They said that Google is diluting the copyright because customers might mistaken the adverstised services as being associated with AXA.
In fairness people are morons - and yes, from experience there are those out there unable to distinguish a third party vendor from the manufacturer of a good or service. My company buys adwords on several trademark names and has natural listing on others - our company name does not include any of these trademarks and yet several times a week we get callers which have confused us with the manufacturer of said products and are looking for technical support.
I like to think the problem is not that we advertise on said words - rather that Google feeds these advertisements to the AOL network!
Google does not pay website owners for AdWords. The owners pay Google to for advertising space on Google.
Google does pay website owners for displaying adwords, in its adsense program.
The problem with the guys attempted extortion is that google charges advertisers more then it pays out on the adds, and as such this guys program, if sucessful, still makes google a buck. That said the amount advertisers pay on adds is determined by a number of criteria such as CTR (which is why googles adds are generally of good quality; better, more relevant, and therefore more clickable adds can be put in top positions for less then irrelevant adds) and as such something of this nature could potentially really screw up advertising related statistics and revenue for google.
What a polite and well written way to say (paraphrased) "we'll sue your ass." Perhaps if the RIAA were only half as elequent the world would be a nicer place. Mabye it was the unexpected simplicity of the legal doubletalk, but the letter from Nintendo seems to raise some valid points:
The very limited archival copy exception to copyright laws is set forth in 17 U.S.C. 117(a)(2), which specifies that the owner of a computer program can make a copy "for archival purposes only." Even if it were otherwise permitted, which it is not, playing a copy of a Nintendo game on the Zodiac system is not "archiving".
While generally I am amoung the first to annunciate my right to fair use, you have to admit that in this case there is a very legitamate and valid difference between media such as a cd and media on which a game is stored, and as such Nintendo makes a strong arguement. While one could do some waving of the hands and talk about hardware upgrades or software cd/dvd players, the plain and simple case in point here is that Nintendo software is meant to be extremely platform dependant. To reiterate this concept, to this day such software is distributed on a piece of plastic that would seem to have broken off a commadore 64.
I dont know...I enjoy emulation but generally (due to hardware limitations more then choice) get my kicks from the plethora of original nintendo, super nintendo, original gameboy, atari, playstation, and arcade emulators available. In retrospect there seems something fair-er about playing such games on under emulation, as many of these systems are no longer produced, and as such the emulator itself becomes - conceptually atleast - an archival copy.
In some cases even those consumers who would like to practice such ideals are unable to
Case in point: I was in the market for a laptop half a year back, and I shopped it to the point of obsession...barebones kits, preloaded linux laptops, et al ad infinium. I ended up getting together a handful of coupons and discounts and buying a Dell. Granted this goes against ever moral fiber of my being, but so does paying an extra five hundred dollars on a rebranded older model thinkpad, or a 12 pound build-your-own asus "portable".
I think the trouble with idealology is it is so damn impractacle...chastising the MPAA necessitates obstaining from hits such as LOTR that I would have prefered to see, and penalizing microsoft in the above example was synonamous with paying for an overpriced underfeatured machine.
If and when there is a supervendor out there capible of delivering what I want without breaking my wallet, then and only then will I vote with my wallet. Unfortunately until such time I vote with my brain.
Our rights have been trampled here, the innocent have not only been assumed guilty and lumped into a guilty mass, but to add insult the best response by the MPAA is that we should perhaps shell out more dough; and its FUNNY? - RTFL
It is apprehensible that some token jackass with a triple digit income suggests I pay a red cent in order to obtain what I have already purchased...such wisdom is what has limited the amount of dvd's I own to literally a handful.
I hear they all take vacation after the superbowl!
Re:Lets hope that the result is progress
on
Google v. Microsoft
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Idealogically, a boycot against MSN is a fnatastic idea, the problem is that from a marketing perspective (for commercial sites) its suicide.
Each free click a site receives is invaluable, to the point that a whole industry is built upon manipulating search results (generally those of google, because thats where the vast majority of traffic comes from) in favor of bettering the positioning of their clients. Try googling for "seo","search enging optimization","search engine placement" and the like and you will notice the sheer number of results speak for themselves.
Ironically enough, results provided via this industry often cost more and perform worse then google adwords (first because it takes some odd months for any results to show, and second because googles sorting algorithm change every month or two and maintaining good position takes constant manipulation), but the point is, that the top five results in any engine, be it google or msn, is money in the pocket. As such business entities will set idealology aside; disallowing msnbot is not a viable solution for any commercial entity.
I had a similar expirience to grandparent not two months back:
I bought four almost identical dell machines (for business use), two with floppy drives, two without. Some weeks after they shipped I noticed that those which were ordered without the drives had the smaller drive bay case part completely omitted! Now generally I could care less about the omission of a $1 piece of metal, the thing is that the chasis are not standard pick it up at frys replacable, there proprietary funny keyed ones which seem to take funny keyed floppy drives. Appearently Dell decided that tetris players who were not familiar with innovations such as the screwdriver were their target market.
