If you're taking the time to write a comment on this story, DON'T. Instead, take that same amount of time to write a one page, reasoned, intelligent letter to your Senators (you have two, you know that?) telling them that you disapprove of this bill, telling them WHY (privacy violation, overextension of copyright, and so forth are good places to start), and encouraging them to work against it. Not tomorrow morning, RIGHT NOW. Get away from that Submit button and go write a letter to someone who could actually do something. Then send it snail mail to their LOCAL office (not DC office), or fax it. (Not email. Many offices don't pay attention to email, although some do.)
I don't want to see any replies to this post. Get away from Slashdot and do something other than whine, or you'll have no one to blame but yourself.
Are you still here? Stop reading and start acting!
Bob Montgomery didn't think he'd need a computer to design his motorized surfboard. Boy, was he wrong.
by Jean Thilmany, Associate Editor
When Bob Montgomery brought his motorized surfboard to market, he expected engineering challenges--but maybe not as many as he eventually met. He didn't think, for example, that he'd have to become an expert in choosing and integrating engineering technologies or in engine design.
A look at the process he went through as he started a company from the ground up provides a glimpse of how engineering technologies can be the hidden driver in bringing a new product to market. Montgomery hired engineers, made decisions about purchasing engineering technologies, and implemented a just-in-time manufacturing system--not to mention the marketing of an entirely new product-- successfully feeling his way through each step of the process.
Sixteen years ago, Montgomery, a former professional surfer and construction foreman, turned on his garage light in Capistrano Beach, Calif., and sat down to sketch the first rough design for an idea he'd been playing around with a while: a motorized surfboard he calls a jet board. He said his concept would bring surfing to the masses, no matter where they live, as long as it's near a body of water, whether that body is ocean, lake, or river. The Powerski Igniter 330 is newly available in the United States. Riders stand on it like a surfboard, and although it includes a mechanism for maneuvering, riders also steer it like a surfboard, by shifting their body weight. The Igniter 330 is now distributed in 35 countries. In August, it earned Coast Guard approval for U.S. distribution, Montgomery said.
Montgomery's 16-year journey from that initial rough draft to jet board production was by no means easy. Along the way he founded a company, Powerski International, in San Clemente, Calif., and hired an engineering team, led by Bjorn Levine, to design and patent a two-stroke, water-cooled, 45-horsepower engine that weighs about 40 pounds. The engine was specially designed to be light but powerful, to be compact with a sleek, side profile, and to perform well as it moves through water. Montgomery himself designed the jet-board hull, hollowing out the space beneath the rider's feet to house the engine. He hand-made a number of prototype hulls from composite materials.
CAN'T DO IT BY HAND
Between the first design on paper and actual production, Powerski engineers made thousands of changes to the hull, engine, and other components. After he built an initial model of the hull in his garage, Montgomery needed an engine to motorize the surfboard.
"I wanted the engine to be low-profile," he said. "Surfboards are flat. They don't have big humps on them. There was no engine out there to fit that profile. I had to pull an engine off the shelf, an outboard engine, which I placed in the hole in the hull horizontally. It was ineffective. It wasn't the correct design."
He would have to do it himself. Montgomery hired Levine, who had designed motorcycle engines successfully in the past. He created a 330-cubic-centimeter engine, known as the SuperTorque XT, that fits nicely within the hull's profile.
"I'd designed the hull and originally it had a sort of bowl in it," Montgomery said. "I said to Bjorn, 'I need you to make an engine to fit this bowl.' And he did it.
"It had to be long, like a little torpedo engine, and narrow, because the board had to be narrow," Montgomery said. "And it couldn't be very high.
"There's a host of design and engineering challenges when you design a surfboard and add an engine," he said. "Water intrusion was one of them. When you sit on the board, it sinks. We had to make it not sink. We've come up with inflatable seals to equalize the pressure around the hatches. Then, the exhaust on the engine had to have one-way valves so water couldn't get into the engine."
The motorized surfboard invented by Bob Montgomery includes a 330-cu
1. You rejuvenate and dance when you hear a windows flaw exposed, but you conveniently ignore the thousands of security flaws exposed in linux.
2. You yell loudly TROLL! at any person's post or at any person you see posting facts that you do not want to hear about your oh so cool linux.
3. You know it's a classic case of penis envy, you don't have all the support, software and hardware available for linux and you have to let that anger out somewhere, but you don't have the brains to admit it.
4. You hate windows, hate Microsoft, but race to emulate windows, have programs to run office from within linux, and spend a $300 on a Windows emulator, only Windows fools.
5. You cannot admit that you don't have professional usage of Linux outside server markets.
6. You cannot admit that most of the joe user out there when told that there is linux will respond, what is that?
7. You cannot admit that there is no professional printing capabilities in linux.
8. You cannot admit that you are a masochist (otherwise why would someone spend hours playing with scripts, and recompiling programs that are available for Windows?)
9. You cannot admit that there is no professional desktop publishing done on Linux.
10. You cannot admit that no one in their right mind would do professional video editing in Linux.
11. You cannot admit that linux sucks when it comes for gaming/home entertainment or education.
12. You have problems in understanding Windows, and you will blame your own incompetence on Microsoft.
13. You have problems in pointing a clicking, but have no problems in wading through cryptic scripts written by lunatics.
14. Nothing will get past that shit that fills your head, you will not admit to any facts.
15. You can't admit that naming of linux components, packages, and others are weird and fits profiles of troubled teenagers. gentoo, lgx, rpm....
16. You feel angered because you were left out by microsoft's Media technologies, they support Mac, Sun sparc, but not linux.
17. You feel inferior deep inside but unable to admit it, you don't have a database as easy and powerful as Access.
18. You cannot tell that not a single office package outside Microsoft's is worth looking at or bothering with.
19. You don't know that your CD recorder software sucks.
20. You don't have DVD-RAM, DVD-R, DVD-RW support in your pathetic OS.
21. While the rest of the world moves on, you're stuck in a stone age technology that needs third party software to boot into GUI.
22. You act out of prejudice, you kill file domains and users of specific news readers while you ignore the bullshit that your fellow linux losers post.
23. You don't know commercial support in Linux is almost non existent.
24. You miss the fact that companies are leaving linux because of the chaos, and the cheap linux losers who are unwilling to pay and support hard work, Corel, gaming companies,...etc.
25. You are unaware that linux has no terminal services (there is a lame one that no one uses), and commercial support for it is not happening.
26. You are unaware that setting up servers on Windows takes couple of minutes while on linux, good luck playing with configuration scripts.
27. You cannot admit that support for USB on linux is laughable at best.
28. You think that Linux is better because slashdot told you so.
29. You spend countless hours flaming people because they post their opinions about your oh so cool linux and your attitude, instead of researching things for yourself and understanding fact in order not to look this stupid.
30. You think that anyone who uses linux has a clue.
31. You think that linux cannot crash.
32. You think that everyone is interested in your conspiracy theories about Microsoft (or should i say M$ in order for you, teenagers to understand?), and how they destroyed linux,...etc.
33. You keep ignoring the fact that thousands of linux servers get hacked every year, but it takes one Windows server hacked to get you and your fellow linux idiots to dance and celebrate.
If the latest revalations regarding IBM's possible leakage of copyrighted Unix code into Linux have proven anything, it is that using any derivative of this outdated operating system is a legal disaster waiting to happen. Not only is Linux licensed under the anti-business GNU General Public License, but it turns out that commercial code may have been unlawfully added, making it illegal to use or distribute.
This should suprise no one familiar with the history of Unix. The earliest version was an unlicensed ripoff of the proprietary Multics operating system, and was partly responsible for destroying the market for this pioneering operating system. The Berkeley Shareware Distribution (BSD) was sued by AT&T in the early 1990s, for openly distributing copyrighted code in its public-domain source releases. As if this wasn't enough, it turned out that AT&T had also broken the license on code they had taken from BSD, leaving both sides forced to essentially accept the other's illegal behavior in order to avoid stiffer penalties.
Reputable software companies such as Microsoft, though initially interested in Unix, have learned to steer clear of the mess of standards, licenses, and conflicting intellectual property rights that Unix forms. Microsoft Windows XP [microsoft.com] is the latest release of Microsoft's flagship version of Windows, built from the ground up in the early 1990s based on the most modern concepts in operating systems, without any legacy baggage from the 1970s. And it is available essentially for free, preloaded on hardware from all major manufacturers. There is really no reason to use anything else, unless you need a truly high-performance computing system such as IBM's proprietary OS/390 or HP's OpenVMS.
My business faces ruin. CD sales have dropped through the floor. People aren't buying half as many CDs as they did just a year ago. Revenue is down and costs are up. My store has survived for years, but I now face the prospect of bankruptcy. Every day I ask myself why this is happening.
I bought the store about 12 years ago. It was one of those boutique record stores that sell obscure, independent releases that no-one listens to, not even the people that buy them. I decided that to grow the business I'd need to aim for a different demographic, the family market. My store specialised in family music - stuff that the whole family could listen to. I don't sell sick stuff like Marilyn Manson or cop-killer rap, and I'm proud to have one of the most extensive Christian rock sections that I know of.
The business strategy worked. People flocked to my store, knowing that they (and their children) could safely purchase records without profanity or violent lyrics. Over the years I expanded the business and took on more clean-cut and friendly employees. It took hard work and long hours but I had achieved my dream - owning a profitable business that I had built with my own hands, from the ground up. But now, this dream is turning into a nightmare.
Every day, fewer and fewer customers enter my store to buy fewer and fewer CDs. Why is no one buying CDs? Are people not interested in music? Do people prefer to watch TV, see films, read books? I don't know. But there is one, inescapable truth - Internet piracy is mostly to blame. The statistics speak for themselves - one in three discs world wide is a pirate. On The Internet, you can find and download hundreds of dollars worth of music in just minutes. It has the potential to destroy the music industry, from artists, to record companies to stores like my own. Before you point to the supposed "economic downturn", I'll note that the book store just across from my store is doing great business. Unlike CDs, it's harder to copy books over The Internet.
A week ago, an unpleasant experience with pirates gave me an idea. In my store, I overheard a teenage patron talking to his friend.
"Dude, I'm going to put this CD on the Internet right away."
"Yeah, dude, that's really lete [sic], you'll get lots of respect."
I was fuming. So they were out to destroy the record industry from right under my nose? Fat chance. When they came to the counter to make their purchase, I grabbed the little shit by his shirt. "So...you're going to copy this to your friends over The Internet, punk?" I asked him in my best Clint Eastwood/Dirty Harry voice.
"Uh y-yeh." He mumbled, shocked.
"That's it. What's your name? You're blacklisted. Now take yourself and your little bitch friend out of my store - and don't come back." I barked. Cravenly, they complied and scampered off.
So that's my idea - a national blacklist of pirates. If somebody cannot obey the basic rules of society, then they should be excluded from society. If pirates want to steal from the music industry, then the music industry should exclude them. It's that simple. One strike, and you're out - no reputable record store will allow you to buy another CD. If the pirates can't buy the CDS to begin with, then they won't be able to copy them over The Internet, will they? It's no different to doctors blacklisting drug dealers from buying prescription medicine.
I have just written a letter to the RIAA outlining my proposal. Suing pirates one by one isn't going far enough. Not to mention pirates use the fact that they're being sued to unfairly portray themselves as victims. A national register of pirates would make the problem far easier to deal with. People would be encouraged to give the names of suspected pirates to a hotline, similar to TIPS. Once we know the size of the problem, the police and other law enforcement agencies will be forced to take piracy seriously. They have fought the War on Drugs with skill, so why not the War on Piracy?
