If the mp3 player is less than $100, the $200 cost of the smart media hard disk isn't terribly hard to swallow, especially if it works in multiple devices.
It would be kind of cool to see this sort of thing in a smartmedia, multimedia, or securedigital form factor, especially if the interfaces of the memoryslot based MP3 players improve. It would be cool to have 6GB of mp3s along and still have $200 in cash more than the ipod freaks...
And all that's in the short term anyway. They're having a harder and harder time getting people to get into HAM Radio. The last major influx was during the Vietnam War if I am remembering what I've heard correctly. If it's not even really feasible to enjoy the activity due to interference, there'll be less and less reason for people to become HAM radio operators, and eventually there'll be some major emergency with cell towers nonfunctional, powerlines down, phone lines down, and no one to coordinate things over the air.
We've had PDAs for years, since the days of the Apple Newtons and early US Robotics Palms. We've had handhelds like the Casio handheld computer with the 200MHz MediaGX processor from Cyrix in it. We've had HP and Compaq handhelds that are powerful enough to play mp3s for about three years.
Another small computer is cool, but is it really especially newsworthy?
We have NPR stations KJZZ and KBAQ in the Phoenix area. KJZZ does NPR talk show stuff during the day, which is often fairly interesting, and Jazz at night. KBAQ is classical, 24/7. Unfortunately KBAQ's transmitter is painfully low-powered, so they don't come in terribly well in many parts of the city.
NPR's stuff on KBAQ is mostly limited to quick news blurbs and some Garrison Keeler stuff. KJZZ is the station that spends a lot of money on the full time programming, some of which is subsidized by the government's budget. I've found that NPR's news is good because it doesn't seem to sensationalize stuff nearly as much, and unlike other talkshows on corporate radio, they seem to give more fair airtime to people with contrasting views on a particular subject. "Talk" on most other stations seems to be "rant at" more than conversation.
We're not sitting there with ten minutes of bombardment from your local automobile dealerships advertising $10,000 for your trade, commercials for anti-depression medication, ads from your local nightclubs talking about the ladies that'll be there Thursday night, etc...
"Is the Howard Stern show still on the radio these days? That could get dangerous."
How about the flip side? I listen to NPR a lot, and if enough people are listening to non-corporate radio, it'll be really interesting to see what kinds of ads are displayed.
Of course in Phoenix, almost all of the corporate stations are running extremely frequent ads for adult stores like "The Castle Boutique" and "Fascinations", or ads for participating in medical studies, so the content could get rather lewd or strange if these advertisers take to the billboards...
Company Lawyer: "You're violating our copyrights! We order you to cease and desist distribution now, or face your utter doom through further legal action!"
Corporate underling, walking in, sullen looking...
Corporate Underling: "Uh, sir, we may have a problem, uh, here, sir. We can't find the copyright information, uh, on our rom, uh, sir..."
Company Lawyer's face suddenly shows his confusion, wonder, and amazement about having to completely retract his previous statement...
Company Lawyer: "Okay. We'll continue to allow you to distribute this time, but be warned, young project, that we'll meet again, Oh yes, we'll meet again!"
"...we are taking a step closer to being a rogue nation -- the likes of which we have so often criticized and fought in the past."
We've been a rogue nation as long as we've been a nation. We've given support and gotten support, but for the first half of the existence of the United States of America, we were geographically isolated enough that we were left alone for the most part. We built up eventually to be extremely strong, and now we can do whatever we want to, for the most part, without fear of large-scale retribution. We prefer when at least part of the rest of the world is agreeable to what we do, because it means that there's not much chance of large numbers of countries ganging up on us at once, but that's what our spindoctors go in to change.
Almost any nation, given the resources, would do the same. Once you are at the top, you don't want to descend.
Now that the Denial of Service stuff is over with, we can get back to the regular SCO articles...
Though it would be fun for everyone who reads Slashdot to send SCO a letter in complaint of their business practices, especially if they were all sent within the same week. Would they try to call receiving a million pieces of mail in six days an 'attack' too?
Just reading the slashdot blurb, I get the image of a pigeon with a couple of DVD data discs tied to it's feet, and the resulting attempt to fly is quite comical...
