Really? None of these things (jurisdiction, proof, warrant, importing copies to the US) seemed to make much difference when they were after a 15 year old Norwegian teenager instead.
Actually, it is because US companies don't rule the world and really don't have the power to stop international pirates. Plus, you actually have to have evidence before ou arrest somebody and it is hard to get a warrant so you can collect evidence overseas. If you get evidence without reasoning of getting evidence(like getting lucky and knocking on the right door), you can't really use that evidence. The only place companies could stop them is if they press them in the US(not likely) and are exporting them. They can get them as they try to export them. So you see, it is really quite complex for a US company to prevent piracy overseas and I'm sure Interpol is going to waste their precious time arresting a local Mob boss. They have bigger fish to fry then pirates.
I don't know about the license, but from a user perspective, Plesk seems like a decent product. My hosting service sweethomes.com uses it to allow cheapskates like me to run their $10/month sites without giving out shell accounts. For the level it seems targeted at, mostly smallish and personal sites, it seems to work pretty well. I would rather have a shell prompt available, of course, but for the price I really can't complain.
His intro makes several references to the CEA. The many references to libraries and academic exceptions (distance learning, etc) make me think that he was addressing the California Education Association, a large teacher's union and a heavy politcal donor.
I don't have any confirmation of this, it's just total speculation, but hey...this is Slashdot.
I had always considered myself to be in favor of direct democracy. I have always voted and tried to be up on the issuse. A couple of years ago, I moved to a small town in New England with a strong tradition of direct democracy, and guess what? They vote on everything and it bugs the hell out of me.
Seriously, they must have six or seven elections a year. I don't have time to stay on top of the issues or know who the candidates are, and consequently, I have not voted in any of the elections since I moved here.
In practice, I find that I prefer representative democracy. I don't want to have to deal with the minute details of every issue. If the town needs to repave a road or chop down a tree, they should not need to ask for a show of hands in advance.
The other problem, here at least, is a tyrrany of the minority. It turns out that there is only a relatively small group of people with the time and energy to devote to working this kind of a system. Consequently, their opinions get voted in time and again. These are often retired people who, in my town, don't want to vote a cent for the schools, or religous voting blocks that vote in decisions preferential to their own groups.
I'm afraid the same herd mentality would happen on a larger scale with national direct democracy. How many elections would be decided by Rush Limbaugh saying "OK, dittoheads, go to www.votenow.gov and click the YES button."?
If on the other hand, we could get an electorate with a HURD mentality....
Napster embraces PKI in a big way and decides to alter their system so that it will only distribute files that are signed with a band's private key. They partner with a CA that charges a lookup fee for the public key. This allows them to provide opt in for the bands since they would have to release signed MP3s and gives them a revenue model since you would pay to "unlock" the file.
Encrypted files could be freely distributed and unencrypted files would not be allowed on the system.
Could it be cheated, sure but so can your bank's ATM with enough effort. It might be good enough, just like ATM security is good enough. Besides, if the plan helps to convert some of those 23 million Napster users into PGP users along the way, so much the better!
I wonder if Michael actually participated in this election. I have a hard time thinking that anyone would want to make more elections work like the ICANN ones. Do you really want to present a pin number from a snail letter, two pieces of email, and the entrails of a chicken just to vote? (OK, I made up the part about the chicken).
I actually went through all the hoops to become an at large member of ICANN and it seems to me like they consciously made it as difficult to vote as possible. I think Auerbach even alluded to this in his platform. It would have been easier to win a government contract than vote in this thing!
The worst part of all is that, after having jumped through all the hoops, I had a project due and didn't make the time to vote.
So far, all ICANN has deomonstrated that it can quickly attract a bureaucracy and grind on interminably. Jon Postel, one man IANA, we miss you more than ever.
For ages AppleScript has had localized dictionaries of keywords. The interpreter consults a lookup table that translates localized keywords into the default English dialect. This means that you can open ScriptEditor and type:
por chacun feuille in cahier "Untitled"
ouvrir avec "SimpleText"
fin de por
and it would execute just the same as:
for each file in folder "Untitled"
open with "SimpleText"
end for
I think they did this because AppleScript was billed as such an "English-like", as opposed to natural language, scripting system. I don't personally know anyone who has used this feature and found it helpful, but I always thought it was interesting.
Apologies in advance for poor French and/or AppleScript syntax. Both are languages I don't use a whole lot anymore.
I just got off the phone with the people at Contentville and this is not quite what it has been portrayed on Slashdot. It turns out that Contentville is a retailer selling copies of these works published by Bell and Howell. Do you remember Bell and Howell? They are the people you paid $150 bucks to print up 5 copies of your thesis or dissertation. Two typically go to the author, two to the university library, and one to the Library of Congress.