My business faces ruin. CD sales have dropped through the floor. People aren't buying half as many CDs as they did just a year ago. Revenue is down and costs are up. My store has survived for years, but I now face the prospect of bankruptcy. Every day I ask myself why this is happening.
I bought the store about 12 years ago. It was one of those boutique record stores that sell obscure, independent releases that no-one listens to, not even the people that buy them. I decided that to grow the business I'd need to aim for a different demographic, the family market. My store specialised in family music - stuff that the whole family could listen to. I don't sell sick stuff like Marilyn Manson or cop-killer rap, and I'm proud to have one of the most extensive Christian rock sections that I know of.
The business strategy worked. People flocked to my store, knowing that they (and their children) could safely purchase records without profanity or violent lyrics. Over the years I expanded the business and took on more clean-cut and friendly employees. It took hard work and long hours but I had achieved my dream - owning a profitable business that I had built with my own hands, from the ground up. But now, this dream is turning into a nightmare.
Every day, fewer and fewer customers enter my store to buy fewer and fewer CDs. Why is no one buying CDs? Are people not interested in music? Do people prefer to watch TV, see films, read books? I don't know. But there is one, inescapable truth - Internet piracy is mostly to blame. The statistics speak for themselves - one in three discs world wide is a pirate. On The Internet, you can find and download hundreds of dollars worth of music in just minutes. It has the potential to destroy the music industry, from artists, to record companies to stores like my own. Before you point to the supposed "economic downturn", I'll note that the book store just across from my store is doing great business. Unlike CDs, it's harder to copy books over The Internet.
A week ago, an unpleasant experience with pirates gave me an idea. In my store, I overheard a teenage patron talking to his friend.
"Dude, I'm going to put this CD on the Internet right away."
"Yeah, dude, that's really lete [sic], you'll get lots of respect."
I was fuming. So they were out to destroy the record industry from right under my nose? Fat chance. When they came to the counter to make their purchase, I grabbed the little shit by his shirt. "So...you're going to copy this to your friends over The Internet, punk?" I asked him in my best Clint Eastwood/Dirty Harry voice.
"Uh y-yeh." He mumbled, shocked.
"That's it. What's your name? You're blacklisted. Now take yourself and your little bitch friend out of my store - and don't come back." I barked. Cravenly, they complied and scampered off.
So that's my idea - a national blacklist of pirates. If somebody cannot obey the basic rules of society, then they should be excluded from society. If pirates want to steal from the music industry, then the music industry should exclude them. It's that simple. One strike, and you're out - no reputable record store will allow you to buy another CD. If the pirates can't buy the CDS to begin with, then they won't be able to copy them over The Internet, will they? It's no different to doctors blacklisting drug dealers from buying prescription medicine.
I have just written a letter to the RIAA outlining my proposal. Suing pirates one by one isn't going far enough. Not to mention pirates use the fact that they're being sued to unfairly portray themselves as victims. A national register of pirates would make the problem far easier to deal with. People would be encouraged to give the names of suspected pirates to a hotline, similar to TIPS. Once we know the size of the problem, the police and other law enforcement agencies will be forced to take piracy seriously. They have fought the War on Drugs with skill, so why not the War on Piracy?
1. You rejuvenate and dance when you hear a windows flaw exposed, but you conveniently ignore the thousands of security flaws exposed in linux.
2. You yell loudly TROLL! at any person's post or at any person you see posting facts that you do not want to hear about your oh so cool linux.
3. You know it's a classic case of penis envy, you don't have all the support, software and hardware available for linux and you have to let that anger out somewhere, but you don't have the brains to admit it.
4. You hate windows, hate Microsoft, but race to emulate windows, have programs to run office from within linux, and spend a $300 on a Windows emulator, only Windows fools.
5. You cannot admit that you don't have professional usage of Linux outside server markets.
6. You cannot admit that most of the joe user out there when told that there is linux will respond, what is that?
7. You cannot admit that there is no professional printing capabilities in linux.
8. You cannot admit that you are a masochist (otherwise why would someone spend hours playing with scripts, and recompiling programs that are available for Windows?)
9. You cannot admit that there is no professional desktop publishing done on Linux.
10. You cannot admit that no one in their right mind would do professional video editing in Linux.
11. You cannot admit that linux sucks when it comes for gaming/home entertainment or education.
12. You have problems in understanding Windows, and you will blame your own incompetence on Microsoft.
13. You have problems in pointing a clicking, but have no problems in wading through cryptic scripts written by lunatics.
14. Nothing will get past that shit that fills your head, you will not admit to any facts.
15. You can't admit that naming of linux components, packages, and others are weird and fits profiles of troubled teenagers. gentoo, lgx, rpm....
16. You feel angered because you were left out by microsoft's Media technologies, they support Mac, Sun sparc, but not linux.
17. You feel inferior deep inside but unable to admit it, you don't have a database as easy and powerful as Access.
18. You cannot tell that not a single office package outside Microsoft's is worth looking at or bothering with.
19. You don't know that your CD recorder software sucks.
20. You don't have DVD-RAM, DVD-R, DVD-RW support in your pathetic OS.
21. While the rest of the world moves on, you're stuck in a stone age technology that needs third party software to boot into GUI.
22. You act out of prejudice, you kill file domains and users of specific news readers while you ignore the bullshit that your fellow linux losers post.
23. You don't know commercial support in Linux is almost non existent.
24. You miss the fact that companies are leaving linux because of the chaos, and the cheap linux losers who are unwilling to pay and support hard work, Corel, gaming companies,...etc.
25. You are unaware that linux has no terminal services (there is a lame one that no one uses), and commercial support for it is not happening.
26. You are unaware that setting up servers on Windows takes couple of minutes while on linux, good luck playing with configuration scripts.
27. You cannot admit that support for USB on linux is laughable at best.
28. You think that Linux is better because slashdot told you so.
29. You spend countless hours flaming people because they post their opinions about your oh so cool linux and your attitude, instead of researching things for yourself and understanding fact in order not to look this stupid.
30. You think that anyone who uses linux has a clue.
31. You think that linux cannot crash.
32. You think that everyone is interested in your conspiracy theories about Microsoft (or should i say M$ in order for you, teenagers to understand?), and how they destroyed linux,...etc.
33. You keep ignoring the fact that thousands of linux servers get hacked every year, but it takes one Windows server hacked to get you and your fellow linux idiots to dance and celebrate.
1. You rejuvenate and dance when you hear a windows flaw exposed, but you conveniently ignore the thousands of security flaws exposed in linux.
2. You yell loudly TROLL! at any person's post or at any person you see posting facts that you do not want to hear about your oh so cool linux.
3. You know it's a classic case of penis envy, you don't have all the support, software and hardware available for linux and you have to let that anger out somewhere, but you don't have the brains to admit it.
4. You hate windows, hate Microsoft, but race to emulate windows, have programs to run office from within linux, and spend a $300 on a Windows emulator, only Windows fools.
5. You cannot admit that you don't have professional usage of Linux outside server markets.
6. You cannot admit that most of the joe user out there when told that there is linux will respond, what is that?
7. You cannot admit that there is no professional printing capabilities in linux.
8. You cannot admit that you are a masochist (otherwise why would someone spend hours playing with scripts, and recompiling programs that are available for Windows?)
9. You cannot admit that there is no professional desktop publishing done on Linux.
10. You cannot admit that no one in their right mind would do professional video editing in Linux.
11. You cannot admit that linux sucks when it comes for gaming/home entertainment or education.
12. You have problems in understanding Windows, and you will blame your own incompetence on Microsoft.
13. You have problems in pointing a clicking, but have no problems in wading through cryptic scripts written by lunatics.
14. Nothing will get past that shit that fills your head, you will not admit to any facts.
15. You can't admit that naming of linux components, packages, and others are weird and fits profiles of troubled teenagers. gentoo, lgx, rpm....
16. You feel angered because you were left out by microsoft's Media technologies, they support Mac, Sun sparc, but not linux.
17. You feel inferior deep inside but unable to admit it, you don't have a database as easy and powerful as Access.
18. You cannot tell that not a single office package outside Microsoft's is worth looking at or bothering with.
19. You don't know that your CD recorder software sucks.
20. You don't have DVD-RAM, DVD-R, DVD-RW support in your pathetic OS.
21. While the rest of the world moves on, you're stuck in a stone age technology that needs third party software to boot into GUI.
22. You act out of prejudice, you kill file domains and users of specific news readers while you ignore the bullshit that your fellow linux losers post.
23. You don't know commercial support in Linux is almost non existent.
24. You miss the fact that companies are leaving linux because of the chaos, and the cheap linux losers who are unwilling to pay and support hard work, Corel, gaming companies,...etc.
25. You are unaware that linux has no terminal services (there is a lame one that no one uses), and commercial support for it is not happening.
26. You are unaware that setting up servers on Windows takes couple of minutes while on linux, good luck playing with configuration scripts.
27. You cannot admit that support for USB on linux is laughable at best.
28. You think that Linux is better because slashdot told you so.
29. You spend countless hours flaming people because they post their opinions about your oh so cool linux and your attitude, instead of researching things for yourself and understanding fact in order not to look this stupid.
30. You think that anyone who uses linux has a clue.
31. You think that linux cannot crash.
32. You think that everyone is interested in your conspiracy theories about Microsoft (or should i say M$ in order for you, teenagers to understand?), and how they destroyed linux,...etc.
33. You keep ignoring the fact that thousands of linux servers get hacked every year, but it takes one Windows server hacked to get you and your fellow linux idiots to dance and celebrate.
Thu Sep 18, 5:00 PM ET Add Technology - Reuters to My Yahoo!
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - A group of computer owners has filed a lawsuit against some of the world's biggest makers of personal computers, claiming that their advertising deceptively overstates the true capacity of their hard drives.
delayed 20 mins - disclaimer Quote Data provided by Reuters
Missed Tech Tuesday? Get wireless Internet to go - here's how. Plus, the scoop on service plans, security and more.
The lawsuit, which seeks class action status, was filed earlier this week in Los Angeles Superior Court against Apple Computer Inc.
The lawsuit brought by Los Angeles residents Lanchau Dan, Adam Selkowitz, Tim Swan and John Zahabian centers around the way that computer hard drives are described by manufacturers.
Representatives of the eight defendants were not immediately available to comment.
According to the lawsuit, computer hard drive capacities are described in promotional material in decimal notation, but the computer reads and writes data to the drives in a binary system.
The result is that a hard drive described as being 20 gigabytes would actually have only 20.3 gigabytes of readable capacity, the lawsuit said.
The plaintiffs said this difference in convention is deceptive and leaves buyers with less storage than they thought they were getting when they purchased their computers.
For example, when a consumer buys what he thinks is a 150 gigabyte hard drive, the plaintiffs said, he actually gets only 140 gigabytes of storage space. That missing 10 gigabytes, they claim, could store an extra 2,000 digitized songs or 20,000 pictures.
The lawsuit asks for an injunction against the purportedly unfair marketing practices, an order requiring the defendants to disclose their practices to the public, restitution, disgorgement of ill-gotten profits and attorneys' fees.
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Compulsory Licensing - The Death of Gnutella and the Triumph of Google
Posted by Ernest Miller on Monday, September 15 @ 06:05:16 EDT File Sharing Never have so many companies fought so hard to change the law so that they can so quickly be put out of business.