In any case on the subject of laptops (and specifically my laptop, damnit), I have found Dell to be a nightmareish entity. My machine literally has racked up over a month of downtime in less then six months, has been replaced twice, has had motherboard changed out once, and has had various other parts replaced. Needless to say I am a bit less then satisfied with the machine and desired a full refund. After exhausting their corperate options I took the step of contacting the BBB as well as filing a complaint with California Dept of Consumer Affairs (BEAR, which handles computer repair complaints, is a department of the CDCA hence this complaint).
The most recent replacement machine arrived a week ago today, it was shipped ground about a week after they promised 24hr processing. This week they have contacted me twice by mail and once by phone requesting the status of the broken machine...its on my goddamn floor and thats where it will stay till I feel like shipping it
I would be the first to agree that soundcard selection is lacking at best...
That said quality USB headsets seem to do wonders, the one I have is a plantronics DSP 500...has a built in soundcard (i think all usb headsets do), puts out nice bass if so desired, and is plug and play with hotplug under alsa.
Any complaints I have about this model would be shared with analog headphones the same size...namely the footprint (large headset, six feet of cord), is excessive on the go.
I do IT and marketing for a small company which I will not name here. We use addwords, (depriciated) google premium, overture, and an SEO firm, along with a healthy smattering of lesser marketing techniques for one of our larger sites, and have smaller sites which expiriment with one or more of these techniques to better evaluate the effectiveness of each. Our products are relatively competative, and as such we pay good money for every click, even natural results. We also pay money to see where our traffic comes from, what it does within our site, what searches brought it there, what people buy, et al ad infinium. In total we speand perhaps $20,000 on marketing and related stuff each month, and this is likely a conservative estimate.
One of the things I find most ironic about searches is that people view google as an "unbiased search engine", when that very concept is oxymoronic in nature. But dont take my word for it look at the source code for the top 2 or 3 listings for any marginally competitve seach term where there is some potential for profit, generally what you will find is headers and content which is pleasing to google, and only marginally pleasing to humans. The very idea of corperate america letting traffic buy products from competitors makes any boss anxious, and as such we pay something like six dollars per person per click for some of our more competitve terms.
Google is neither uncensored nor unbiased, it is indeed fallable. It just happens that google makes it hard(er) to purchase such results by allowing other, uncertified parties to sell them to the end-user, by changing their algoritm to thwart these efforts monthly. Google does indeed do censoring, and in terms of SEO efforts censors quite radically (hiring SEO firms is tricky particularly because the wrong ones will invariably get one banned).
All this aside, I still use google almost exclusively for searching, but tend to do so differently then before I learned about the inner workings of search engine placement:
For commercial goods, I typically click the sponsored link, because atleast they are honest about their intent, and they are going to put you on the page within their site you want, they control where you are directed (as opposed to natural results tend towards pages with better link weight, and not a whole lot of people outside the sites are necessarily linking to their products). I figure the better part of first page content on google is bought, and I might as well frequent those sites blatently buying it, as opposed to subtily doing so.
The other large change I have made is to use more words with will exclude commercial results if I am looking for information or whatever else, I get natural results by wording my searches so that there is no commercial interest (generally by specifing or disallowing a word that will elimanate the bulk of commercial results), for instance "howto" works wonders when finding anything linux related...
From the FAQ:
How is Nvu different from other HTML editors available for Linux?
There are five main differences:... 3) Integrated web file management....
I have to say in this respect I've found quanta already far exceeds the windows offerings, as support for the fish protocol (transfers files over secure shell) means one can avoid ftp like the security scorge it is. With dreamweaver even SFTP dosn't come out of the box.
Me-thinks it looks promising, given that a platform with wysiwyg and functionality similar to that of dreamweaver can only be accomplished by combining mozilla's editor (or open office's) with quanta, bluefish, or the like. There are a few (commercial) ones I have yet to try such as coffee cup, but overall it is a rather undesirable situation for those who prefer to layout tables without frazzling the brain.
"Processing at the speed of light, you can have safer airports"
Its really quite sick and disturbing that the aftermath of 9/11 has degraded to a marketing ploy.
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item =3355761848&category=2298
LOTR, Fellowship BIN $9.95 (open box from first page, im lazy tonight)
In answer to your question, no not just the crappy ones are available for $10. The point is not the price that it takes to produce films, rather that films cost so much more to produce then CD's and yet retail for comparitively so much cheaper. Even if the films are $5 more on average for new releases, their production cost 200* more, and the media which they are distributed on is also more expensive to master and produce.
A compact disk might take a band a week in a recording studio with a crew of 10, a film might be a year with a crew of 50, and yet these media are comperable in price. Logically, there is something very wrong with that picture
Perhaps the thing that most irks me is not the new releases (I dont listen to a whole lot of new artists) but the fact that older dvd's are sold cheap whereas older cd's tend to be more expensive.