In their standard agreement they make everyone sign, they set themselves up as technically being a publisher and they reserve the right to distribute your work in printed and electronic form. They say that if your thesis generates more then $10 in sales in a calendar year, they will pay you a 10% royalty. The ownership of the copyright remains entirely with the author. This is the same agreement they have used for a long time when theses are ordered by other libraries and sometimes by individuals. The only part that's new is the aggressive marketing.
They are running this as an opt out program. If you do not want them selling your thesis online you can call 800-521-0600 x2873 and they will remove your work from the database.
In all, this seems to me like it is not theft. They are taking advantage of the small print in an existing contract to sell books. This isn't too different from conventional publishing except they didn't inform the authors that they were cranking up the marketing machine. They were not able to give me any cases where they had actually generated sales through Contentville or where they had paid any authors, but they have only been up about a month. The woman I spoke to also said that they will only be issuing royaly statements to authors who generate more than $10 in sales.
Because of the minimum sales requirement and the lack of accounting statements for all writers, this gives them the opportunity to underreport sales and steal from people if they want. Time will tell how they will handle this part
The biggest shock for me was seeing that they plan a new service where they will print your email and deliver it to your house for $.41 per piece! That's a 25% premium over first class mail.
In addition to the charge, this also means that they will be accessing and (presumably) reading all your mail for you.
I don't wear a tinfoil hat, and I don't fear the government but I do not want the postal service correlating my physical and email addresses any more than I want my mailman reading my email.
Let's look at this for a moment and see if maybe, *maybe* we can come up with some plausible explanation.
Hmmm...DDoS attacks are taking out a bunch of high profile web sites. At the same time, students in teh dorms notice that their bandwidth drops off to nothing. Could it possibly be that all those student owned, unsecured, non-admined machines in the dorms with high bandwidth always on Internet connections made perfect DDoS zombies? And that maye afterwards the admins throttled your bandwidth to keep them from being such attractive targets? You might even suspect that they might want to avoid talking about it, and even go so far as to concoct a cover story about Napster being at fault, to avoid any legal liability.
After all, look at the bad press UCSC got for admitting they had one zombie on campus? Most of the media outlets made it look like all these sites had been DOSed because one box in Santa Cruz got r00ted.
Furthermore, I don't have much sympathy for your bandwidth problems. When *I* was a student at Berkeley, the only access we had from outside of Evans was renting a Televideo terminal with a 300 baud modem from the ASUC store.
Of course, if you ever got stuck with some weird command in vi you could just go to the lab and find Bill Joy and get him to emplain it to you...
I don't know why the Times article repeats so often that DeCSS is about copying DVDs. It isn't, it's about access control and the movie studios trying to control what you can you with a DVD *after* you have bought and paid for it. We know this all ready, but the general public doesn't and it is a shame to see the Times drop the ball.
They had acutally been an important supporter of 2600 through this case and made a point of linking to the 2600 site to test the MPAA's contention that linking to DeCSS is illegal.
Well, at least the article wasn't written by John Markoff
Just remember, the Apollo moon missions were done with the aggregate computing power of three C64s.
Also, at 2600's H2K conference last weekend Cheshire Catalyst built a serial multiplex "network" out of whatever old crap people could bring in. There were several C64s, a couple of TRS-80s a pile of other retrogear. Pretty amazing to see it all work together.
Well, as a Western Canadian, I think some of the knee jerk reactions to this come from pretty deep seated historical animosity. Canadians outside of Quebec tend to think that Quebecers want to legislatively preserve only one culture in an increasingly pluralistic society. In Vancouver, you are much more likely to hear Cantonese, Hindi, Lao, or Hmong than you are French. To "protect" one minority and not others smacks of favouritism, or at least of the preferred minority considering itself superior to others.
In other parts of Canada, if you choose to open a store serving a Cambodian commmunity, you can put up all your signs in Cambodian, advertise in Cambodian, and hire all monolingual Cambodian speaking staff.
IANALibertarian, but this seems like a good example of the market deciding. If you want to serve a subset of the population, fine, but there is nothing saying that you must also put out your signs in the many other languages spoken in the community.
Yes, French settlers were an important part of Canada's history but don't forget that for close to 100 years, Vancouver had the largest Chinese speaking community outside of Asia.
Canada is a pluralistic nation composed (with the exception of First Nations Peoples) of immigrants and their descendants. You can't legislate demographics, get over it. If you want to preserve a language and a group identity, it needs to be done on an individual basis, not by legislation passed by a bunch of demogogues.