Back in July, a number of filesharing companies (Blubster, Grokster, BearShare, eDonkey 2000 and LimeWire - Kazaa being conspiculously absent) formed a trade association (P2PUnited - website coming soon, apparently), to push for, among other things, compulsory licensing, as noted in this New York Post article (File-Share Firms Hire a Lobbyist). I wonder how much they have really thought this through. After all, a compulsory license that legimitized filesharing would quickly put most of these companies out of business.
The Death of Gnutella
Why do most of these companies even exist? One very simple reason: the courts put Napster out of business. Napster was an extremely elegant solution for filesharing. It acted as a massive centralized database that allowed downloaders to easily find the uploaders with the files they wanted. By comparison, decentralized P2P networks, such as those based on the Gnutella protocol, are clunky and have serious issues with scalability, search efficiency and bandwidth use. Although services based upon the Gnutella protocol have gotten better, adopting strategies such as "supernodes", they remain hampered in their efficiency by their very reason for being: avoiding contributory and vicarious copyright liability (at which they have been successful, so far - though the farther they push for efficiency and control, the more shaky the legal ground they stand on, see, Decentralization, Gnutella and Bad Actors).
However, if filesharing becomes legal through a compulsory license, what is the purpose of the Gnutella-based software anymore? Napster's liability was based on theories of contributory and vicarious liability, which requires an underlying copyright violation. To the extent that filesharing is no longer copyright infringement, Napster could no longer be held liable. Since the Napster solution is far more efficient, particularly for searches, why would anyone use a Gnutella (or any decentralized P2P) network anymore? Virtually anything a Gnutella network can do can be implemented in a Napster-like network as well. Sure, current interfaces are better than Napster's, but they could easily be ported from a Gnutella client to a Napster-like one.
All that effort, all that clever programming optimizing the Gnutella protocol, gone in a flash of compulsory licensing. Sure Gnutella will still be around, but what will it be used for? Why will so much effort be devoted to develop and optimize it? Gnutella will be, as far as I can see, a dead end technology, at least for filesharing.
There Will Be Only One
So what, you say? Of course all these companies will swiftly shift to a Napster-like network when the law is passed. Absolutely! However, it is very likely that all but one of these companies will soon go out of business. The reason is that, like the auction market eBay, there is reason to believe that very strong network effects occur in the filesharing market. After all, in the auction market, sellers go to where the buyers are and buyers go where the sellars are. If you attract more buyers, you will attract more sellers, which then attracts more buyers, and so on in a positive feedback loop. Such network effects should operate similarly in the filesharing market, though most people will be buyers and only inadvertantly sellers. For example, if I am looking for an obscure track, I will go to the filesharing service with the most participants, since I will have the greatest chance of finding what I am looking for. Therefore, once one filesharing service clearly distinguishes itself in popularity from the others, it will take off and its competitors quickly wither away.
True, there is nothing that would prevent people from participating in several file
Let me just say that BitTorrent is nothing short of the Denial of Service attack. I hope they are taken down. When is/. going to learn that you can't flood sites, steal music, or copy DVDs without repercussion?
Blogger bucks premium-services trend By Paul Festa Staff Writer, CNET News.com September 10, 2003, 10:44 AM PT
Google-owned Web log-creation site Blogger is eliminating its paid version and folding premium functions into its free service, bucking a trend toward making people pay for Web site extras.
The creation of Blogger Pro, which cost subscribers a yearly fee of $35, came about as a result of financial necessity, Blogger co-founder Evan Williams wrote in an e-mail to subscribers. Now that Google owns the service, that need has passed.
"Pro subscribers helped keep us going as a struggling start-up, when servers and bandwidth were at an extreme premium," Williams wrote. "We wanted to keep basic Blogger free, but we needed to start charging in order to keep the lights on...Today, as you may know, Blogger's situation is much different. For one thing, we're part of Google. Google has lots of computers and bandwidth. And Google believes blogs are important and good for the Web."
Google said it would give Blogger Pro subscribers either a $24 Blogger sweatshirt or an RMS hippie doll. That offer is good through Oct. 1.
A Google representative said the formerly paid services will be rolled out in the free version in the next few days, but that syndication and posting by e-mail will take longer to offer.
Those who paid for Blogger Pro will continue to be able to use those services without interruption.
every say 4 seconds, with the client getting the standard error 500 - unrecoverable server error. I'm under Linux 2.0.35.
This use to bring my server to the ground, but I added more memory, and the server is fine now, except for Apache. All CGI is run as "nobody". My top command says:
Is there anything at all I can do to allow more damn CGI to run? Whats with the limit anyway? I just want to run an unlimited number of nobody CGI processes. How can I do that?
If you're taking the time to write a comment on this story, DON'T. Instead, take that same amount of time to write a one page, reasoned, intelligent letter to your Senators (you have two, you know that?) telling them that you disapprove of this bill, telling them WHY (privacy violation, overextension of copyright, and so forth are good places to start), and encouraging them to work against it. Not tomorrow morning, RIGHT NOW. Get away from that Submit button and go write a letter to someone who could actually do something. Then send it snail mail to their LOCAL office (not DC office), or fax it. (Not email. Many offices don't pay attention to email, although some do.)
I don't want to see any replies to this post. Get away from Slashdot and do something other than whine, or you'll have no one to blame but yourself.
Are you still here? Stop reading and start acting!
Recently I've been introduced to an operating system known as Linux. Lured by its low cost, I replaced Windows 98 on my computer with Linux. Unfortunately the more I use it the more I fear that this "Linux" may be an insidious way for the Dark One to gain a stronger foothold here on Earth. I know this may be a shocking claim, but I have evidence to back it up!
To begin with, Linux runs numerous background processes. These processes are usettlingly termed "demons." Furthermore in order to start or stop these "demons" a user must execute a command called "finger". By "fingering" a "demon" one excercises an unholy power, much the same way that the Lord of Flies controls his black minions.
Also consider some of these other Linux commands: "sleep", "mount", "unzip", "strip" and "touch". All highly suggestive in a sexual nature. I know that our Lord cannot approve of these, and I urge them to be renamed to something appropriate to the Christian community.
Third, Linux uses a flavor of DOS known as Bash. Bash is an acronym for "Bourne Again Shell". On the surface this would appear to be supportive of the Lord. However, remember that even Satan can quote the bible for his own purposes! While I believe Linux may be born-again, its obvious by the misspelling of "born" that its not born-again in an Christian church. Will the lies ever cease?
Additionally, one of the main people involved with the GNU Free Software Foundation supports contraception and abortion. His web site even advocates government support of contraception. He also wears fake halos, and has quips about his made-up church that relates to his free software. I find such blasphemy to be extremely unsettling.
One must also remember that the creator of Linux, a college student named Linux Torvaldis, comes from Finland. I'm sure all the followers of Christ are aware of the heritical nature of the Finnish: from necrophilia to human sacrifice, Finnish culture is awash in sin. I find little reason to believe anything good and holy could arise from this evil land.
Finally, let us remember that there is an alternative to using the Satan-powered Linux. I think history has shown us that Microsoft is quite holy. I'm told that its founder, William Gates is a strong supporter of our Lord and I encourage my fellow Christians to buy only his products to help keep the Devil at bay.
I wish I had more time to expound upon my findings. Unfortunately a family of Jews has moved in across the street and I must go speak to them of Jesus Christ before they are condemned to eternal hellfire. Please investigate this as you see fit and I'm sure you'll reach the same conclusions that I have.
Site Slashdotted - Ob Repost
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Dotcom Era Fads
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· Score: -1, Redundant
Rummaging through the recycle bin of Net obsessions
Good news: Net fashionistas have already declared the "flash mob" -- in which participants follow instructions given by e-mail and mobile phone to gather, annoy passersby, and disperse -- passe. Like a vapid-but-catchy summer anthem (here's looking at you, Nelly), a sartorial whim that everyone follows and then rapidly drops (hello, mood ring!), or the desperately annoying catchprase on everyone's lips (whassuuuuup indeed), various cybercultural oddities (a.k.a. memes) over the years have made a fleeting impact on Net culture, and sometimes beyond it. Consider if you will:
The Dancing Baby. Created in 1996 to demonstrate a software program by Autodesk, the baby took on a life of its own in 1997. Back then, when highly realistic moving graphics were innovative and the Net was not yet mainstream, Netizens passed along the baby because he represented a geek show as well as a freak show. His fame peaked when he was featured on the television show Ally McBeal.
HampsterDance. The (intentional) misspelling wasn't the only thing annoying about this chirpy fad. Canadian Deidre LaCarte built a personal Web site in the summer of 1998 in a competition with her sister and her best friend to see who could get the most traffic. She won. Named for LaCarte's 2 1/2-year-old pet hamster, Hampton Hampster, the HampsterDance site features animated critter dancing to a 20-second music loop (a clip from Roger Miller's Whistle-Stop from the 1973 soundtrack of Robin Hood). For reasons unknown it hit the big time, showing up in e-mail inboxes as that cute link you just had to see. It has even been featured in a TV commercial by Internet access provider EarthLink, and there was a CD released. Its fame has faded, but it lives on the Web at hampsterdance2.com.
Mahir "I Kiss You" Cagri. Mahir Cagri, an accordion-playing, fun-loving guy from Izmir, Turkey, created a Web page in 1998 with the greeting 'I Kiss You.' As with most Web pages it lived in relative obscurity -- until late 1999, when a hacker took the already kitschy page, added music and certain risque elements, and sent the URL out to the world. Unlike some unwitting Net celebs (such as the Star Wars Kid), Cagri welcomed the fame and created a music video, My Name is Mahir, that wasn't exactly a hit. One Internet company even flew him to the USA in the middle of the dot-com boom to be their representative. You can still see Mahir at ikissyou.org.
Other Net insta-celebs include Webcam doyenne Jenni (Jennifer Ringley) of jennicam.com; proto-spammers Canter and Siegel, known as the "green card lawyers" for a notorious ad posted to thousands of Usenet groups in the mid-'90s, and once-ubiquitous cult figure "Kibo" (James Parry), who would join the discussion when his name was invoked in Usenet newsgroups of the late '80s and early '90s.
All Your Base Are Belong to Us. This is an example of a saying or idea that rockets across the Net and becomes as familiar as an actual person. (The term spam, when used in reference to junk e-mail, is the most famous and successful of these.) The phrase, derived from a bad Japanese-to-English translation in the game Zero Wing, started showing up in the far corners of the Net in 2000 and shot to Web superstardom the following spring. People picked up the phrase and created a panoply of Web sites using it; they built Internet billboards, they morphed photos, they even put together music videos. But like other flashes in the pan, it retreated as quickly as it had appeared.
Imm. Req!!! Sr. Software Engineer - INDIA
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Dotcom Era Fads
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· Score: -1, Offtopic
Dear Friends,
We have an immidiate requirement for Sr. Software Engineer for our MNC client from Banglore, INDIA. Exp: 5 - 8 Years Qual: B.E/B.Tech OR M.E/M.Tech The person must have a knowledge of the following key skills.
- C and RISC programming - Software Arch. and Design Experience - Chip Debugging - VxWorks - pSoS -Device Drivers -ATM -DSL -System Debugging
Please forword your Latest Resume as word document attachment.
Please do convey your friends and pals who are looking for a better opportunity in in INDIA.
Slashdotted, and not one comment!
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Spray-On Computers
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· Score: -1, Informative
A spray-on computer is way to do IT
FIONA MACGREGOR EDUCATION REPORTER
SPRAY-ON computers the size of a grain of sand are set to transform information technology across the world thanks to pioneering research at Edinburgh University.