1.) The artists who are getting screwed by people like you
The artists are not getting screwed by people such as myself, I did not address piracy in my previous post. Personally, I dont feel the need to lower myself to downloading the latest played out radio crap, and as such, there is little or nothing on this computer which should not be here. I buy CD's, quite often really, but in recent years have chosen to do so at small shows from the actual artists who are not affiliated with the big 5, or at sites such as mp3.com where the artist are fairly compensated for their work. The artists are benifiting from my purchase in that they are making say 50% of the price I pay, I am benefiting in that I dont have to listen to some guy who shows of his 50 Bentlys on MTV sing about how miserable his life is.
2.)...pirating their product is still illegal, immoral, and wrong...
Illegal yes, immoral and wrong, thats a personal decision, and in my instance I dont find it to be such, atleast not arbitrarily so. For instance where do bootlegs fall into this paradigm, recordings from specific concerts which are not a viable commercial product, but which are an invaluable musical commodity to those who collect them.
Are their instances where piracy is wrong, I think most certainly so, but unfortunately for the artist, at times it serves as an effective means to an end. Luckily the MPAA tax is so heavy that when one downloads an entire album they are generally denying the artist less then a dollar.
As for iTunes, if you could kindly direct me to the version for linux I would love to check it out....oh whats that you say, it requires a thousand dollors worth of cheap mac or agreement with windows EULA. Hmmm, real viable option for those who disagree with exploitation at the hands of commercialism.
Lastly and perhaps most importantly "idealistic stands" do not necessarily indicate an affinity for free as in beer. I dont claim to dislike the RIAA because they make music proprietary, rather I dislike them (and the MPAA, and Microsoft, and the policy imposed by George W, and a great deal of other stuff) because they discourage choice and declare that "this is the way it is, and fuck your idealism." You mention kazaa, I do not use it because it suffers from the same platform limitations as iTunes, is associated with spyware, and recently has been directed exclusively towards commercial interests. To me, there are more viable options out there, and the same stands with music produced by the big five. I refuse to contribute funds to institutions that treat me like a peice of shit with no rights simply because they can, and I do this specifically because I think America would be a better place if the people were able to contribute half as much to congress as corperate interests do. It would truly be for the people, by the people, and unfortunately institutions such as the RIAA prevent this and make it look like a warped version of reality.
Perhaps If you were to read the artical and familiarize yourself with the past behavior of the RIAA (instead of spouting as much rubbish as you can and still have a shot at first post), you might understand that the reason this so pisses alot of us off is exactly because we are music lovers. The issue is not necessarily one of piracy, nor lawsuits, but one of a blatent monopoly acting in their own interests and screwing their audence
Case in point: "Our objective here is not to win lawsuits; it is to foster a business environment where legal online music services and bricks-and-mortar retail stores can flourish.''
That might be true, but five years ago this was anything but the case. The RIAA in the past not only has done nothing to promote MP3s or any other "free" type of file (free as in containing no or few restrictions on use), but rather went out of their way to denounce the mp3 as a tool whose use was limited to piracy, and sunk money into proprietary, loosy formats which were time, play, or copy limited. They missed the uprising of online music by blatently persecuting those involved in it, legally or otherwise, and as such have had no monitary interest in it until Napster brought mp3s away from campuses and onto the computers of the common man...when they realized that it would not and could not be stopped.
Additionally the RIAA has gone out of its way to manipulate both facts and figures. MP3s are a perfect digital copy they say, and therefore a much different beast then an analog VCR tape. Make sense to me, BUT, they use an argument that directly counters this at other times. Lets say one owns a CD and wants to make MP3's...its legal. Wants to find MP3's (corresponding to the CD in question) online...nope, the RIAA says that each CD pressed has minute flaws unique to a given CD and therefore the MP3's I create and those created by somone else are different entities, in effect that the MP3 is not so perfect a digital copy. Quite frankly I see little point in reporter even asking questions that demonstrate inconsistancies such as this (if you cannot afford a $15 cdrom drive or cannot figure out how to use one of the many available ripping tools then by definition your much too stupid to be finding music online). The point here is not that its a viable situation, rather that the RIAA tends to interpret law, or figures, in the way which is most convient at the time.
Take this one: The lawsuits are the record industry's reaction to a 31 percent decline in CD sales in the United States in the past three years, a sharp drop that coincides with the rise of popular file-sharing networks like Kazaa and Gnutella, used by millions of people around the world to swap free copies of songs.
What is ommited is this period also coincides with an economic slump and lossed by companies accross the board. It also coincides with the price of DVDs, a digital copy of a movie which took say $100 million to produce, falling below $10, and that of compact discs, which take perhaps $50,000 to master rising above $20. It also coincides with behaviors from the RIAA that have caused a handful, such as myself, to cease buying CD's. So while its nice to throw a big figure out there and omit all the other stuff, even nicer is to analize that figure in a historical perspective.