I remember reading in an anthropology text once that leisure time is inversely proportional to technological advancement. The cultures with the highest levels of leisure time were hunter-gatherers and that it all pretty much went downhill from there.
The prototypical tribe would try to kill some big game animal and, when they were finally successful, would pretty much just camp out next to the carcass for as long as it lasted. If you are talking about a wooly mammoth, it could have gone on for a while.
Where is there a reasonable comprimise? I like leasure time, but I'm also fond of indoor plumbing and electricity. Technology gives us the means to work more (think electric lighting) so we do work more. Back on the farm 150 years ago, you worked awfully hard during the day when the weather was good, but after the sun went down you had 12 hours of enforced downtime; even more during the winter.
We are also to some extent victims of our own prosperity. Incomes for tech workers have risen to the point where we can think about owning homes, cars, and other goodies. Many of us make long commutes in addition to working long hours.
I guess the real question is: on balance are we better or worse off than we would have been without the technology?
I wonder how much of this is motivated by Apple's frustration at the inaccuracy of the rumors sites? I mean, if anyone kept a MOSR scorecard, I think Ryan's accuracy would be in single digits.
Don't get me wrong, I read MOSR all the time, but I have come to view it as entertainment rather than a source of reliable information.
Sites like MOSR and AppleInsider are fun, and people want to believe what they read there. The problem is that inaccurate information can sometimes be harmful. Take the recent case of rumors preceding Apple's Worldwide Developers' Conference. MOSR was saying continuously that Mac OS X would ship at WWDC. A lot of people got excited about this and forgot that Apple had said earlier that the release version of OS X wouldn't ship until January.
At WWDC a *public beta* of OS X was announced. Instead of this being recognized as a Good Thing coming from Apple, a lot of people who believed the hype felt that the OS was now six months behind schedule.
I read MOSR the same way I find myself compelled to scan the headlines on the cover of the Weekly World News in the grocery store checkout line. Increasingly, I think the two have about the same level of reliability.
This went around the Apple rumors sites over a year ago (and you know how reliably *they* are). If you want the proof from the tin foil hat crowd, turn a blue and white G3 on its side and it looks like a Mickey Mouse head
Performa 6300 series maybe? I never could figure out how to get one of those damn things open. One of my users had one and the hard drive died. I sheepishly told him (after about two hours) that I could not figure out how to open the case.
I called Apple and they refused to tell me how to open the box! They wanted me to bring it to an authorized repair facility to plug in an IDE drive.
Even before that, I used to keep in my desk drawer the 10 inch T-8 torx screwdriver and mechanical case spreader you had to use to open an SE or SE/30. It was a pain to open them up, but worth it to see the developers' signatures molded into the inside of the case.
Since then, Apple has become quite a bit more forthcoming about their hardware.
...Happily typing this on my Wall Street II powerbook running LinuxPPC.
This is a very interesting comparison. Remember that Cheswick *invented* the firewall! His mapping project was meant to get some understanding of the topology of the modern Internet. He discovered that you can supposedly get from any one site to any other in something like 10 clicks.
There has been a lot of traffic on the SecurityFocus mailing lists over the last couple of weeks about Quova. Many people are upset with them because they see port scans and ping scans as the equivalent of casing a building for break in. There is nothing strictly illegal about rattling doorknobs, but you can imagine that it will not win you any favor with your neighbors.
By the way, I heard Cheswick speak a couple of years ago at a SANS conference. He was one of the most widely knowledgable and overall brilliant speakers I have ever heard. He's a cool guy and definitely *not* in the same league as Quova.
OS X is based on OpenStep which was based on NEXTSTEP, which was based on BSD. My ancient NeXT cube running a circa 1992 version of NEXTSTEP came bundled with an ad hoc clustering utility called Zilla. It's pretty cool. You can choose to donate idle CPU cycles to a shared process which is advertised via NetInfo.
This tool is nearly 10 years old and it is by far the simplest clustering tool I have seen yet (I don't suspect it is necessarily the most efficient, but it does work). I really hope something like this makes it into the final release of OS X. It would be very handy for tasks like rendering that parallelize well.
Well, not exactly. Echelon was put into place during the cold war and has supposedly been used for antiterrorist spying. If you believe the stuff going around about Echelon, you could very well have been intercepted if you have ever made a telephone call, sent a fax, or emailed anyone overseas. To me this sounds a lot like American people being spied on.
In a larger sense, this shows an agency in search of a mission. When the cold war ended, these guys wound up beating the bushes looking for places to use their spy tech. As we might have expected, it doesn't win any points with our allies to have turned against them a system designed for use against our enemies.