"4) These are the people who are deciding how the internet is going to be governed"
Not to get too off-topic, but I don't think that I like the direction that they want to take the Internet. Yes, it spans the globe, but it's something that a lot of private and public American funding went into designing, developing, and maintaining. I understand the need for standards, but I don't think that the U.N. is really right for governing the Internet. They have a hard enough time running peacekeeping missions in European countries, let alone anywhere else in the world, and that's stuff that there has been established methods around for quite some time.
My basic idea is this-- The U.S. had the single largest contribution to the idea of a global information network in the form of the Internet. If the rest of the world wants one of their own, let them create it themselves. There are enough people in enough other countries that if they want to slowly combine into one government with it's own infrastructure, let them. It's called competition, and it's been proven, that when coupled with the right amount of cooperation, to be very good at advancing things. If the U.N. builds their own global information network and it's better than the Internet, people will switch. If it's not, either through information availability problems, or through censorship, then it won't. Seems fairly simple.
Netcraft had a posting about the supposed attack, but didn't doubt the actual situation. I've sent them the following letter:
To: webmaster@netcraft.com
Subject: News on your front page
You have a news article about SCO's network downtime posted on your front page, claiming that SCO is the target of a DDoS attack. Due to availability of services on other machines on the same netblock, like the FTP protocol on ftp.sco.com (one IP address higher than www.sco.com), I question the veracity of your news article, and I felt that I should call this into question.
groklaw.net has information posted that you might find interesting, potentially leading to a revision of your news article. The page can be found at:
Much of the information that I have read about this is available from them, as are some theories as to what is actually happening.
Thank you for your time,
TWX
Basically, if you doubt the truth of the "news" about SCO/Caldera's troubles, call it into question with those reporting it, especially those who are supposed to be some kind of authority to listen to.
I'm amazed that companies whose sole purpose is to provide secure, reliable data management (ATMs, and now voting machines) would be so incredibly stupid regarding security and integrity of systems. Diebold's attitudes toward their voting machines make me wonder about their ATMs, and if they are as insecure and poorly implemented as the voting machines were demonstrated to be.
This is one place where we should definitely push for open source software with peer review. Otherwise we'll have elections under control of a few people without any recourse.
If you want to find the collective IQ of an assembled group, you take the IQ of the lowest person in the group and you divide it by the number of people in the group.
...is that no one else knows where to look to find things that might be sensitive. You can literally hide things in plain sight, but with the amount of crud stacked everywhere physically, and the amount of data strewn about with no apparent labelling (except for the porn of course), no one can actually tell what is important and what isn't.
Of course, dates don't seem to understand the logic of living in an apartment that already looks like it's been rifled through.
"...software patents are just like nuclear veapons - it is just too damaging so that noone really wants to use them - it would destroy everyone."
Except that software patents don't cause people to be killed en masse.
I kind of hope that everyone starts trying to enforce all of the patents that exist. Maybe it'll force some rethinking of how the patent office and patent system is implemented.
I agree, but there is one thing that does need to be considered. Much of what IBM has patents on is used by every OS developer under the sky. IBM has, so far, not gone after many otherwise-lucrative targets, seeming to favour making a point of knowing competitors' systems so well that they can integrate anything into them. If IBM really wanted to go after a rich company, I'm certain that Microsoft's process control stuff falls under patents that IBM holds, and IBM hasn't bothered. I suspect that they'd rather leech money of of people who need support for a badly implemented product, which IBM provides, rather than destroy the services and support market that they've made a lot of money in.
Remember, IBM is probably the oldest IT company in the world. They didn't get there from pulling a rambus-style attack on someone.
Slashdot Mirror
If the mp3 player is less than $100, the $200 cost of the smart media hard disk isn't terribly hard to swallow, especially if it works in multiple devices.
It would be kind of cool to see this sort of thing in a smartmedia, multimedia, or securedigital form factor, especially if the interfaces of the memoryslot based MP3 players improve. It would be cool to have 6GB of mp3s along and still have $200 in cash more than the ipod freaks...