Scientists at the institution have just been awarded a 1.3 million grant to develop the "ubiquitous computing" technology which uses tiny semiconductor specks that can sense, compute and communicate without wires.
The study is set to put Scotland at the forefront of the next great leap forward for information technology and is likely to bring huge advances in all walks of life.
Researchers are already working with staff at Edinburgh hospitals to develop a method of using the computers to monitor heart patients at home.
They plan to spray the nano computers on to the chests of coronary patients, where the tiny cells would record a patient's health and transmit information back to a hospital computer.
Head of the project Professor DK Arvid said: "This research is very much looking to the future. At the moment, computer information is processed very discreetly, you either have a laptop, or a PC.
"In the future, computers will be able to be diffused into the environment. There won't be a sharp division - barricades will just disappear into the background.
"One way to achieve that will be computers the size of a grain of sand. Just by spraying them on to objects, you can computerise them. They would create a network which can transmit wirelessly to each other.
"In a cubic millimetre, you can have a sensor for heat, pressure, light and so on, but also a computer and wireless technology.
The professor said the team was already involved with doctors at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary and the Western General Hospital.
He said: "We are already working with cardiologists on a spray which would go on the chest and monitor the performance of the heart in an unobtrusive way. It means you don't have to have a large machine to lug around or go into hospital.
"After surgery there is great pressure on hospital beds yet there is no reason to stay other than to keep hooked up to a machine.
"With this you get into the home - this research is going to have an impact on real life."
The funding for the project, which also involves Napier, St Andrews, Glasgow and Strathclyde universities, has come from the Scottish Higher Education Funding Council.
The money will allow the scientists to see the technology working to cre micael's retardnesses within four years.
Prof Arvid said the spray-on computers could be in shops, hospitals and schools within ten years.
"At the moment if you want to interface you have to use a key board or a mouse, which is very unwieldy. With this you could take a pen and spray it and it becomes an interface in its own right."
The advance is set to put Edinburgh and Scotland at the forefront of the industry.
Bill Furness of Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce said: "This has huge potential for applications in commerce, health and education.
"From the business community's point of view, we are increasingly looking at the future of our city.
"Part of the answer to that is the vision of a world-class centre for research and innovation.
"This particular development sounds a very strong building block towards that vision."
Dr Simon Maxwell, part of the blood pressure unit at the Western General Hospital in Edinburgh University's department of medicine, described the technology as very "exciting". He said: "This will allow us to monitor patients much more accurately than we have ever been able to do and for more prolonged periods."
Canadian cellphone carriers rally around Wi-Fi By JACK KAPICA Globe and Mail Update
Canada's cellphone providers have agreed to create a common standard for their subscribers to connect to the Internet via public "hot-spots."
The 12-million people who own cellphones, personal digital assistants or any wireless device and subscribe to Bell Mobility (with Aliant Mobility), Microcell Solutions (Fido), Rogers AT&T Wireless or Telus Mobility will be able to use all Wi-Fi hot-spots operated by any one of those companies.
The plan is to create "a common identity" in which Wi-Fi subscribers would be recognized by the other companies' hot spots and would have to pay for on-line time only to their own carriers.
"It will work just like Interac," said a spokesman for the Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association, referring to debit and credit cards working at any automated teller machine regardless of where the customer has an account.
The agreement became necessary because Canada's cellphone providers offer four different and incompatible connection technologies.
The carriers will continue to vigorously compete with each other, both for customers and Wi-Fi hotspot locations, the CWTA said in a statement.
"Wi-Fi is a natural extension to the ubiquitous wireless voice and data services offered by the licensed public wireless carriers across Canada," CWTA president and CEO Peter Barnes said. "By developing standards of service and interconnection, the carriers will ensure Canadians have secure and convenient access to Wi-Fi hotspots without requiring new network identities or billing arrangements."
Common standards introduced by the national Canadian cellphone carriers would help to eliminate the development of redundant authentication and billing methods and will lead to consistent, simplified access, the group said.
The announcement is a step toward the development of standards and cross-carrier roaming capabilities for Canadian Wi-Fi users and wankers like michael. It is also expected to pave the way for future interoperability between the carriers' wireless data networks and their Wi-Fi hotspots.
The carriers said they expect to have standards and agreements in place by the end
of the year, and have them operational in 2004.
"Much like the Canadian inter-carrier messaging agreement provided a tremendous boost to adoption of text messaging in Canada, today's announcement is expected to significantly increase the adoption rates of Wi-Fi in Canada," Mr. Barnes said.
While IPv6 fixes many problems in IPv4, the developed world will not embrace IPv6 until many shortcomings in the protocol are addressed.
1. Cisco routers suck at IPv6. Many of cisco's routers use the router's CPU to process IPv6 packets instead of the fast-path. The reasons for this are explained in the next few points. While Juniper's routers are substantially better at IPv6 than cisco's, IT managers are often restrained by insane corporate policy that dictactes the use of cisco.
2. There are too many addresses. There are 16.7 million addresses per square metre of the earth's surface, including the oceans. This is overkill. The world does not need more than the 4 billion addresses available with IPv4, and I challenge you to come up with an application that requires that many. Assuming that you can actually come up with one, it could easily be solved with Network Address Translation, or NAT as it is commonly known.
3. IPv6 addresses are too large. An IPv6 address is 128 bits in size - 64 bits of which are reserved for addressing hosts, and 64 bits of which are reserved for routing. One thing that is cool with IPv6 is address autoconfiguration. Take your 56-bit MAC address on your ethernet card, ask for 64-bits of network prefix, bang it together with EUI-64 and you are set. The problem with a 64-bit network prefix is that routing tables become massive. Just do the math and you'll see that extreme amounts of memory are required to hold routing tables.
4. The IPv6 header is too large. An IPv4 header compact at 20 bytes in length, while the IPv6 is bloated at 40 bytes. That's right people, each one of your IP packets has twice as much overhead as before. While this may not sound much, IP networks have a requirement that the minimum MTU supported must be 576 bytes. That means that where you might have got 556 bytes of data in your IP packets, you now get 536 bytes. This means that downloading stuff will take 3.4% longer.
Sure, IPv6 allows for nice hacks like those described in this article, but is it really ready for prime time?
Throughout history there have been examples of writers of childrens' stories inserting more adult themes into their works. Many childrens' stories and Disney movies contain sex and drugs, but most of the adult themes have more to do with politics. Authors as a whole are an opinionated bunch, and every once in a while they secrete their beliefs and propaganda in seemingly innocent works. Frank Baum filled The Wizard of Oz with references to the gold or silver standard debate of the time. Mao Zedong's Little Red Book reeks of Communist beliefs, as does the Communist Manifesto. But after extensive research, I have discovered what might be the most frightening example of all. Hidden in the words and pictures of "Green Eggs and Ham" by the beloved Dr. Seuss is a veritable allegory of Communist ideology. From every innocent tongue twister springs a hidden meaning or anagram, and every plot twist shows the "struggle" against Capitalism.
Though the characters seem innocent and pure, just under the surface lurks a deeper, redder truth. The name of the main character Sam is also the initials of the secret Socialist American Militia. Coincidence? I think not. The main character remains nameless because he represents the nameless millions that have not been "saved" and converted to Communism. When Sam brings in all the possible dining companions, it is not difficult to see through the happy childrens' book to the darker underlying meaning. The mouse in the house represents all of the little people who have been converted and now happily toil in equality. The fox shows that smart and clever people have joined the Communist side. The goat is a representative of the agricultural interests that enjoy the benefits of Communism. As you see, this is not just a childrens' book.
The locales were also not chosen by coincidence. The house shows that everybody will have a roof over their head, while the box is representative of manufacturing. The car is just an example of the luxuries people would be able to afford in a Communist world. The train shows that the world would still be structured and happy. Just like in Mussolini's Italy, where the trains ran on time. The darkness represents Capitalism, the "darkness" that is overcome when they exit the tunnel. The nameless Capitalist is nearing the end of his journey of conversion. The boat that is his last locale is an example of the powerful navy under the Communist world, able to destroy everybody else. But the good doctor does not stop here.
Even in his images, Dr. Seuss is pushing his Communism on impressionable children. It is no accident that the only sad person throughout the story is the only Capitalist. Nor is it mere happenstance that the sad wretch is reading a Western newspaper. And the ham that looks like Russia? Nothing between these covers is accidental, down to the red hat on Sam. Even when they go in a tree, it is obvious that Seuss understands that accepting Communism is going "out on a limb." From the red flag the boat is flying to the look of joy on the nameless Capitalist (after sampling Communism, of course), every image is calculated to subliminally drive Communism into the minds of impressionable children. They show Seuss' convoluted image of right and wrong to the world.
When Communists tell other adults to give up their ways, the Capitalists know to just ignore them, but our children, our future, have not been trained yet, so it is very easy for them to fall for Seuss' evil words, especially after seeing the joy and hearing "I do so like green eggs and ham! Thank you! Thank you, Sam-I-am!" (Seuss 62). My research centered soley on "Green Eggs and Ham," but I am sure Seuss used other books to spread his evil. We must protect our children from Seuss and his kind, before it is too late.
Please help me with the GPL
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FCC Goes WiFi
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· Score: -1, Offtopic
As a consultant for several large companies, I'd always done my work on Windows. Recently however, a top online investment firm asked us to do some work using Linux. The concept of having access to source code was very appealing to us, as we'd be able to modify the kernel to meet our exacting standards which we're unable to do with Microsoft's products.
Although we met several technical challenges along the way (specifically, Linux's lack of Token Ring support and the fact that we were unable to defrag its ext2 file system), all in all the process went smoothly. Everyone was very pleased with Linux, and we were considering using it for a great deal of future internal projects.
So you can imagine our suprise when we were informed by a lawyer that we would be required to publish our source code for others to use. It was brought to our attention that Linux is copyrighted under something called the GPL, or the Gnu Protective License. Part of this license states that any changes to the kernel are to be made freely available. Unfortunately for us, this meant that the great deal of time and money we spent "touching up" Linux to work for this investment firm would now be available at no cost to our competitors.
Furthermore, after reviewing this GPL our lawyers advised us that any products compiled with GPL'ed tools - such as gcc - would also have to its source code released. This was simply unacceptable.
Although we had planned for no one outside of this company to ever use, let alone see the source code, we were now put in a difficult position. We could either give away our hard work, or come up with another solution. Although it was tought to do, there really was no option: We had to rewrite the code, from scratch, for Windows 2000.
I think the biggest thing keeping Linux from being truly competitive with Microsoft is this GPL. Its draconian requirements virtually guarentee that no business will ever be able to use it. After my experience with Linux, I won't be recommending it to any of my associates. I may reconsider if Linux switches its license to something a little more fair, such as Microsoft's "Shared Source". Until then its attempts to socialize the software market will insure it remains only a bit player.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're taking the time to write a comment on this story, DON'T. Instead, take that same amount of time to write a one page, reasoned, intelligent letter to your Senators (you have two, you know that?) telling them that you disapprove of this bill, telling them WHY (privacy violation, overextension of copyright, and so forth are good places to start), and encouraging them to work against it. Not tomorrow morning, RIGHT NOW. Get away from that Submit button and go write a letter to someone who could actually do something. Then send it snail mail to their LOCAL office (not DC office), or fax it. (Not email. Many offices don't pay attention to email, although some do.)