Well, maybe this is just more plot justification, but I thought that the stormtroopers were all clones. If you notice, thay all have the same voice and are all the same height. I thought that this was Lucas' 70s way of preparing us to later accept the stormtroopers as the result (or maybe cause) of the clone wars.
The Internet does *not* need to become more like amateur radio. If you spend any time with hams, you quickly find out that the spend most of their time arguing about whether they should still require Morse code as a requirement for getting a license. The divisions within the ham radio community are killing the hobby. The average age of operators is getting older and older and very few new people want to get into something that is seen as a pastime for cranky old men. All this because of an argument over a technology that has been largely obsolete for half a century!
An Internet Driver's License is an inherently bad idea. Yes, there are lots of personal pages out there that have little relevence outside a small group of friends and relatives, but that it kind of the point. The Internet provides one to many communication without regard to distance. Many of us here belong to communities of interest outside the mainstream and use the web to keep in touch with others in these communities. Slashdot itself is an excellent example of this.
One of the idealistic promises of opening up the Internet was that it would allow direct communication with people in countries where contact with the outside is discouraged. How many Internet licenses do you think would be issued in places like Myanmar or China or North Korea? Do you think that people in these countries should be categorically denied access to information freedom to spare you the inconvenience of getting the occasional personal page in your Google results?
As the Internet continues to grow over the next several years, we will see more self-defined content rating anyhow. I would be perfectly happy to include an XML tag that says something like:
into my personal page. People who want to see pictures of my dog will go there when they want and I don't really care if no one else ever sees it. This would also allow me to set my viewing filter to something like:
subject-matter="TRS-80"
and I could be back to the mid 70s before most Slashdotters were born and there was a lot less congestion on the Internet!
Yes, Jobs is in business to make money, lots of money, but you need to apportion the credit/blame where it belongs.
It wasn't Jobs who killed MacOS on Intel, it was John Scully who pulled it at the last minute because MacOS ran faster on 486s than on 68040s. After Scully fired Jobs, he (Jobs) went on to run NeXT, one of the most open commercial unix companies ever. NEXTSTEP ran on NeXT's own Motorola hardware, as well as Intel, Sparc and HP PA-RISC. It's still common to find NeXT packages on stepwise.com in "quad fat" binary. Eventually, NeXT stopped selling hardware altogether and became an OS vendor supporting mostly commodity Intel hardware.
Jobs *DID* kill the Mac clones, and in a pretty pissy way. He revoked Power Computing's license and refused to accept any Motorola StarMax machines for the mandatory compatibility testing. Like it or not, he had a reason for doing this. The clone makers (Power Computing in particular) were embarrassing Apple by selling faster machines at much lower prices. Apple had hoped that the clones would expand the market for the MacOS, instead the clone vendors were underselling Apple's own products and eroding Apple's existing customer base. I was very upset when he killed the clones (I had just bought a truckload of PowerWave 604e 250s), but I can see why he did it.
I think just about everyone would agree that Jobs is a control freak. If you buy into the reality distortion field, you will wind up believing that he does it because of his relentless drive for the best user experience possible. If you don't buy into it, well, he's just a control freak.
But when you look at his recent actions at Apple, he doesn't look too bad. He has more or less open sourced much of OS X and Darwin is resonably close to being a Mac system running on commodity hardware, Intel or PowerPC.
I think OS X on Intel could be a good idea. There is more uncertainty about Microsoft now than there has been in years. Corporate IT departments will be more likely to fool around with testing an alternative OS if it runs on the hardware they have on hand. After all, it worked for Linux, which now has a 24% market share for servers.
This has the potential to really change things. The one really brilliant piece of the ruling that I have not seen publicized enough is that one company will get Windows, and the other will get all the development tools.
This means that Windows, Inc will finally have to fully document their APIs. The tools to code for Windows will be in the hands of someone else. This means that anyone wanting to port gcc, yacc, or whatever will have the same level of access to the internals that the applications company will have.
It doesn't go as far as forcing them to open up the Office file formats, but this will make tricks like the Kerberos nonsense much harder to pull off.
Not citizenship exactly, but what is known in Canada as Landed Immigrant Status. This is comparable to a permanant resident status (green card) in the US. It lets you stay as long as you like, work, and pay taxes, but not vote.
This was a big deal before the Hong Kong reverted to China. Lots of business people from HK relocated to Canada. If I remember correctly, you could get landed immigrant status immediately if you had a certin amount of money that you were willing to invest in a business in Canada. The farther East you were willing to move, the cheaper it was.