To me a music lover is someone that buys a nice set of speakers, and listens to music. In contrast to this is those such as yourself who like to support the RIAA by giving the Spice Girls and N-Sync there day in the spotlight and dollar per disk, and could care less that the other $19 is used for suing 12 year olds and other worthless causes that do nothing to further music
That they could play a longshot and come out real big if that longshot happens to win.
Its the same ideaology that caused some fortune 500 companies to invest in SEO's licenses.
I think the suprising thing is that those who stand most to win if ibm is ruled against (i.e. microsoft) have invested so little monitarily in this battle.
Incedentally, some of these funds could eventually be paid out in the lawsuits against SEO for violating the GPL, if said lawsuits succeed. Wouldnt that be sweet revenge, deep pockets paying to further linux. Perhaps Bill will soon join the bandwagon and contribute his cash to further open source.
Here are a few of mine:
Jupiter Lander (it was one of the few I found that took under three minutes from boot to play)
Jumpman
Delta Force
Pawn (it was only years later that I realized what a druggie game this was)
Commando
Skate or Die
Summer Olympics
Winter Olympics
The Hulk (to this day I think this game is unsolvable)
Buck Rogers
The Frogger Cartridge ...I could go on indefinately but i think im off to find me an emulator
The 64 was a hand me down from my brothers and the 128 a birthday gift a year or two later. My mom made me read the manual front to back before I was allowed to play, and after I had demonstrated my skills by typing in one or two of the "programs" contained in the manual, she got a hundred or two hundred pirated disks somewhere...ahh my first warez...
Some years later I have a computer science degree, just goes to show what the misconcieved overprotective nature of making a kid RTFM will do to him (or her)
In the old days an email address wasnt a disposible commodity.
There wern't people launching the equivelent of dictionary attacks against mail servers to see what does not bounce, and hence keeping an email address private involved sharing only with those who were trusted.
Today if I see such an attack at work I block the ip and fire up nessus. Fight fire with fire.
I havent touched 2.6 with my desktop boxes, but for my (relatively cutting edge, broken bios) laptop its ideal.
Some months back when my laptop shipped ACPI would freeze on 4 or 5 vanilla and patched kernels I tried the exceptions being late 2.5 and ac series kernels.
Though the situation is better now I find 2.6 irons out some minor stuff with reiser performance(which I cannot duplicate on other hardware, and have yet to find information about, boot time was ~10 min largely due to checking reiser at boot), allows working acpi and b44 drivers (these have largly been backported), and perhaps most importantly has richer facilities as far as acpi sleep states, swswap, and powersaving feature in general go.
As far as snappier schedualing and the like this is icing on the cake but, to me atleast, not as mentionable as better support for my hardware.
Perhaps the an interesting aspect of the comparison of new features in 2.2->2.4 and 2.4->2.6 is reflective of and specific to linux on the desktop, with 2.4 catering to features lacking in desktops (usb, firewire) and 2.6 adding quite a bit of stuff specific to mobile use.
Mitigating factors:
The vulnerability lies in the Windows Shell, rather than Windows Media Player. As a result, playing an audio file with Windows Media Player would not pose any additional risk.
Great to know that only the shell is broken, I would hate not to be able to play my collection of comprimised mp3s one last time before reformating yet again
Outlook 98 and 2000 (after installing the Outlook Email Security Update), Outlook 2002, and Outlook Express 6 all open HTML mail in the Restricted Sites Zone...
Is it just me or was there something about windows update that prior to this reading made me assume that it fixed stuff rather then introducing bigger and better vulnerabilities
In the case where an attackers code was executed, the code would run in the security context of the user. As a result, any limitations on the user's ability would also restrict the actions that an attacker's code could take
Really makes you wish that 98 had the concept of limitation on the users abaility (or user for that matter) or that users of other flavors assigned themselves accounts with permissions suitable for daily use.
Oh wait, I dont wish that...HAHAHA
In seriousness I thought the RIAA had empty threats with that whole were gonna kill all your computers thing, turns out that this really was and probably is possible for atleast a subset of the platforms they claimed were targetable.
Which goes a great ways towards explaining why an orginization that tried to outlaw playing DVD's under linux is being cast as the good guy here.
The mafia goon who breaks your legs for untimely lack of payment is more of a goodguy then the one who goes around sueing minors...err killing people, but that does not mean that he (or she) is not a mafia goon.
Boycott Music...give the big 5 more statistics (real ones this time) about how piracy is killing their monopoly, no thanks.
Once after my team won the superbowl I was downtown with some college buddies caught in the mist of celebration. Then the police riot line teargassed us merrymakers, and I'll be damned if that wasnt the biggest motivation for destruction of public property I have ever seen.
The RIAA has ripped off, lied to, supressed, ad infinium. They have threatened to plant cross platform viruses on my most holy of temples, and even (gasp) corrupted my congressman. Boycotting is a great first step, may I suggest urinating on the toothbrushes in the executive restroom as an effective and rational second step.
Slashdot Mirror
They said that Google is diluting the copyright because customers might mistaken the adverstised services as being associated with AXA.