I don't want to see any replies to this post. Get away from Slashdot and do something other than whine, or you'll have no one to blame but yourself.
Are you still here? Stop reading and start acting!
One is running Here so slashdot it please - it needs stress testing.
Bob Montgomery didn't think he'd need a computer to design his motorized surfboard. Boy, was he wrong.
by Jean Thilmany,
Associate Editor
When Bob Montgomery brought his motorized surfboard to market, he expected engineering challenges--but maybe not as many as he eventually met. He didn't think, for example, that he'd have to become an expert in choosing and integrating engineering technologies or in engine design.
A look at the process he went through as he started a company from the ground up provides a glimpse of how engineering technologies can be the hidden driver in bringing a new product to market. Montgomery hired engineers, made decisions about purchasing engineering technologies, and implemented a just-in-time manufacturing system--not to mention the marketing of an entirely new product-- successfully feeling his way through each step of the process.
Sixteen years ago, Montgomery, a former professional surfer and construction foreman, turned on his garage light in Capistrano Beach, Calif., and sat down to sketch the first rough design for an idea he'd been playing around with a while: a motorized surfboard he calls a jet board. He said his concept would bring surfing to the masses, no matter where they live, as long as it's near a body of water, whether that body is ocean, lake, or river. The Powerski Igniter 330 is newly available in the United States. Riders stand on it like a surfboard, and although it includes a mechanism for maneuvering, riders also steer it like a surfboard, by shifting their body weight. The Igniter 330 is now distributed in 35 countries. In August, it earned Coast Guard approval for U.S. distribution, Montgomery said.
Montgomery's 16-year journey from that initial rough draft to jet board production was by no means easy. Along the way he founded a company, Powerski International, in San Clemente, Calif., and hired an engineering team, led by Bjorn Levine, to design and patent a two-stroke, water-cooled, 45-horsepower engine that weighs about 40 pounds. The engine was specially designed to be light but powerful, to be compact with a sleek, side profile, and to perform well as it moves through water. Montgomery himself designed the jet-board hull, hollowing out the space beneath the rider's feet to house the engine. He hand-made a number of prototype hulls from composite materials.
CAN'T DO IT BY HAND
Between the first design on paper and actual production, Powerski engineers made thousands of changes to the hull, engine, and other components. After he built an initial model of the hull in his garage, Montgomery needed an engine to motorize the surfboard.
"I wanted the engine to be low-profile," he said. "Surfboards are flat. They don't have big humps on them. There was no engine out there to fit that profile. I had to pull an engine off the shelf, an outboard engine, which I placed in the hole in the hull horizontally. It was ineffective. It wasn't the correct design."
He would have to do it himself. Montgomery hired Levine, who had designed motorcycle engines successfully in the past. He created a 330-cubic-centimeter engine, known as the SuperTorque XT, that fits nicely within the hull's profile.
"I'd designed the hull and originally it had a sort of bowl in it," Montgomery said. "I said to Bjorn, 'I need you to make an engine to fit this bowl.' And he did it.
"It had to be long, like a little torpedo engine, and narrow, because the board had to be narrow," Montgomery said. "And it couldn't be very high.
"There's a host of design and engineering challenges when you design a surfboard and add an engine," he said. "Water intrusion was one of them. When you sit on the board, it sinks. We had to make it not sink. We've come up with inflatable seals to equalize the pressure around the hatches. Then, the exhaust on the engine had to have one-way valves so water couldn't get into the engine."
The motorized surfboard invented by Bob Montgomery includes a 330-cu
hey, I was gonna crash it with debug.com, only you kept stopping me!
:-p
I hope you had a printer on LPT1
AKA a nazi fanatic loser.
....
...etc.
1. You rejuvenate and dance when you hear a windows flaw exposed, but you conveniently ignore the thousands of security flaws exposed in linux.
2. You yell loudly TROLL! at any person's post or at any person you see posting facts that you do not want to hear about your oh so cool linux.
3. You know it's a classic case of penis envy, you don't have all the support, software and hardware available for linux and you have to let that anger out somewhere, but you don't have the brains to admit it.
4. You hate windows, hate Microsoft, but race to emulate windows, have programs to run office from within linux, and spend a $300 on a Windows emulator, only Windows fools.
5. You cannot admit that you don't have professional usage of Linux outside server markets.
6. You cannot admit that most of the joe user out there when told that there is linux will respond, what is that?
7. You cannot admit that there is no professional printing capabilities in linux.
8. You cannot admit that you are a masochist (otherwise why would someone spend hours playing with scripts,
and recompiling programs that are available for Windows?)
9. You cannot admit that there is no professional desktop publishing done on Linux.
10. You cannot admit that no one in their right mind would do professional video editing in Linux.
11. You cannot admit that linux sucks when it comes for gaming/home entertainment or education.
12. You have problems in understanding Windows, and you will blame your own incompetence on Microsoft.
13. You have problems in pointing a clicking, but have no problems in wading through cryptic scripts written by lunatics.
14. Nothing will get past that shit that fills your head, you will not admit to any facts.
15. You can't admit that naming of linux components, packages, and others are weird and fits profiles of troubled teenagers. gentoo, lgx, rpm
16. You feel angered because you were left out by microsoft's Media technologies, they support Mac, Sun sparc, but not linux.
17. You feel inferior deep inside but unable to admit it, you don't have a database as easy and powerful as Access.
18. You cannot tell that not a single office package outside Microsoft's is worth looking at or bothering with.
19. You don't know that your CD recorder software sucks.
20. You don't have DVD-RAM, DVD-R, DVD-RW support in your pathetic OS.
21. While the rest of the world moves on, you're stuck in a stone age technology that needs third party software to boot into GUI.
22. You act out of prejudice, you kill file domains and users of specific news readers while you ignore the bullshit that your fellow linux losers post.
23. You don't know commercial support in Linux is almost non existent.
24. You miss the fact that companies are leaving linux because of the chaos, and the cheap linux losers who are unwilling to pay and support hard work, Corel, gaming companies,...etc.
25. You are unaware that linux has no terminal services (there is a lame one that no one uses), and commercial support for it is not happening.
26. You are unaware that setting up servers on Windows takes couple of minutes while on linux, good luck playing with configuration scripts.
27. You cannot admit that support for USB on linux is laughable at best.
28. You think that Linux is better because slashdot told you so.
29. You spend countless hours flaming people because they post their opinions about your oh so cool linux and your attitude, instead of researching things for yourself and understanding fact in order not to look this stupid.
30. You think that anyone who uses linux has a clue.
31. You think that linux cannot crash.
32. You think that everyone is interested in your conspiracy theories about Microsoft (or should i say M$ in order for you, teenagers to understand?), and how they destroyed linux,
33. You keep ignoring the fact that thousands of linux servers get hacked every year, but it takes one Windows server hacked to get you and your fellow linux idiots to dance and celebrate.
If the latest revalations regarding IBM's possible leakage of copyrighted Unix code into Linux have proven anything, it is that using any derivative of this outdated operating system is a legal disaster waiting to happen. Not only is Linux licensed under the anti-business GNU General Public License, but it turns out that commercial code may have been unlawfully added, making it illegal to use or distribute.
This should suprise no one familiar with the history of Unix. The earliest version was an unlicensed ripoff of the proprietary Multics operating system, and was partly responsible for destroying the market for this pioneering operating system. The Berkeley Shareware Distribution (BSD) was sued by AT&T in the early 1990s, for openly distributing copyrighted code in its public-domain source releases. As if this wasn't enough, it turned out that AT&T had also broken the license on code they had taken from BSD, leaving both sides forced to essentially accept the other's illegal behavior in order to avoid stiffer penalties.
Reputable software companies such as Microsoft, though initially interested in Unix, have learned to steer clear of the mess of standards, licenses, and conflicting intellectual property rights that Unix forms. Microsoft Windows XP [microsoft.com] is the latest release of Microsoft's flagship version of Windows, built from the ground up in the early 1990s based on the most modern concepts in operating systems, without any legacy baggage from the 1970s. And it is available essentially for free, preloaded on hardware from all major manufacturers. There is really no reason to use anything else, unless you need a truly high-performance computing system such as IBM's proprietary OS/390 or HP's OpenVMS.
My business faces ruin. CD sales have dropped through the floor. People aren't buying half as many CDs as they did just a year ago. Revenue is down and costs are up. My store has survived for years, but I now face the prospect of bankruptcy. Every day I ask myself why this is happening.
I bought the store about 12 years ago. It was one of those boutique record stores that sell obscure, independent releases that no-one listens to, not even the people that buy them. I decided that to grow the business I'd need to aim for a different demographic, the family market. My store specialised in family music - stuff that the whole family could listen to. I don't sell sick stuff like Marilyn Manson or cop-killer rap, and I'm proud to have one of the most extensive Christian rock sections that I know of.
The business strategy worked. People flocked to my store, knowing that they (and their children) could safely purchase records without profanity or violent lyrics. Over the years I expanded the business and took on more clean-cut and friendly employees. It took hard work and long hours but I had achieved my dream - owning a profitable business that I had built with my own hands, from the ground up. But now, this dream is turning into a nightmare.
Every day, fewer and fewer customers enter my store to buy fewer and fewer CDs. Why is no one buying CDs? Are people not interested in music? Do people prefer to watch TV, see films, read books? I don't know. But there is one, inescapable truth - Internet piracy is mostly to blame. The statistics speak for themselves - one in three discs world wide is a pirate. On The Internet, you can find and download hundreds of dollars worth of music in just minutes. It has the potential to destroy the music industry, from artists, to record companies to stores like my own. Before you point to the supposed "economic downturn", I'll note that the book store just across from my store is doing great business. Unlike CDs, it's harder to copy books over The Internet.
A week ago, an unpleasant experience with pirates gave me an idea. In my store, I overheard a teenage patron talking to his friend.
"Dude, I'm going to put this CD on the Internet right away."
"Yeah, dude, that's really lete [sic], you'll get lots of respect."
I was fuming. So they were out to destroy the record industry from right under my nose? Fat chance. When they came to the counter to make their purchase, I grabbed the little shit by his shirt. "So...you're going to copy this to your friends over The Internet, punk?" I asked him in my best Clint Eastwood/Dirty Harry voice.
"Uh y-yeh." He mumbled, shocked.
"That's it. What's your name? You're blacklisted. Now take yourself and your little bitch friend out of my store - and don't come back." I barked. Cravenly, they complied and scampered off.
So that's my idea - a national blacklist of pirates. If somebody cannot obey the basic rules of society, then they should be excluded from society. If pirates want to steal from the music industry, then the music industry should exclude them. It's that simple. One strike, and you're out - no reputable record store will allow you to buy another CD. If the pirates can't buy the CDS to begin with, then they won't be able to copy them over The Internet, will they? It's no different to doctors blacklisting drug dealers from buying prescription medicine.
I have just written a letter to the RIAA outlining my proposal. Suing pirates one by one isn't going far enough. Not to mention pirates use the fact that they're being sued to unfairly portray themselves as victims. A national register of pirates would make the problem far easier to deal with. People would be encouraged to give the names of suspected pirates to a hotline, similar to TIPS. Once we know the size of the problem, the police and other law enforcement agencies will be forced to take piracy seriously. They have fought the War on Drugs with skill, so why not the War on Piracy?
This evening, my daughters a
My business faces ruin. CD sales have dropped through the floor. People aren't buying half as many CDs as they did just a year ago. Revenue is down and costs are up. My store has survived for years, but I now face the prospect of bankruptcy. Every day I ask myself why this is happening.