The joke at the time was the rates were something like:
British Columbia --> $1,000,000 Alberta --> $750,000 Saskatchewan --> $500,000 ... Quebec --> FR500 PEI --> $10 Newfoundland -- $3.18
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, it is because US companies don't rule the world and really don't have the power to stop international pirates. Plus, you actually have to have evidence before ou arrest somebody and it is hard to get a warrant so you can collect evidence overseas. If you get evidence without reasoning of getting evidence(like getting lucky and knocking on the right door), you can't really use that evidence. The only place companies could stop them is if they press them in the US(not likely) and are exporting them. They can get them as they try to export them. So you see, it is really quite complex for a US company to prevent piracy overseas and I'm sure Interpol is going to waste their precious time arresting a local Mob boss. They have bigger fish to fry then pirates.
I don't know about the license, but from a user perspective, Plesk seems like a decent product. My hosting service sweethomes.com uses it to allow cheapskates like me to run their $10/month sites without giving out shell accounts. For the level it seems targeted at, mostly smallish and personal sites, it seems to work pretty well. I would rather have a shell prompt available, of course, but for the price I really can't complain.
His intro makes several references to the CEA. The many references to libraries and academic exceptions (distance learning, etc) make me think that he was addressing the California Education Association, a large teacher's union and a heavy politcal donor.
I don't have any confirmation of this, it's just total speculation, but hey...this is Slashdot.
I had always considered myself to be in favor of direct democracy. I have always voted and tried to be up on the issuse. A couple of years ago, I moved to a small town in New England with a strong tradition of direct democracy, and guess what? They vote on everything and it bugs the hell out of me.
Seriously, they must have six or seven elections a year. I don't have time to stay on top of the issues or know who the candidates are, and consequently, I have not voted in any of the elections since I moved here.
In practice, I find that I prefer representative democracy. I don't want to have to deal with the minute details of every issue. If the town needs to repave a road or chop down a tree, they should not need to ask for a show of hands in advance.
The other problem, here at least, is a tyrrany of the minority. It turns out that there is only a relatively small group of people with the time and energy to devote to working this kind of a system. Consequently, their opinions get voted in time and again. These are often retired people who, in my town, don't want to vote a cent for the schools, or religous voting blocks that vote in decisions preferential to their own groups.
I'm afraid the same herd mentality would happen on a larger scale with national direct democracy. How many elections would be decided by Rush Limbaugh saying "OK, dittoheads, go to www.votenow.gov and click the YES button."?
If on the other hand, we could get an electorate with a HURD mentality....
How about this.....
Napster embraces PKI in a big way and decides to alter their system so that it will only distribute files that are signed with a band's private key. They partner with a CA that charges a lookup fee for the public key. This allows them to provide opt in for the bands since they would have to release signed MP3s and gives them a revenue model since you would pay to "unlock" the file.
Encrypted files could be freely distributed and unencrypted files would not be allowed on the system.
Could it be cheated, sure but so can your bank's ATM with enough effort. It might be good enough, just like ATM security is good enough. Besides, if the plan helps to convert some of those 23 million Napster users into PGP users along the way, so much the better!
I wonder if Michael actually participated in this election. I have a hard time thinking that anyone would want to make more elections work like the ICANN ones. Do you really want to present a pin number from a snail letter, two pieces of email, and the entrails of a chicken just to vote? (OK, I made up the part about the chicken).
I actually went through all the hoops to become an at large member of ICANN and it seems to me like they consciously made it as difficult to vote as possible. I think Auerbach even alluded to this in his platform. It would have been easier to win a government contract than vote in this thing!
The worst part of all is that, after having jumped through all the hoops, I had a project due and didn't make the time to vote.
So far, all ICANN has deomonstrated that it can quickly attract a bureaucracy and grind on interminably. Jon Postel, one man IANA, we miss you more than ever.
For ages AppleScript has had localized dictionaries of keywords. The interpreter consults a lookup table that translates localized keywords into the default English dialect. This means that you can open ScriptEditor and type:
por chacun feuille in cahier "Untitled"
ouvrir avec "SimpleText"
fin de por
and it would execute just the same as:
for each file in folder "Untitled"
open with "SimpleText"
end for
I think they did this because AppleScript was billed as such an "English-like", as opposed to natural language, scripting system. I don't personally know anyone who has used this feature and found it helpful, but I always thought it was interesting.
Apologies in advance for poor French and/or AppleScript syntax. Both are languages I don't use a whole lot anymore.
I just got off the phone with the people at Contentville and this is not quite what it has been portrayed on Slashdot. It turns out that Contentville is a retailer selling copies of these works published by Bell and Howell. Do you remember Bell and Howell? They are the people you paid $150 bucks to print up 5 copies of your thesis or dissertation. Two typically go to the author, two to the university library, and one to the Library of Congress.