In fairness people are morons - and yes, from experience there are those out there unable to distinguish a third party vendor from the manufacturer of a good or service. My company buys adwords on several trademark names and has natural listing on others - our company name does not include any of these trademarks and yet several times a week we get callers which have confused us with the manufacturer of said products and are looking for technical support.
I like to think the problem is not that we advertise on said words - rather that Google feeds these advertisements to the AOL network!
Google does not pay website owners for AdWords. The owners pay Google to for advertising space on Google.
Google does pay website owners for displaying adwords, in its adsense program.
The problem with the guys attempted extortion is that google charges advertisers more then it pays out on the adds, and as such this guys program, if sucessful, still makes google a buck. That said the amount advertisers pay on adds is determined by a number of criteria such as CTR (which is why googles adds are generally of good quality; better, more relevant, and therefore more clickable adds can be put in top positions for less then irrelevant adds) and as such something of this nature could potentially really screw up advertising related statistics and revenue for google.
What a polite and well written way to say (paraphrased) "we'll sue your ass." Perhaps if the RIAA were only half as elequent the world would be a nicer place. Mabye it was the unexpected simplicity of the legal doubletalk, but the letter from Nintendo seems to raise some valid points:
The very limited archival copy exception to copyright laws is set forth in 17 U.S.C. 117(a)(2), which specifies that the owner of a computer program can make a copy "for archival purposes only." Even if it were otherwise permitted, which it is not, playing a copy of a Nintendo game on the Zodiac system is not "archiving".
While generally I am amoung the first to annunciate my right to fair use, you have to admit that in this case there is a very legitamate and valid difference between media such as a cd and media on which a game is stored, and as such Nintendo makes a strong arguement. While one could do some waving of the hands and talk about hardware upgrades or software cd/dvd players, the plain and simple case in point here is that Nintendo software is meant to be extremely platform dependant. To reiterate this concept, to this day such software is distributed on a piece of plastic that would seem to have broken off a commadore 64.
I dont know...I enjoy emulation but generally (due to hardware limitations more then choice) get my kicks from the plethora of original nintendo, super nintendo, original gameboy, atari, playstation, and arcade emulators available. In retrospect there seems something fair-er about playing such games on under emulation, as many of these systems are no longer produced, and as such the emulator itself becomes - conceptually atleast - an archival copy.
In some cases even those consumers who would like to practice such ideals are unable to
Case in point: I was in the market for a laptop half a year back, and I shopped it to the point of obsession...barebones kits, preloaded linux laptops, et al ad infinium. I ended up getting together a handful of coupons and discounts and buying a Dell. Granted this goes against ever moral fiber of my being, but so does paying an extra five hundred dollars on a rebranded older model thinkpad, or a 12 pound build-your-own asus "portable".
I think the trouble with idealology is it is so damn impractacle...chastising the MPAA necessitates obstaining from hits such as LOTR that I would have prefered to see, and penalizing microsoft in the above example was synonamous with paying for an overpriced underfeatured machine.
If and when there is a supervendor out there capible of delivering what I want without breaking my wallet, then and only then will I vote with my wallet. Unfortunately until such time I vote with my brain.
Why is parent modded as funny?
Our rights have been trampled here, the innocent have not only been assumed guilty and lumped into a guilty mass, but to add insult the best response by the MPAA is that we should perhaps shell out more dough; and its FUNNY? - RTFL
It is apprehensible that some token jackass with a triple digit income suggests I pay a red cent in order to obtain what I have already purchased...such wisdom is what has limited the amount of dvd's I own to literally a handful.
http://www.illegal-art.org/audio/grey.html (site respone is slow, download speed was ok)
I hear they all take vacation after the superbowl!
Idealogically, a boycot against MSN is a fnatastic idea, the problem is that from a marketing perspective (for commercial sites) its suicide.
Each free click a site receives is invaluable, to the point that a whole industry is built upon manipulating search results (generally those of google, because thats where the vast majority of traffic comes from) in favor of bettering the positioning of their clients. Try googling for "seo","search enging optimization","search engine placement" and the like and you will notice the sheer number of results speak for themselves.
Ironically enough, results provided via this industry often cost more and perform worse then google adwords (first because it takes some odd months for any results to show, and second because googles sorting algorithm change every month or two and maintaining good position takes constant manipulation), but the point is, that the top five results in any engine, be it google or msn, is money in the pocket. As such business entities will set idealology aside; disallowing msnbot is not a viable solution for any commercial entity.
I had a similar expirience to grandparent not two months back:
I bought four almost identical dell machines (for business use), two with floppy drives, two without. Some weeks after they shipped I noticed that those which were ordered without the drives had the smaller drive bay case part completely omitted! Now generally I could care less about the omission of a $1 piece of metal, the thing is that the chasis are not standard pick it up at frys replacable, there proprietary funny keyed ones which seem to take funny keyed floppy drives. Appearently Dell decided that tetris players who were not familiar with innovations such as the screwdriver were their target market.