I bought the store about 12 years ago. It was one of those boutique record stores that sell obscure, independent releases that no-one listens to, not even the people that buy them. I decided that to grow the business I'd need to aim for a different demographic, the family market. My store specialised in family music - stuff that the whole family could listen to. I don't sell sick stuff like Marilyn Manson or cop-killer rap, and I'm proud to have one of the most extensive Christian rock sections that I know of.
The business strategy worked. People flocked to my store, knowing that they (and their children) could safely purchase records without profanity or violent lyrics. Over the years I expanded the business and took on more clean-cut and friendly employees. It took hard work and long hours but I had achieved my dream - owning a profitable business that I had built with my own hands, from the ground up. But now, this dream is turning into a nightmare.
Every day, fewer and fewer customers enter my store to buy fewer and fewer CDs. Why is no one buying CDs? Are people not interested in music? Do people prefer to watch TV, see films, read books? I don't know. But there is one, inescapable truth - Internet piracy is mostly to blame. The statistics speak for themselves - one in three discs world wide is a pirate. On The Internet, you can find and download hundreds of dollars worth of music in just minutes. It has the potential to destroy the music industry, from artists, to record companies to stores like my own. Before you point to the supposed "economic downturn", I'll note that the book store just across from my store is doing great business. Unlike CDs, it's harder to copy books over The Internet.
A week ago, an unpleasant experience with pirates gave me an idea. In my store, I overheard a teenage patron talking to his friend.
"Dude, I'm going to put this CD on the Internet right away."
"Yeah, dude, that's really lete [sic], you'll get lots of respect."
I was fuming. So they were out to destroy the record industry from right under my nose? Fat chance. When they came to the counter to make their purchase, I grabbed the little shit by his shirt. "So...you're going to copy this to your friends over The Internet, punk?" I asked him in my best Clint Eastwood/Dirty Harry voice.
"Uh y-yeh." He mumbled, shocked.
"That's it. What's your name? You're blacklisted. Now take yourself and your little bitch friend out of my store - and don't come back." I barked. Cravenly, they complied and scampered off.
So that's my idea - a national blacklist of pirates. If somebody cannot obey the basic rules of society, then they should be excluded from society. If pirates want to steal from the music industry, then the music industry should exclude them. It's that simple. One strike, and you're out - no reputable record store will allow you to buy another CD. If the pirates can't buy the CDS to begin with, then they won't be able to copy them over The Internet, will they? It's no different to doctors blacklisting drug dealers from buying prescription medicine.
I have just written a letter to the RIAA outlining my proposal. Suing pirates one by one isn't going far enough. Not to mention pirates use the fact that they're being sued to unfairly portray themselves as victims. A national register of pirates would make the problem far easier to deal with. People would be encouraged to give the names of suspected pirates to a hotline, similar to TIPS. Once we know the size of the problem, the police and other law enforcement agencies will be forced to take piracy seriously. They have fought the War on Drugs with skill, so why not the War on Piracy?
This evening, my daughters a
AKA a nazi fanatic loser.
....
...etc.
1. You rejuvenate and dance when you hear a windows flaw exposed, but you conveniently ignore the thousands of security flaws exposed in linux.
2. You yell loudly TROLL! at any person's post or at any person you see posting facts that you do not want to hear about your oh so cool linux.
3. You know it's a classic case of penis envy, you don't have all the support, software and hardware available for linux and you have to let that anger out somewhere, but you don't have the brains to admit it.
4. You hate windows, hate Microsoft, but race to emulate windows, have programs to run office from within linux, and spend a $300 on a Windows emulator, only Windows fools.
5. You cannot admit that you don't have professional usage of Linux outside server markets.
6. You cannot admit that most of the joe user out there when told that there is linux will respond, what is that?
7. You cannot admit that there is no professional printing capabilities in linux.
8. You cannot admit that you are a masochist (otherwise why would someone spend hours playing with scripts,
and recompiling programs that are available for Windows?)
9. You cannot admit that there is no professional desktop publishing done on Linux.
10. You cannot admit that no one in their right mind would do professional video editing in Linux.
11. You cannot admit that linux sucks when it comes for gaming/home entertainment or education.
12. You have problems in understanding Windows, and you will blame your own incompetence on Microsoft.
13. You have problems in pointing a clicking, but have no problems in wading through cryptic scripts written by lunatics.
14. Nothing will get past that shit that fills your head, you will not admit to any facts.
15. You can't admit that naming of linux components, packages, and others are weird and fits profiles of troubled teenagers. gentoo, lgx, rpm
16. You feel angered because you were left out by microsoft's Media technologies, they support Mac, Sun sparc, but not linux.
17. You feel inferior deep inside but unable to admit it, you don't have a database as easy and powerful as Access.
18. You cannot tell that not a single office package outside Microsoft's is worth looking at or bothering with.
19. You don't know that your CD recorder software sucks.
20. You don't have DVD-RAM, DVD-R, DVD-RW support in your pathetic OS.
21. While the rest of the world moves on, you're stuck in a stone age technology that needs third party software to boot into GUI.
22. You act out of prejudice, you kill file domains and users of specific news readers while you ignore the bullshit that your fellow linux losers post.
23. You don't know commercial support in Linux is almost non existent.
24. You miss the fact that companies are leaving linux because of the chaos, and the cheap linux losers who are unwilling to pay and support hard work, Corel, gaming companies,...etc.
25. You are unaware that linux has no terminal services (there is a lame one that no one uses), and commercial support for it is not happening.
26. You are unaware that setting up servers on Windows takes couple of minutes while on linux, good luck playing with configuration scripts.
27. You cannot admit that support for USB on linux is laughable at best.
28. You think that Linux is better because slashdot told you so.
29. You spend countless hours flaming people because they post their opinions about your oh so cool linux and your attitude, instead of researching things for yourself and understanding fact in order not to look this stupid.
30. You think that anyone who uses linux has a clue.
31. You think that linux cannot crash.
32. You think that everyone is interested in your conspiracy theories about Microsoft (or should i say M$ in order for you, teenagers to understand?), and how they destroyed linux,
33. You keep ignoring the fact that thousands of linux servers get hacked every year, but it takes one Windows server hacked to get you and your fellow linux idiots to dance and celebrate.
AKA a nazi fanatic loser.
....
...etc.
1. You rejuvenate and dance when you hear a windows flaw exposed, but you conveniently ignore the thousands of security flaws exposed in linux.
2. You yell loudly TROLL! at any person's post or at any person you see posting facts that you do not want to hear about your oh so cool linux.
3. You know it's a classic case of penis envy, you don't have all the support, software and hardware available for linux and you have to let that anger out somewhere, but you don't have the brains to admit it.
4. You hate windows, hate Microsoft, but race to emulate windows, have programs to run office from within linux, and spend a $300 on a Windows emulator, only Windows fools.
5. You cannot admit that you don't have professional usage of Linux outside server markets.
6. You cannot admit that most of the joe user out there when told that there is linux will respond, what is that?
7. You cannot admit that there is no professional printing capabilities in linux.
8. You cannot admit that you are a masochist (otherwise why would someone spend hours playing with scripts,
and recompiling programs that are available for Windows?)
9. You cannot admit that there is no professional desktop publishing done on Linux.
10. You cannot admit that no one in their right mind would do professional video editing in Linux.
11. You cannot admit that linux sucks when it comes for gaming/home entertainment or education.
12. You have problems in understanding Windows, and you will blame your own incompetence on Microsoft.
13. You have problems in pointing a clicking, but have no problems in wading through cryptic scripts written by lunatics.
14. Nothing will get past that shit that fills your head, you will not admit to any facts.
15. You can't admit that naming of linux components, packages, and others are weird and fits profiles of troubled teenagers. gentoo, lgx, rpm
16. You feel angered because you were left out by microsoft's Media technologies, they support Mac, Sun sparc, but not linux.
17. You feel inferior deep inside but unable to admit it, you don't have a database as easy and powerful as Access.
18. You cannot tell that not a single office package outside Microsoft's is worth looking at or bothering with.
19. You don't know that your CD recorder software sucks.
20. You don't have DVD-RAM, DVD-R, DVD-RW support in your pathetic OS.
21. While the rest of the world moves on, you're stuck in a stone age technology that needs third party software to boot into GUI.
22. You act out of prejudice, you kill file domains and users of specific news readers while you ignore the bullshit that your fellow linux losers post.
23. You don't know commercial support in Linux is almost non existent.
24. You miss the fact that companies are leaving linux because of the chaos, and the cheap linux losers who are unwilling to pay and support hard work, Corel, gaming companies,...etc.
25. You are unaware that linux has no terminal services (there is a lame one that no one uses), and commercial support for it is not happening.
26. You are unaware that setting up servers on Windows takes couple of minutes while on linux, good luck playing with configuration scripts.
27. You cannot admit that support for USB on linux is laughable at best.
28. You think that Linux is better because slashdot told you so.
29. You spend countless hours flaming people because they post their opinions about your oh so cool linux and your attitude, instead of researching things for yourself and understanding fact in order not to look this stupid.
30. You think that anyone who uses linux has a clue.
31. You think that linux cannot crash.
32. You think that everyone is interested in your conspiracy theories about Microsoft (or should i say M$ in order for you, teenagers to understand?), and how they destroyed linux,
33. You keep ignoring the fact that thousands of linux servers get hacked every year, but it takes one Windows server hacked to get you and your fellow linux idiots to dance and celebrate.
Computer Makers Sued Over Hard-Drive Size Claims
Thu Sep 18, 5:00 PM ET
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LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - A group of computer owners has filed a lawsuit against some of the world's biggest makers of personal computers, claiming that their advertising deceptively overstates the true capacity of their hard drives.
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The lawsuit, which seeks class action status, was filed earlier this week in Los Angeles Superior Court against Apple Computer Inc.
The lawsuit brought by Los Angeles residents Lanchau Dan, Adam Selkowitz, Tim Swan and John Zahabian centers around the way that computer hard drives are described by manufacturers.
Representatives of the eight defendants were not immediately available to comment.
According to the lawsuit, computer hard drive capacities are described in promotional material in decimal notation, but the computer reads and writes data to the drives in a binary system.
The result is that a hard drive described as being 20 gigabytes would actually have only 20.3 gigabytes of readable capacity, the lawsuit said.
The plaintiffs said this difference in convention is deceptive and leaves buyers with less storage than they thought they were getting when they purchased their computers.
For example, when a consumer buys what he thinks is a 150 gigabyte hard drive, the plaintiffs said, he actually gets only 140 gigabytes of storage space. That missing 10 gigabytes, they claim, could store an extra 2,000 digitized songs or 20,000 pictures.
The lawsuit asks for an injunction against the purportedly unfair marketing practices, an order requiring the defendants to disclose their practices to the public, restitution, disgorgement of ill-gotten profits and attorneys' fees.
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Compulsory Licensing - The Death of Gnutella and the Triumph of Google
Posted by Ernest Miller on Monday, September 15 @ 06:05:16 EDT File Sharing
Never have so many companies fought so hard to change the law so that they can so quickly be put out of business.
Back in July, a number of filesharing companies (Blubster, Grokster, BearShare, eDonkey 2000 and LimeWire - Kazaa being conspiculously absent) formed a trade association (P2PUnited - website coming soon, apparently), to push for, among other things, compulsory licensing, as noted in this New York Post article (File-Share Firms Hire a Lobbyist). I wonder how much they have really thought this through. After all, a compulsory license that legimitized filesharing would quickly put most of these companies out of business.