In their standard agreement they make everyone sign, they set themselves up as technically being a publisher and they reserve the right to distribute your work in printed and electronic form. They say that if your thesis generates more then $10 in sales in a calendar year, they will pay you a 10% royalty. The ownership of the copyright remains entirely with the author. This is the same agreement they have used for a long time when theses are ordered by other libraries and sometimes by individuals. The only part that's new is the aggressive marketing.
They are running this as an opt out program. If you do not want them selling your thesis online you can call 800-521-0600 x2873 and they will remove your work from the database.
In all, this seems to me like it is not theft. They are taking advantage of the small print in an existing contract to sell books. This isn't too different from conventional publishing except they didn't inform the authors that they were cranking up the marketing machine. They were not able to give me any cases where they had actually generated sales through Contentville or where they had paid any authors, but they have only been up about a month. The woman I spoke to also said that they will only be issuing royaly statements to authors who generate more than $10 in sales.
Because of the minimum sales requirement and the lack of accounting statements for all writers, this gives them the opportunity to underreport sales and steal from people if they want. Time will tell how they will handle this part
The biggest shock for me was seeing that they plan a new service where they will print your email and deliver it to your house for $.41 per piece! That's a 25% premium over first class mail.
In addition to the charge, this also means that they will be accessing and (presumably) reading all your mail for you.
I don't wear a tinfoil hat, and I don't fear the government but I do not want the postal service correlating my physical and email addresses any more than I want my mailman reading my email.
Don't make me get out the cluestick....
Let's look at this for a moment and see if maybe, *maybe* we can come up with some plausible explanation.
Hmmm...DDoS attacks are taking out a bunch of high profile web sites. At the same time, students in teh dorms notice that their bandwidth drops off to nothing. Could it possibly be that all those student owned, unsecured, non-admined machines in the dorms with high bandwidth always on Internet connections made perfect DDoS zombies? And that maye afterwards the admins throttled your bandwidth to keep them from being such attractive targets? You might even suspect that they might want to avoid talking about it, and even go so far as to concoct a cover story about Napster being at fault, to avoid any legal liability.
After all, look at the bad press UCSC got for admitting they had one zombie on campus? Most of the media outlets made it look like all these sites had been DOSed because one box in Santa Cruz got r00ted.
Furthermore, I don't have much sympathy for your bandwidth problems. When *I* was a student at Berkeley, the only access we had from outside of Evans was renting a Televideo terminal with a 300 baud modem from the ASUC store.
Of course, if you ever got stuck with some weird command in vi you could just go to the lab and find Bill Joy and get him to emplain it to you...
I don't know why the Times article repeats so often that DeCSS is about copying DVDs. It isn't, it's about access control and the movie studios trying to control what you can you with a DVD *after* you have bought and paid for it. We know this all ready, but the general public doesn't and it is a shame to see the Times drop the ball.
They had acutally been an important supporter of 2600 through this case and made a point of linking to the 2600 site to test the MPAA's contention that linking to DeCSS is illegal.
Well, at least the article wasn't written by John Markoff
Just remember, the Apollo moon missions were done with the aggregate computing power of three C64s.
Also, at 2600's H2K conference last weekend Cheshire Catalyst built a serial multiplex "network" out of whatever old crap people could bring in. There were several C64s, a couple of TRS-80s a pile of other retrogear. Pretty amazing to see it all work together.
Well, as a Western Canadian, I think some of the knee jerk reactions to this come from pretty deep seated historical animosity. Canadians outside of Quebec tend to think that Quebecers want to legislatively preserve only one culture in an increasingly pluralistic society. In Vancouver, you are much more likely to hear Cantonese, Hindi, Lao, or Hmong than you are French. To "protect" one minority and not others smacks of favouritism, or at least of the preferred minority considering itself superior to others.
In other parts of Canada, if you choose to open a store serving a Cambodian commmunity, you can put up all your signs in Cambodian, advertise in Cambodian, and hire all monolingual Cambodian speaking staff.
IANALibertarian, but this seems like a good example of the market deciding. If you want to serve a subset of the population, fine, but there is nothing saying that you must also put out your signs in the many other languages spoken in the community.
Yes, French settlers were an important part of Canada's history but don't forget that for close to 100 years, Vancouver had the largest Chinese speaking community outside of Asia.
Canada is a pluralistic nation composed (with the exception of First Nations Peoples) of immigrants and their descendants. You can't legislate demographics, get over it. If you want to preserve a language and a group identity, it needs to be done on an individual basis, not by legislation passed by a bunch of demogogues.