In any case on the subject of laptops (and specifically my laptop, damnit), I have found Dell to be a nightmareish entity. My machine literally has racked up over a month of downtime in less then six months, has been replaced twice, has had motherboard changed out once, and has had various other parts replaced. Needless to say I am a bit less then satisfied with the machine and desired a full refund. After exhausting their corperate options I took the step of contacting the BBB as well as filing a complaint with California Dept of Consumer Affairs (BEAR, which handles computer repair complaints, is a department of the CDCA hence this complaint).
The most recent replacement machine arrived a week ago today, it was shipped ground about a week after they promised 24hr processing. This week they have contacted me twice by mail and once by phone requesting the status of the broken machine...its on my goddamn floor and thats where it will stay till I feel like shipping it
I would be the first to agree that soundcard selection is lacking at best...
That said quality USB headsets seem to do wonders, the one I have is a plantronics DSP 500...has a built in soundcard (i think all usb headsets do), puts out nice bass if so desired, and is plug and play with hotplug under alsa.
Any complaints I have about this model would be shared with analog headphones the same size...namely the footprint (large headset, six feet of cord), is excessive on the go.
I do IT and marketing for a small company which I will not name here. We use addwords, (depriciated) google premium, overture, and an SEO firm, along with a healthy smattering of lesser marketing techniques for one of our larger sites, and have smaller sites which expiriment with one or more of these techniques to better evaluate the effectiveness of each. Our products are relatively competative, and as such we pay good money for every click, even natural results. We also pay money to see where our traffic comes from, what it does within our site, what searches brought it there, what people buy, et al ad infinium. In total we speand perhaps $20,000 on marketing and related stuff each month, and this is likely a conservative estimate.
One of the things I find most ironic about searches is that people view google as an "unbiased search engine", when that very concept is oxymoronic in nature. But dont take my word for it look at the source code for the top 2 or 3 listings for any marginally competitve seach term where there is some potential for profit, generally what you will find is headers and content which is pleasing to google, and only marginally pleasing to humans. The very idea of corperate america letting traffic buy products from competitors makes any boss anxious, and as such we pay something like six dollars per person per click for some of our more competitve terms.
Google is neither uncensored nor unbiased, it is indeed fallable. It just happens that google makes it hard(er) to purchase such results by allowing other, uncertified parties to sell them to the end-user, by changing their algoritm to thwart these efforts monthly. Google does indeed do censoring, and in terms of SEO efforts censors quite radically (hiring SEO firms is tricky particularly because the wrong ones will invariably get one banned).
All this aside, I still use google almost exclusively for searching, but tend to do so differently then before I learned about the inner workings of search engine placement:
For commercial goods, I typically click the sponsored link, because atleast they are honest about their intent, and they are going to put you on the page within their site you want, they control where you are directed (as opposed to natural results tend towards pages with better link weight, and not a whole lot of people outside the sites are necessarily linking to their products). I figure the better part of first page content on google is bought, and I might as well frequent those sites blatently buying it, as opposed to subtily doing so.
The other large change I have made is to use more words with will exclude commercial results if I am looking for information or whatever else, I get natural results by wording my searches so that there is no commercial interest (generally by specifing or disallowing a word that will elimanate the bulk of commercial results), for instance "howto" works wonders when finding anything linux related...
Xine has an ascii output plugin, probably other players as well...so technically you wont have to wait though I cannot vouge for the quality
From the FAQ: How is Nvu different from other HTML editors available for Linux? ... 3) Integrated web file management....
There are five main differences:
I have to say in this respect I've found quanta already far exceeds the windows offerings, as support for the fish protocol (transfers files over secure shell) means one can avoid ftp like the security scorge it is. With dreamweaver even SFTP dosn't come out of the box.
Me-thinks it looks promising, given that a platform with wysiwyg and functionality similar to that of dreamweaver can only be accomplished by combining mozilla's editor (or open office's) with quanta, bluefish, or the like. There are a few (commercial) ones I have yet to try such as coffee cup, but overall it is a rather undesirable situation for those who prefer to layout tables without frazzling the brain.
"Processing at the speed of light, you can have safer airports"
Its really quite sick and disturbing that the aftermath of 9/11 has degraded to a marketing ploy.
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item =3355761848&category=2298
LOTR, Fellowship BIN $9.95 (open box from first page, im lazy tonight)
In answer to your question, no not just the crappy ones are available for $10. The point is not the price that it takes to produce films, rather that films cost so much more to produce then CD's and yet retail for comparitively so much cheaper. Even if the films are $5 more on average for new releases, their production cost 200* more, and the media which they are distributed on is also more expensive to master and produce.
A compact disk might take a band a week in a recording studio with a crew of 10, a film might be a year with a crew of 50, and yet these media are comperable in price. Logically, there is something very wrong with that picture
Perhaps the thing that most irks me is not the new releases (I dont listen to a whole lot of new artists) but the fact that older dvd's are sold cheap whereas older cd's tend to be more expensive.