The Death of Gnutella
Why do most of these companies even exist? One very simple reason: the courts put Napster out of business. Napster was an extremely elegant solution for filesharing. It acted as a massive centralized database that allowed downloaders to easily find the uploaders with the files they wanted. By comparison, decentralized P2P networks, such as those based on the Gnutella protocol, are clunky and have serious issues with scalability, search efficiency and bandwidth use. Although services based upon the Gnutella protocol have gotten better, adopting strategies such as "supernodes", they remain hampered in their efficiency by their very reason for being: avoiding contributory and vicarious copyright liability (at which they have been successful, so far - though the farther they push for efficiency and control, the more shaky the legal ground they stand on, see, Decentralization, Gnutella and Bad Actors).
However, if filesharing becomes legal through a compulsory license, what is the purpose of the Gnutella-based software anymore? Napster's liability was based on theories of contributory and vicarious liability, which requires an underlying copyright violation. To the extent that filesharing is no longer copyright infringement, Napster could no longer be held liable. Since the Napster solution is far more efficient, particularly for searches, why would anyone use a Gnutella (or any decentralized P2P) network anymore? Virtually anything a Gnutella network can do can be implemented in a Napster-like network as well. Sure, current interfaces are better than Napster's, but they could easily be ported from a Gnutella client to a Napster-like one.
All that effort, all that clever programming optimizing the Gnutella protocol, gone in a flash of compulsory licensing. Sure Gnutella will still be around, but what will it be used for? Why will so much effort be devoted to develop and optimize it? Gnutella will be, as far as I can see, a dead end technology, at least for filesharing.
There Will Be Only One
So what, you say? Of course all these companies will swiftly shift to a Napster-like network when the law is passed. Absolutely! However, it is very likely that all but one of these companies will soon go out of business. The reason is that, like the auction market eBay, there is reason to believe that very strong network effects occur in the filesharing market. After all, in the auction market, sellers go to where the buyers are and buyers go where the sellars are. If you attract more buyers, you will attract more sellers, which then attracts more buyers, and so on in a positive feedback loop. Such network effects should operate similarly in the filesharing market, though most people will be buyers and only inadvertantly sellers. For example, if I am looking for an obscure track, I will go to the filesharing service with the most participants, since I will have the greatest chance of finding what I am looking for. Therefore, once one filesharing service clearly distinguishes itself in popularity from the others, it will take off and its competitors quickly wither away.
True, there is nothing that would prevent people from participating in several file
Let me just say that BitTorrent is nothing short of the Denial of Service attack. I hope they are taken down. When is /. going to learn that you can't flood sites, steal music, or copy DVDs without repercussion?
Blogger bucks premium-services trend
By Paul Festa
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
September 10, 2003, 10:44 AM PT
Google-owned Web log-creation site Blogger is eliminating its paid version and folding premium functions into its free service, bucking a trend toward making people pay for Web site extras.
The creation of Blogger Pro, which cost subscribers a yearly fee of $35, came about as a result of financial necessity, Blogger co-founder Evan Williams wrote in an e-mail to subscribers. Now that Google owns the service, that need has passed.
"Pro subscribers helped keep us going as a struggling start-up, when servers and bandwidth were at an extreme premium," Williams wrote. "We wanted to keep basic Blogger free, but we needed to start charging in order to keep the lights on...Today, as you may know, Blogger's situation is much different. For one thing, we're part of Google. Google has lots of computers and bandwidth. And Google believes blogs are important and good for the Web."
Google said it would give Blogger Pro subscribers either a $24 Blogger sweatshirt or an RMS hippie doll. That offer is good through Oct. 1.
A Google representative said the formerly paid services will be rolled out in the free version in the next few days, but that syndication and posting by e-mail will take longer to offer.
Those who paid for Blogger Pro will continue to be able to use those services without interruption.
I have a couple huge sites that run endless amounts of CGI all day long. I
/apache133/web/site.com/perlprogram.cgi
constantly get:
[Sat Mar 6 17:08:47 1999] [error] [client 24.216.92.184] (11)Try again:
couldn't spawn child process:
every say 4 seconds, with the client getting the standard error 500 -
unrecoverable server error. I'm under Linux 2.0.35.
This use to bring my server to the ground, but I added more memory, and the
server is fine now, except for Apache. All CGI is run as "nobody". My top
command says:
5:21pm up 32 days, 2:41, 2 users, load average: 7.11, 5.36, 4.24
278 processes: 259 sleeping, 8 running, 11 zombie, 0 stopped
CPU states: 42.8% user, 23.8% system, 0.1% nice, 38.7% idle
Mem: 257168K av, 237796K used, 19372K free, 267660K shrd, 71272K buff
Swap: 120480K av, 0K used, 120480K free 47420K cached
My httpd.conf has
KeepAlive On
MaxKeepAliveRequests 1000
KeepAliveTimeout 30
MinSpareServers 5
MaxSpareServers 25
StartServers 5
MaxClients 500
MaxRequestsPerChild 3000
Is there anything at all I can do to allow more damn CGI to run? Whats with
the limit anyway? I just want to run an unlimited number of nobody
CGI processes. How can I do that?
If you're taking the time to write a comment on this story, DON'T. Instead, take that same amount of time to write a one page, reasoned, intelligent letter to your Senators (you have two, you know that?) telling them that you disapprove of this bill, telling them WHY (privacy violation, overextension of copyright, and so forth are good places to start), and encouraging them to work against it. Not tomorrow morning, RIGHT NOW. Get away from that Submit button and go write a letter to someone who could actually do something. Then send it snail mail to their LOCAL office (not DC office), or fax it. (Not email. Many offices don't pay attention to email, although some do.)
I don't want to see any replies to this post. Get away from Slashdot and do something other than whine, or you'll have no one to blame but yourself.
Are you still here? Stop reading and start acting!
Hello,
Recently I've been introduced to an operating system known as Linux.
Lured by its low cost, I replaced Windows 98 on my computer with
Linux. Unfortunately the more I use it the more I fear that this
"Linux" may be an insidious way for the Dark One to gain a stronger
foothold here on Earth. I know this may be a shocking claim, but I
have evidence to back it up!
To begin with, Linux runs numerous background processes. These
processes are usettlingly termed "demons." Furthermore in order to
start or stop these "demons" a user must execute a command called
"finger". By "fingering" a "demon" one excercises an unholy power,
much the same way that the Lord of Flies controls his black minions.
Also consider some of these other Linux commands: "sleep", "mount",
"unzip", "strip" and "touch". All highly suggestive in a sexual
nature. I know that our Lord cannot approve of these, and I urge them
to be renamed to something appropriate to the Christian community.
Third, Linux uses a flavor of DOS known as Bash. Bash is an acronym
for "Bourne Again Shell". On the surface this would appear to be
supportive of the Lord. However, remember that even Satan can quote
the bible for his own purposes! While I believe Linux may be
born-again, its obvious by the misspelling of "born" that its not
born-again in an Christian church. Will the lies ever cease?
Additionally, one of the main people involved with the GNU Free
Software Foundation supports contraception and abortion. His web site
even advocates government support of contraception. He also wears fake
halos, and has quips about his made-up church that relates to his free
software. I find such blasphemy to be extremely unsettling.
One must also remember that the creator of Linux, a college student
named Linux Torvaldis, comes from Finland. I'm sure all the followers
of Christ are aware of the heritical nature of the Finnish: from
necrophilia to human sacrifice, Finnish culture is awash in sin. I
find little reason to believe anything good and holy could arise from
this evil land.
Finally, let us remember that there is an alternative to using the
Satan-powered Linux. I think history has shown us that Microsoft is
quite holy. I'm told that its founder, William Gates is a strong
supporter of our Lord and I encourage my fellow Christians to buy only
his products to help keep the Devil at bay.
I wish I had more time to expound upon my findings. Unfortunately a
family of Jews has moved in across the street and I must go speak to
them of Jesus Christ before they are condemned to eternal hellfire.
Please investigate this as you see fit and I'm sure you'll reach the
same conclusions that I have.
I win, I win!
Rummaging through the recycle bin of Net obsessions
Good news: Net fashionistas have already declared the "flash mob" -- in which participants follow instructions given by e-mail and mobile phone to gather, annoy passersby, and disperse -- passe. Like a vapid-but-catchy summer anthem (here's looking at you, Nelly), a sartorial whim that everyone follows and then rapidly drops (hello, mood ring!), or the desperately annoying catchprase on everyone's lips (whassuuuuup indeed), various cybercultural oddities (a.k.a. memes) over the years have made a fleeting impact on Net culture, and sometimes beyond it. Consider if you will:
The Dancing Baby. Created in 1996 to demonstrate a software program by Autodesk, the baby took on a life of its own in 1997. Back then, when highly realistic moving graphics were innovative and the Net was not yet mainstream, Netizens passed along the baby because he represented a geek show as well as a freak show. His fame peaked when he was featured on the television show Ally McBeal.
HampsterDance. The (intentional) misspelling wasn't the only thing annoying about this chirpy fad. Canadian Deidre LaCarte built a personal Web site in the summer of 1998 in a competition with her sister and her best friend to see who could get the most traffic. She won. Named for LaCarte's 2 1/2-year-old pet hamster, Hampton Hampster, the HampsterDance site features animated critter dancing to a 20-second music loop (a clip from Roger Miller's Whistle-Stop from the 1973 soundtrack of Robin Hood). For reasons unknown it hit the big time, showing up in e-mail inboxes as that cute link you just had to see. It has even been featured in a TV commercial by Internet access provider EarthLink, and there was a CD released. Its fame has faded, but it lives on the Web at hampsterdance2.com.
Mahir "I Kiss You" Cagri. Mahir Cagri, an accordion-playing, fun-loving guy from Izmir, Turkey, created a Web page in 1998 with the greeting 'I Kiss You.' As with most Web pages it lived in relative obscurity -- until late 1999, when a hacker took the already kitschy page, added music and certain risque elements, and sent the URL out to the world. Unlike some unwitting Net celebs (such as the Star Wars Kid), Cagri welcomed the fame and created a music video, My Name is Mahir, that wasn't exactly a hit. One Internet company even flew him to the USA in the middle of the dot-com boom to be their representative. You can still see Mahir at ikissyou.org.
Other Net insta-celebs include Webcam doyenne Jenni (Jennifer Ringley) of jennicam.com; proto-spammers Canter and Siegel, known as the "green card lawyers" for a notorious ad posted to thousands of Usenet groups in the mid-'90s, and once-ubiquitous cult figure "Kibo" (James Parry), who would join the discussion when his name was invoked in Usenet newsgroups of the late '80s and early '90s.
All Your Base Are Belong to Us. This is an example of a saying or idea that rockets across the Net and becomes as familiar as an actual person. (The term spam, when used in reference to junk e-mail, is the most famous and successful of these.) The phrase, derived from a bad Japanese-to-English translation in the game Zero Wing, started showing up in the far corners of the Net in 2000 and shot to Web superstardom the following spring. People picked up the phrase and created a panoply of Web sites using it; they built Internet billboards, they morphed photos, they even put together music videos. But like other flashes in the pan, it retreated as quickly as it had appeared.
Dear Friends,
We have an immidiate requirement for Sr. Software Engineer for our MNC
client from Banglore, INDIA.
Exp: 5 - 8 Years
Qual: B.E/B.Tech OR M.E/M.Tech
The person must have a knowledge of the following key skills.