I remember reading in an anthropology text once that leisure time is inversely proportional to technological advancement. The cultures with the highest levels of leisure time were hunter-gatherers and that it all pretty much went downhill from there.
The prototypical tribe would try to kill some big game animal and, when they were finally successful, would pretty much just camp out next to the carcass for as long as it lasted. If you are talking about a wooly mammoth, it could have gone on for a while.
Where is there a reasonable comprimise? I like leasure time, but I'm also fond of indoor plumbing and electricity. Technology gives us the means to work more (think electric lighting) so we do work more. Back on the farm 150 years ago, you worked awfully hard during the day when the weather was good, but after the sun went down you had 12 hours of enforced downtime; even more during the winter.
We are also to some extent victims of our own prosperity. Incomes for tech workers have risen to the point where we can think about owning homes, cars, and other goodies. Many of us make long commutes in addition to working long hours.
I guess the real question is: on balance are we better or worse off than we would have been without the technology?
I wonder how much of this is motivated by Apple's frustration at the inaccuracy of the rumors sites? I mean, if anyone kept a MOSR scorecard, I think Ryan's accuracy would be in single digits.
Don't get me wrong, I read MOSR all the time, but I have come to view it as entertainment rather than a source of reliable information.
Sites like MOSR and AppleInsider are fun, and people want to believe what they read there. The problem is that inaccurate information can sometimes be harmful. Take the recent case of rumors preceding Apple's Worldwide Developers' Conference. MOSR was saying continuously that Mac OS X would ship at WWDC. A lot of people got excited about this and forgot that Apple had said earlier that the release version of OS X wouldn't ship until January.
At WWDC a *public beta* of OS X was announced. Instead of this being recognized as a Good Thing coming from Apple, a lot of people who believed the hype felt that the OS was now six months behind schedule.
I read MOSR the same way I find myself compelled to scan the headlines on the cover of the Weekly World News in the grocery store checkout line. Increasingly, I think the two have about the same level of reliability.
Here's a link on that particular one.
Here's AppleInsider's report on the merger rumor, from February 1999! And you think Slashdot is late with the news sometimes!
Performa 6300 series maybe? I never could figure out how to get one of those damn things open. One of my users had one and the hard drive died. I sheepishly told him (after about two hours) that I could not figure out how to open the case.
I called Apple and they refused to tell me how to open the box! They wanted me to bring it to an authorized repair facility to plug in an IDE drive.
Even before that, I used to keep in my desk drawer the 10 inch T-8 torx screwdriver and mechanical case spreader you had to use to open an SE or SE/30. It was a pain to open them up, but worth it to see the developers' signatures molded into the inside of the case.
Since then, Apple has become quite a bit more forthcoming about their hardware.
...Happily typing this on my Wall Street II powerbook running LinuxPPC.
This is a very interesting comparison. Remember that Cheswick *invented* the firewall! His mapping project was meant to get some understanding of the topology of the modern Internet. He discovered that you can supposedly get from any one site to any other in something like 10 clicks.
There has been a lot of traffic on the SecurityFocus mailing lists over the last couple of weeks about Quova. Many people are upset with them because they see port scans and ping scans as the equivalent of casing a building for break in. There is nothing strictly illegal about rattling doorknobs, but you can imagine that it will not win you any favor with your neighbors.
By the way, I heard Cheswick speak a couple of years ago at a SANS conference. He was one of the most widely knowledgable and overall brilliant speakers I have ever heard. He's a cool guy and definitely *not* in the same league as Quova.
OS X is based on OpenStep which was based on NEXTSTEP, which was based on BSD. My ancient NeXT cube running a circa 1992 version of NEXTSTEP came bundled with an ad hoc clustering utility called Zilla. It's pretty cool. You can choose to donate idle CPU cycles to a shared process which is advertised via NetInfo.
This tool is nearly 10 years old and it is by far the simplest clustering tool I have seen yet (I don't suspect it is necessarily the most efficient, but it does work). I really hope something like this makes it into the final release of OS X. It would be very handy for tasks like rendering that parallelize well.
Well, not exactly. Echelon was put into place during the cold war and has supposedly been used for antiterrorist spying. If you believe the stuff going around about Echelon, you could very well have been intercepted if you have ever made a telephone call, sent a fax, or emailed anyone overseas. To me this sounds a lot like American people being spied on.
In a larger sense, this shows an agency in search of a mission. When the cold war ended, these guys wound up beating the bushes looking for places to use their spy tech. As we might have expected, it doesn't win any points with our allies to have turned against them a system designed for use against our enemies.
Well, maybe this is just more plot justification, but I thought that the stormtroopers were all clones. If you notice, thay all have the same voice and are all the same height. I thought that this was Lucas' 70s way of preparing us to later accept the stormtroopers as the result (or maybe cause) of the clone wars.