1.) The artists who are getting screwed by people like you
...pirating their product is still illegal, immoral, and wrong...
The artists are not getting screwed by people such as myself, I did not address piracy in my previous post. Personally, I dont feel the need to lower myself to downloading the latest played out radio crap, and as such, there is little or nothing on this computer which should not be here. I buy CD's, quite often really, but in recent years have chosen to do so at small shows from the actual artists who are not affiliated with the big 5, or at sites such as mp3.com where the artist are fairly compensated for their work. The artists are benifiting from my purchase in that they are making say 50% of the price I pay, I am benefiting in that I dont have to listen to some guy who shows of his 50 Bentlys on MTV sing about how miserable his life is.
2.)
Illegal yes, immoral and wrong, thats a personal decision, and in my instance I dont find it to be such, atleast not arbitrarily so. For instance where do bootlegs fall into this paradigm, recordings from specific concerts which are not a viable commercial product, but which are an invaluable musical commodity to those who collect them.
Are their instances where piracy is wrong, I think most certainly so, but unfortunately for the artist, at times it serves as an effective means to an end. Luckily the MPAA tax is so heavy that when one downloads an entire album they are generally denying the artist less then a dollar.
As for iTunes, if you could kindly direct me to the version for linux I would love to check it out....oh whats that you say, it requires a thousand dollors worth of cheap mac or agreement with windows EULA. Hmmm, real viable option for those who disagree with exploitation at the hands of commercialism.
Lastly and perhaps most importantly "idealistic stands" do not necessarily indicate an affinity for free as in beer. I dont claim to dislike the RIAA because they make music proprietary, rather I dislike them (and the MPAA, and Microsoft, and the policy imposed by George W, and a great deal of other stuff) because they discourage choice and declare that "this is the way it is, and fuck your idealism." You mention kazaa, I do not use it because it suffers from the same platform limitations as iTunes, is associated with spyware, and recently has been directed exclusively towards commercial interests. To me, there are more viable options out there, and the same stands with music produced by the big five. I refuse to contribute funds to institutions that treat me like a peice of shit with no rights simply because they can, and I do this specifically because I think America would be a better place if the people were able to contribute half as much to congress as corperate interests do. It would truly be for the people, by the people, and unfortunately institutions such as the RIAA prevent this and make it look like a warped version of reality.
Perhaps If you were to read the artical and familiarize yourself with the past behavior of the RIAA (instead of spouting as much rubbish as you can and still have a shot at first post), you might understand that the reason this so pisses alot of us off is exactly because we are music lovers. The issue is not necessarily one of piracy, nor lawsuits, but one of a blatent monopoly acting in their own interests and screwing their audence
Case in point:
"Our objective here is not to win lawsuits; it is to foster a business environment where legal online music services and bricks-and-mortar retail stores can flourish.''
That might be true, but five years ago this was anything but the case. The RIAA in the past not only has done nothing to promote MP3s or any other "free" type of file (free as in containing no or few restrictions on use), but rather went out of their way to denounce the mp3 as a tool whose use was limited to piracy, and sunk money into proprietary, loosy formats which were time, play, or copy limited. They missed the uprising of online music by blatently persecuting those involved in it, legally or otherwise, and as such have had no monitary interest in it until Napster brought mp3s away from campuses and onto the computers of the common man...when they realized that it would not and could not be stopped.
Additionally the RIAA has gone out of its way to manipulate both facts and figures. MP3s are a perfect digital copy they say, and therefore a much different beast then an analog VCR tape. Make sense to me, BUT, they use an argument that directly counters this at other times. Lets say one owns a CD and wants to make MP3's...its legal. Wants to find MP3's (corresponding to the CD in question) online...nope, the RIAA says that each CD pressed has minute flaws unique to a given CD and therefore the MP3's I create and those created by somone else are different entities, in effect that the MP3 is not so perfect a digital copy. Quite frankly I see little point in reporter even asking questions that demonstrate inconsistancies such as this (if you cannot afford a $15 cdrom drive or cannot figure out how to use one of the many available ripping tools then by definition your much too stupid to be finding music online). The point here is not that its a viable situation, rather that the RIAA tends to interpret law, or figures, in the way which is most convient at the time.
Take this one:
The lawsuits are the record industry's reaction to a 31 percent decline in CD sales in the United States in the past three years, a sharp drop that coincides with the rise of popular file-sharing networks like Kazaa and Gnutella, used by millions of people around the world to swap free copies of songs.
What is ommited is this period also coincides with an economic slump and lossed by companies accross the board. It also coincides with the price of DVDs, a digital copy of a movie which took say $100 million to produce, falling below $10, and that of compact discs, which take perhaps $50,000 to master rising above $20. It also coincides with behaviors from the RIAA that have caused a handful, such as myself, to cease buying CD's. So while its nice to throw a big figure out there and omit all the other stuff, even nicer is to analize that figure in a historical perspective.
