event immortalized by Picasso), which was a dress rehearsal for the Luftwaffe.
In fact, the first bombs that fell on Berlin in WWII were French, dropped from a converted mail plane dubbed the Jules Verne, in May 1940.
Yes, the US and UK dropped tons of ordnance on Germany. But the only thing that kept Nazi Germany from replying in kind was the Luftwaffe's lack of heavy bombers. A prototype of something called the Amerika Bomber was built by Junkers, but Germany lacked the industrial infrastructure to build them in significant numbers. The Luftwaffe's assets were largely medium bombers.
Finally, after the war, the USAAF conducted something called the Strategic Bombing Survey, an assessment of the effectiveness of their heavy bombing strategy. It concluded that the results fell short of pre-war predictions. Enemy morale was never broken. Industrial output was not completely crippled (e.g., machine tools were found to be more durable than the factories that housed them). Given the human cost of the bombing campaign, it would be hard to term this a success. The only plus is that defending against the USAAF and RAF bombers meant that the Germans had to devote 250,000 troops to man thousands of 88mm AA pieces that might have otherwise been used against Allied tanks (the 88 was a dual-purpose weapon).
k.
About 12 years ago, at the New Music Seminar in NYC (it was more of a trade show than a seminar at that point), I saw a demo of exactly what you're describing: a kiosk that would burn CDs to order. Juke-box interface, custom artwork, etc. It was called iMusic or eKiosk or something suitably bland and forgettable. Not more than six months after I saw that demo these were deployed at a number of Tower Records stores.
It failed miserably.
Part of the problem was that this was the late '80s/early '90s and Moore's Law hadn't caught up with the concept. Expensive hard disks limited the amount of music available. Early CD burning tech led to long waits and unreliable discs that wouldn't play in everyone's CD players. On top of this all, it cost more to rent the floor space in the record store than it did to construct these kiosks.
I also think that the developers of the kiosk overestimated the market for what is essentially a digital "mix tape". Most customers of large record stores (and discount stores like [K-|Wal-]Mart) just want to grab the latest pop sensation from the rack without having to choose artist, song, order, or wait for their disc to be burned.
While I think the kiosk would be more cost-effective were it built with today's tech (or even last year's), due to the greater commoditization of pop music (as compared to 1990), the grab 'n' go factor is even bigger.
Just my $0.02.
k.
Like him?
k.
I don't remember any puffery about Tienanmen Square and the Internet because there was no puffery about Tienanmen Square and the Internet.
The protests in Tienanmen Square took place in 1989, before even news agencies and television networks were wired, much less Chinese students.
I do recall that fax machines were crucial for the Chinese democracy movement in terms of getting their message out to the rest of the world. And foreign news agencies filed their reports via portable satellite uplinks (for very large values of "portable": 15 or 20 suitcases of equipment) and by hand-carrying video tapes out of the country.
Before the recent Iraq war, foreign reporters arriving in Baghdad to cover the conflict were required by the Iraqi government to surrender their satellite phones and video equipment (the latter now contained in a single suitcase). Reporters managed to skirt these restrictions, like NPR's Anne Garrels, who kept her sat phone.
If anything, an internet connection is easier for a government to block or filter (c.f., Great Firewall of China) than a satellite uplink.
k.
What can't you do with Photoshop? Why, just today I grafted Barbara Bush's face on to Jenna Jamison's body...
But seriously, it's a bitmap editor. You can create and edit bitmaps. Resize and color correct digital photos. Generate textures for 3D models. Create graphic links and banners for web pages. Make files with editable text that can be imported into Illustrator. Browse directories and make contact sheets. Record a macro that crops or resizes a whole folder of images. Convert from one format to another. Clipping paths. Alpha channels. Duotones. CMYK. Barbara Bush's head on Jenna Jamison's body, with a k3wl lens flare effect.
Billing out $90/hr. That's what Photoshop is for.
k.
Unless you're looking to do pro audio. Then you'd want a Mac-compatible card from CreamWare, Alesis, Digidesign, Event, Lucid, Ensoniq, Opcode, Lexicon, RME, Lucid, Sonorus, Echo, or M-Audio, among others.
What, did you think that all those Macs in recording studios were using the built-in audio to run ProTools?
k.