Yeah, I know. a lot of people write it like that though, and I tend to interact with them enough that I just don't give a damn.
Here is why it's Ham Radio.
Not and acronym, and not kosher...
And all that's in the short term anyway. They're having a harder and harder time getting people to get into HAM Radio. The last major influx was during the Vietnam War if I am remembering what I've heard correctly. If it's not even really feasible to enjoy the activity due to interference, there'll be less and less reason for people to become HAM radio operators, and eventually there'll be some major emergency with cell towers nonfunctional, powerlines down, phone lines down, and no one to coordinate things over the air.
We've had PDAs for years, since the days of the Apple Newtons and early US Robotics Palms. We've had handhelds like the Casio handheld computer with the 200MHz MediaGX processor from Cyrix in it. We've had HP and Compaq handhelds that are powerful enough to play mp3s for about three years.
Another small computer is cool, but is it really especially newsworthy?
...Slashdot found out and saturated their web site with so many hits that they'll spend the next three years paying for the bandwidth...
We have NPR stations KJZZ and KBAQ in the Phoenix area. KJZZ does NPR talk show stuff during the day, which is often fairly interesting, and Jazz at night. KBAQ is classical, 24/7. Unfortunately KBAQ's transmitter is painfully low-powered, so they don't come in terribly well in many parts of the city.
NPR's stuff on KBAQ is mostly limited to quick news blurbs and some Garrison Keeler stuff. KJZZ is the station that spends a lot of money on the full time programming, some of which is subsidized by the government's budget. I've found that NPR's news is good because it doesn't seem to sensationalize stuff nearly as much, and unlike other talkshows on corporate radio, they seem to give more fair airtime to people with contrasting views on a particular subject. "Talk" on most other stations seems to be "rant at" more than conversation.
We're not sitting there with ten minutes of bombardment from your local automobile dealerships advertising $10,000 for your trade, commercials for anti-depression medication, ads from your local nightclubs talking about the ladies that'll be there Thursday night, etc...
"Is the Howard Stern show still on the radio these days? That could get dangerous."
How about the flip side? I listen to NPR a lot, and if enough people are listening to non-corporate radio, it'll be really interesting to see what kinds of ads are displayed.
Of course in Phoenix, almost all of the corporate stations are running extremely frequent ads for adult stores like "The Castle Boutique" and "Fascinations", or ads for participating in medical studies, so the content could get rather lewd or strange if these advertisers take to the billboards...
Company Lawyer: "You're violating our copyrights! We order you to cease and desist distribution now, or face your utter doom through further legal action!"
Corporate underling, walking in, sullen looking...
Corporate Underling: "Uh, sir, we may have a problem, uh, here, sir. We can't find the copyright information, uh, on our rom, uh, sir..."
Company Lawyer's face suddenly shows his confusion, wonder, and amazement about having to completely retract his previous statement...
Company Lawyer: "Okay. We'll continue to allow you to distribute this time, but be warned, young project, that we'll meet again, Oh yes, we'll meet again!"
"...we are taking a step closer to being a rogue nation -- the likes of which we have so often criticized and fought in the past."
We've been a rogue nation as long as we've been a nation. We've given support and gotten support, but for the first half of the existence of the United States of America, we were geographically isolated enough that we were left alone for the most part. We built up eventually to be extremely strong, and now we can do whatever we want to, for the most part, without fear of large-scale retribution. We prefer when at least part of the rest of the world is agreeable to what we do, because it means that there's not much chance of large numbers of countries ganging up on us at once, but that's what our spindoctors go in to change.
Almost any nation, given the resources, would do the same. Once you are at the top, you don't want to descend.
Now that the Denial of Service stuff is over with, we can get back to the regular SCO articles...
Though it would be fun for everyone who reads Slashdot to send SCO a letter in complaint of their business practices, especially if they were all sent within the same week. Would they try to call receiving a million pieces of mail in six days an 'attack' too?
Just reading the slashdot blurb, I get the image of a pigeon with a couple of DVD data discs tied to it's feet, and the resulting attempt to fly is quite comical...