To me a music lover is someone that buys a nice set of speakers, and listens to music. In contrast to this is those such as yourself who like to support the RIAA by giving the Spice Girls and N-Sync there day in the spotlight and dollar per disk, and could care less that the other $19 is used for suing 12 year olds and other worthless causes that do nothing to further music
That they could play a longshot and come out real big if that longshot happens to win. Its the same ideaology that caused some fortune 500 companies to invest in SEO's licenses. I think the suprising thing is that those who stand most to win if ibm is ruled against (i.e. microsoft) have invested so little monitarily in this battle.
Incedentally, some of these funds could eventually be paid out in the lawsuits against SEO for violating the GPL, if said lawsuits succeed. Wouldnt that be sweet revenge, deep pockets paying to further linux. Perhaps Bill will soon join the bandwagon and contribute his cash to further open source.
Here are a few of mine:
...I could go on indefinately but i think im off to find me an emulator
Jupiter Lander (it was one of the few I found that took under three minutes from boot to play)
Jumpman
Delta Force
Pawn (it was only years later that I realized what a druggie game this was)
Commando
Skate or Die
Summer Olympics
Winter Olympics
The Hulk (to this day I think this game is unsolvable)
Buck Rogers
The Frogger Cartridge
I was 7 give or take:
The 64 was a hand me down from my brothers and the 128 a birthday gift a year or two later. My mom made me read the manual front to back before I was allowed to play, and after I had demonstrated my skills by typing in one or two of the "programs" contained in the manual, she got a hundred or two hundred pirated disks somewhere...ahh my first warez...
Some years later I have a computer science degree, just goes to show what the misconcieved overprotective nature of making a kid RTFM will do to him (or her)
In the old days an email address wasnt a disposible commodity.
There wern't people launching the equivelent of dictionary attacks against mail servers to see what does not bounce, and hence keeping an email address private involved sharing only with those who were trusted.
Today if I see such an attack at work I block the ip and fire up nessus. Fight fire with fire.
I havent touched 2.6 with my desktop boxes, but for my (relatively cutting edge, broken bios) laptop its ideal.
Some months back when my laptop shipped ACPI would freeze on 4 or 5 vanilla and patched kernels I tried the exceptions being late 2.5 and ac series kernels.
Though the situation is better now I find 2.6 irons out some minor stuff with reiser performance(which I cannot duplicate on other hardware, and have yet to find information about, boot time was ~10 min largely due to checking reiser at boot), allows working acpi and b44 drivers (these have largly been backported), and perhaps most importantly has richer facilities as far as acpi sleep states, swswap, and powersaving feature in general go.
As far as snappier schedualing and the like this is icing on the cake but, to me atleast, not as mentionable as better support for my hardware.
Perhaps the an interesting aspect of the comparison of new features in 2.2->2.4 and 2.4->2.6 is reflective of and specific to linux on the desktop, with 2.4 catering to features lacking in desktops (usb, firewire) and 2.6 adding quite a bit of stuff specific to mobile use.
From the windows update article:
Mitigating factors:
The vulnerability lies in the Windows Shell, rather than Windows Media Player. As a result, playing an audio file with Windows Media Player would not pose any additional risk.
Great to know that only the shell is broken, I would hate not to be able to play my collection of comprimised mp3s one last time before reformating yet again
Outlook 98 and 2000 (after installing the Outlook Email Security Update), Outlook 2002, and Outlook Express 6 all open HTML mail in the Restricted Sites Zone...
Is it just me or was there something about windows update that prior to this reading made me assume that it fixed stuff rather then introducing bigger and better vulnerabilities
In the case where an attackers code was executed, the code would run in the security context of the user. As a result, any limitations on the user's ability would also restrict the actions that an attacker's code could take
Really makes you wish that 98 had the concept of limitation on the users abaility (or user for that matter) or that users of other flavors assigned themselves accounts with permissions suitable for daily use.
Oh wait, I dont wish that...HAHAHA
In seriousness I thought the RIAA had empty threats with that whole were gonna kill all your computers thing, turns out that this really was and probably is possible for atleast a subset of the platforms they claimed were targetable.
Which goes a great ways towards explaining why an orginization that tried to outlaw playing DVD's under linux is being cast as the good guy here. The mafia goon who breaks your legs for untimely lack of payment is more of a goodguy then the one who goes around sueing minors...err killing people, but that does not mean that he (or she) is not a mafia goon.
Boycott Music...give the big 5 more statistics (real ones this time) about how piracy is killing their monopoly, no thanks. Once after my team won the superbowl I was downtown with some college buddies caught in the mist of celebration. Then the police riot line teargassed us merrymakers, and I'll be damned if that wasnt the biggest motivation for destruction of public property I have ever seen. The RIAA has ripped off, lied to, supressed, ad infinium. They have threatened to plant cross platform viruses on my most holy of temples, and even (gasp) corrupted my congressman. Boycotting is a great first step, may I suggest urinating on the toothbrushes in the executive restroom as an effective and rational second step.