- C and RISC programming
- Software Arch. and Design Experience
- Chip Debugging
- VxWorks
- pSoS
-Device Drivers
-ATM
-DSL
-System Debugging
Please forword your Latest Resume as word document attachment.
Thanks
Uday.
uday@eexcelsolutions.com
visit: www.eexcelsolutions.com
Please do convey your friends and pals who are looking for a better
opportunity in in INDIA.
A spray-on computer is way to do IT
FIONA MACGREGOR EDUCATION REPORTER
SPRAY-ON computers the size of a grain of sand are set to transform information technology across the world thanks to pioneering research at Edinburgh University.
Scientists at the institution have just been awarded a 1.3 million grant to develop the "ubiquitous computing" technology which uses tiny semiconductor specks that can sense, compute and communicate without wires.
The study is set to put Scotland at the forefront of the next great leap forward for information technology and is likely to bring huge advances in all walks of life.
Researchers are already working with staff at Edinburgh hospitals to develop a method of using the computers to monitor heart patients at home.
They plan to spray the nano computers on to the chests of coronary patients, where the tiny cells would record a patient's health and transmit information back to a hospital computer.
Head of the project Professor DK Arvid said: "This research is very much looking to the future. At the moment, computer information is processed very discreetly, you either have a laptop, or a PC.
"In the future, computers will be able to be diffused into the environment. There won't be a sharp division - barricades will just disappear into the background.
"One way to achieve that will be computers the size of a grain of sand. Just by spraying them on to objects, you can computerise them. They would create a network which can transmit wirelessly to each other.
"In a cubic millimetre, you can have a sensor for heat, pressure, light and so on, but also a computer and wireless technology.
The professor said the team was already involved with doctors at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary and the Western General Hospital.
He said: "We are already working with cardiologists on a spray which would go on the chest and monitor the performance of the heart in an unobtrusive way. It means you don't have to have a large machine to lug around or go into hospital.
"After surgery there is great pressure on hospital beds yet there is no reason to stay other than to keep hooked up to a machine.
"With this you get into the home - this research is going to have an impact on real life."
The funding for the project, which also involves Napier, St Andrews, Glasgow and Strathclyde universities, has come from the Scottish Higher Education Funding Council.
The money will allow the scientists to see the technology working to cre micael's retardnesses within four years.
Prof Arvid said the spray-on computers could be in shops, hospitals and schools within ten years.
"At the moment if you want to interface you have to use a key board or a mouse, which is very unwieldy. With this you could take a pen and spray it and it becomes an interface in its own right."
The advance is set to put Edinburgh and Scotland at the forefront of the industry.
Bill Furness of Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce said: "This has huge potential for applications in commerce, health and education.
"From the business community's point of view, we are increasingly looking at the future of our city.
"Part of the answer to that is the vision of a world-class centre for research and innovation.
"This particular development sounds a very strong building block towards that vision."
Dr Simon Maxwell, part of the blood pressure unit at the Western General Hospital in Edinburgh University's department of medicine, described the technology as very "exciting". He said: "This will allow us to monitor patients much more accurately than we have ever been able to do and for more prolonged periods."
Canadian cellphone carriers rally around Wi-Fi
By JACK KAPICA
Globe and Mail Update
Canada's cellphone providers have agreed to create a common standard for their subscribers to connect to the Internet via public "hot-spots."
The 12-million people who own cellphones, personal digital assistants or any wireless device and subscribe to Bell Mobility (with Aliant Mobility), Microcell Solutions (Fido), Rogers AT&T Wireless or Telus Mobility will be able to use all Wi-Fi hot-spots operated by any one of those companies.
The plan is to create "a common identity" in which Wi-Fi subscribers would be recognized by the other companies' hot spots and would have to pay for on-line time only to their own carriers.
"It will work just like Interac," said a spokesman for the Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association, referring to debit and credit cards working at any automated teller machine regardless of where the customer has an account.
The agreement became necessary because Canada's cellphone providers offer four different and incompatible connection technologies.
The carriers will continue to vigorously compete with each other, both for customers and Wi-Fi hotspot locations, the CWTA said in a statement.
"Wi-Fi is a natural extension to the ubiquitous wireless voice and data services offered by the licensed public wireless carriers across Canada," CWTA president and CEO Peter Barnes said. "By developing standards of service and interconnection, the carriers will ensure Canadians have secure and convenient access to Wi-Fi hotspots without requiring new network identities or billing arrangements."
Common standards introduced by the national Canadian cellphone carriers would help to eliminate the development of redundant authentication and billing methods and will lead to consistent, simplified access, the group said.
The announcement is a step toward the development of standards and cross-carrier roaming capabilities for Canadian Wi-Fi users and wankers like michael. It is also expected to pave the way for future interoperability between the carriers' wireless data networks and their Wi-Fi hotspots.
The carriers said they expect to have standards and agreements in place by the end
of the year, and have them operational in 2004.
"Much like the Canadian inter-carrier messaging agreement provided a tremendous boost to adoption of text messaging in Canada, today's announcement is expected to significantly increase the adoption rates of Wi-Fi in Canada," Mr. Barnes said.
While IPv6 fixes many problems in IPv4, the developed world will not
embrace IPv6 until many shortcomings in the protocol are addressed.
1. Cisco routers suck at IPv6. Many of cisco's routers use the
router's CPU to process IPv6 packets instead of the fast-path. The
reasons for this are explained in the next few points. While Juniper's
routers are substantially better at IPv6 than cisco's, IT managers are
often restrained by insane corporate policy that dictactes the use of
cisco.
2. There are too many addresses. There are 16.7 million addresses per
square metre of the earth's surface, including the oceans. This is
overkill. The world does not need more than the 4 billion addresses
available with IPv4, and I challenge you to come up with an
application that requires that many. Assuming that you can actually
come up with one, it could easily be solved with Network Address
Translation, or NAT as it is commonly known.
3. IPv6 addresses are too large. An IPv6 address is 128 bits in size -
64 bits of which are reserved for addressing hosts, and 64 bits of
which are reserved for routing. One thing that is cool with IPv6 is
address autoconfiguration. Take your 56-bit MAC address on your
ethernet card, ask for 64-bits of network prefix, bang it together
with EUI-64 and you are set. The problem with a 64-bit network prefix
is that routing tables become massive. Just do the math and you'll see
that extreme amounts of memory are required to hold routing tables.
4. The IPv6 header is too large. An IPv4 header compact at 20 bytes in
length, while the IPv6 is bloated at 40 bytes. That's right people,
each one of your IP packets has twice as much overhead as before.
While this may not sound much, IP networks have a requirement that the
minimum MTU supported must be 576 bytes. That means that where you
might have got 556 bytes of data in your IP packets, you now get 536
bytes. This means that downloading stuff will take 3.4% longer.
Sure, IPv6 allows for nice hacks like those described in this article,
but is it really ready for prime time?
Throughout history there have been examples of writers of childrens' stories inserting more adult themes into their works. Many childrens' stories and Disney movies contain sex and drugs, but most of the adult themes have more to do with politics. Authors as a whole are an opinionated bunch, and every once in a while they secrete their beliefs and propaganda in seemingly innocent works. Frank Baum filled The Wizard of Oz with references to the gold or silver standard debate of the time. Mao Zedong's Little Red Book reeks of Communist beliefs, as does the Communist Manifesto. But after extensive research, I have discovered what might be the most frightening example of all. Hidden in the words and pictures of "Green Eggs and Ham" by the beloved Dr. Seuss is a veritable allegory of Communist ideology. From every innocent tongue twister springs a hidden meaning or anagram, and every plot twist shows the "struggle" against Capitalism.
Though the characters seem innocent and pure, just under the surface lurks a deeper, redder truth. The name of the main character Sam is also the initials of the secret Socialist American Militia. Coincidence? I think not. The main character remains nameless because he represents the nameless millions that have not been "saved" and converted to Communism. When Sam brings in all the possible dining companions, it is not difficult to see through the happy childrens' book to the darker underlying meaning. The mouse in the house represents all of the little people who have been converted and now happily toil in equality. The fox shows that smart and clever people have joined the Communist side. The goat is a representative of the agricultural interests that enjoy the benefits of Communism. As you see, this is not just a childrens' book.
The locales were also not chosen by coincidence. The house shows that everybody will have a roof over their head, while the box is representative of manufacturing. The car is just an example of the luxuries people would be able to afford in a Communist world. The train shows that the world would still be structured and happy. Just like in Mussolini's Italy, where the trains ran on time. The darkness represents Capitalism, the "darkness" that is overcome when they exit the tunnel. The nameless Capitalist is nearing the end of his journey of conversion. The boat that is his last locale is an example of the powerful navy under the Communist world, able to destroy everybody else. But the good doctor does not stop here.
Even in his images, Dr. Seuss is pushing his Communism on impressionable children. It is no accident that the only sad person throughout the story is the only Capitalist. Nor is it mere happenstance that the sad wretch is reading a Western newspaper. And the ham that looks like Russia? Nothing between these covers is accidental, down to the red hat on Sam. Even when they go in a tree, it is obvious that Seuss understands that accepting Communism is going "out on a limb." From the red flag the boat is flying to the look of joy on the nameless Capitalist (after sampling Communism, of course), every image is calculated to subliminally drive Communism into the minds of impressionable children. They show Seuss' convoluted image of right and wrong to the world.
When Communists tell other adults to give up their ways, the Capitalists know to just ignore them, but our children, our future, have not been trained yet, so it is very easy for them to fall for Seuss' evil words, especially after seeing the joy and hearing "I do so like green eggs and ham! Thank you! Thank you, Sam-I-am!" (Seuss 62). My research centered soley on "Green Eggs and Ham," but I am sure Seuss used other books to spread his evil. We must protect our children from Seuss and his kind, before it is too late.
As a consultant for several large companies, I'd always done my work on
Windows. Recently however, a top online investment firm asked us to do
some work using Linux. The concept of having access to source code was
very appealing to us, as we'd be able to modify the kernel to meet our
exacting standards which we're unable to do with Microsoft's products.
Although we met several technical challenges along the way
(specifically, Linux's lack of Token Ring support and the fact that we
were unable to defrag its ext2 file system), all in all the process
went smoothly. Everyone was very pleased with Linux, and we were
considering using it for a great deal of future internal projects.
So you can imagine our suprise when we were informed by a lawyer that
we would be required to publish our source code for others to use. It
was brought to our attention that Linux is copyrighted under something
called the GPL, or the Gnu Protective License. Part of this license
states that any changes to the kernel are to be made freely available.
Unfortunately for us, this meant that the great deal of time and money
we spent "touching up" Linux to work for this investment firm would
now be available at no cost to our competitors.
Furthermore, after reviewing this GPL our lawyers advised us that any
products compiled with GPL'ed tools - such as gcc - would also have to
its source code released. This was simply unacceptable.
Although we had planned for no one outside of this company to ever
use, let alone see the source code, we were now put in a difficult
position. We could either give away our hard work, or come up with
another solution. Although it was tought to do, there really was no
option: We had to rewrite the code, from scratch, for Windows 2000.
I think the biggest thing keeping Linux from being truly competitive
with Microsoft is this GPL. Its draconian requirements virtually
guarentee that no business will ever be able to use it. After my
experience with Linux, I won't be recommending it to any of my
associates. I may reconsider if Linux switches its license to
something a little more fair, such as Microsoft's "Shared Source".
Until then its attempts to socialize the software market will insure
it remains only a bit player.
Thank you for your time.