"4) These are the people who are deciding how the internet is going to be governed"
Not to get too off-topic, but I don't think that I like the direction that they want to take the Internet. Yes, it spans the globe, but it's something that a lot of private and public American funding went into designing, developing, and maintaining. I understand the need for standards, but I don't think that the U.N. is really right for governing the Internet. They have a hard enough time running peacekeeping missions in European countries, let alone anywhere else in the world, and that's stuff that there has been established methods around for quite some time.
My basic idea is this-- The U.S. had the single largest contribution to the idea of a global information network in the form of the Internet. If the rest of the world wants one of their own, let them create it themselves. There are enough people in enough other countries that if they want to slowly combine into one government with it's own infrastructure, let them. It's called competition, and it's been proven, that when coupled with the right amount of cooperation, to be very good at advancing things. If the U.N. builds their own global information network and it's better than the Internet, people will switch. If it's not, either through information availability problems, or through censorship, then it won't. Seems fairly simple.
Netcraft had a posting about the supposed attack, but didn't doubt the actual situation. I've sent them the following letter:
1 63721614
To: webmaster@netcraft.com
Subject: News on your front page
You have a news article about SCO's network downtime posted on your front page, claiming that SCO is the target of a DDoS attack. Due to availability of services on other machines on the same netblock, like the FTP protocol on ftp.sco.com (one IP address higher than www.sco.com), I question the veracity of your news article, and I felt that I should call this into question.
groklaw.net has information posted that you might find interesting, potentially leading to a revision of your news article. The page can be found at:
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20031210
Much of the information that I have read about this is available from them, as are some theories as to what is actually happening.
Thank you for your time,
TWX
Basically, if you doubt the truth of the "news" about SCO/Caldera's troubles, call it into question with those reporting it, especially those who are supposed to be some kind of authority to listen to.
I'm amazed that companies whose sole purpose is to provide secure, reliable data management (ATMs, and now voting machines) would be so incredibly stupid regarding security and integrity of systems. Diebold's attitudes toward their voting machines make me wonder about their ATMs, and if they are as insecure and poorly implemented as the voting machines were demonstrated to be.
This is one place where we should definitely push for open source software with peer review. Otherwise we'll have elections under control of a few people without any recourse.
"But somehow, I can't imagine Kermit Longhorn as a species... :-)"
Oh really?
MUPPETS...
IN...
SPACE...
</ghostly announcer voice>
...when SCO's lawyers turn around and sue them next. It'll go from being "SCO Sues World" to "World Sues SCO"...
If you want to find the collective IQ of an assembled group, you take the IQ of the lowest person in the group and you divide it by the number of people in the group.
...is that no one else knows where to look to find things that might be sensitive. You can literally hide things in plain sight, but with the amount of crud stacked everywhere physically, and the amount of data strewn about with no apparent labelling (except for the porn of course), no one can actually tell what is important and what isn't.
Of course, dates don't seem to understand the logic of living in an apartment that already looks like it's been rifled through.
What's the difference between Bell Labs and the Boy Scouts of America?
The Boy Scouts have adult supervision...
"...software patents are just like nuclear veapons - it is just too damaging so that noone really wants to use them - it would destroy everyone."
Except that software patents don't cause people to be killed en masse.
I kind of hope that everyone starts trying to enforce all of the patents that exist. Maybe it'll force some rethinking of how the patent office and patent system is implemented.
Somehow, I don't think that the Linux community would be terribly upset if Linus announced that there were going to be a few more 2.5 kernels.
"BZZZZZZZZZZTTT! Wrong answer!"
I agree, but there is one thing that does need to be considered. Much of what IBM has patents on is used by every OS developer under the sky. IBM has, so far, not gone after many otherwise-lucrative targets, seeming to favour making a point of knowing competitors' systems so well that they can integrate anything into them. If IBM really wanted to go after a rich company, I'm certain that Microsoft's process control stuff falls under patents that IBM holds, and IBM hasn't bothered. I suspect that they'd rather leech money of of people who need support for a badly implemented product, which IBM provides, rather than destroy the services and support market that they've made a lot of money in.
Remember, IBM is probably the oldest IT company in the world. They didn't get there from pulling a rambus-style attack on someone.