The Internet does *not* need to become more like amateur radio. If you spend any time with hams, you quickly find out that the spend most of their time arguing about whether they should still require Morse code as a requirement for getting a license. The divisions within the ham radio community are killing the hobby. The average age of operators is getting older and older and very few new people want to get into something that is seen as a pastime for cranky old men. All this because of an argument over a technology that has been largely obsolete for half a century!
An Internet Driver's License is an inherently bad idea. Yes, there are lots of personal pages out there that have little relevence outside a small group of friends and relatives, but that it kind of the point. The Internet provides one to many communication without regard to distance. Many of us here belong to communities of interest outside the mainstream and use the web to keep in touch with others in these communities. Slashdot itself is an excellent example of this.
One of the idealistic promises of opening up the Internet was that it would allow direct communication with people in countries where contact with the outside is discouraged. How many Internet licenses do you think would be issued in places like Myanmar or China or North Korea? Do you think that people in these countries should be categorically denied access to information freedom to spare you the inconvenience of getting the occasional personal page in your Google results?
As the Internet continues to grow over the next several years, we will see more self-defined content rating anyhow. I would be perfectly happy to include an XML tag that says something like:
category=personal
commerce=no
bandwidth-priority=low
into my personal page. People who want to see pictures of my dog will go there when they want and I don't really care if no one else ever sees it. This would also allow me to set my viewing filter to something like:
subject-matter="TRS-80"
and I could be back to the mid 70s before most Slashdotters were born and there was a lot less congestion on the Internet!
Yes, Jobs is in business to make money, lots of money, but you need to apportion the credit/blame where it belongs.
It wasn't Jobs who killed MacOS on Intel, it was John Scully who pulled it at the last minute because MacOS ran faster on 486s than on 68040s. After Scully fired Jobs, he (Jobs) went on to run NeXT, one of the most open commercial unix companies ever. NEXTSTEP ran on NeXT's own Motorola hardware, as well as Intel, Sparc and HP PA-RISC. It's still common to find NeXT packages on stepwise.com in "quad fat" binary. Eventually, NeXT stopped selling hardware altogether and became an OS vendor supporting mostly commodity Intel hardware.
Jobs *DID* kill the Mac clones, and in a pretty pissy way. He revoked Power Computing's license and refused to accept any Motorola StarMax machines for the mandatory compatibility testing. Like it or not, he had a reason for doing this. The clone makers (Power Computing in particular) were embarrassing Apple by selling faster machines at much lower prices. Apple had hoped that the clones would expand the market for the MacOS, instead the clone vendors were underselling Apple's own products and eroding Apple's existing customer base. I was very upset when he killed the clones (I had just bought a truckload of PowerWave 604e 250s), but I can see why he did it.
I think just about everyone would agree that Jobs is a control freak. If you buy into the reality distortion field, you will wind up believing that he does it because of his relentless drive for the best user experience possible. If you don't buy into it, well, he's just a control freak.
But when you look at his recent actions at Apple, he doesn't look too bad. He has more or less open sourced much of OS X and Darwin is resonably close to being a Mac system running on commodity hardware, Intel or PowerPC.
I think OS X on Intel could be a good idea. There is more uncertainty about Microsoft now than there has been in years. Corporate IT departments will be more likely to fool around with testing an alternative OS if it runs on the hardware they have on hand. After all, it worked for Linux, which now has a 24% market share for servers.
This has the potential to really change things. The one really brilliant piece of the ruling that I have not seen publicized enough is that one company will get Windows, and the other will get all the development tools.
This means that Windows, Inc will finally have to fully document their APIs. The tools to code for Windows will be in the hands of someone else. This means that anyone wanting to port gcc, yacc, or whatever will have the same level of access to the internals that the applications company will have.
It doesn't go as far as forcing them to open up the Office file formats, but this will make tricks like the Kerberos nonsense much harder to pull off.
Not citizenship exactly, but what is known in Canada as Landed Immigrant Status. This is comparable to a permanant resident status (green card) in the US. It lets you stay as long as you like, work, and pay taxes, but not vote.
This was a big deal before the Hong Kong reverted to China. Lots of business people from HK relocated to Canada. If I remember correctly, you could get landed immigrant status immediately if you had a certin amount of money that you were willing to invest in a business in Canada. The farther East you were willing to move, the cheaper it was.
The joke at the time was the rates were something like:
British Columbia --> $1,000,000
Alberta --> $750,000
Saskatchewan --> $500,000
...
Quebec --> FR500
PEI --> $10
Newfoundland -- $3.18