"The Wachowski Brothers' vision for The Matrix is one that extends far beyond the theatrical trilogy, and the world they have created is so rich that we've chosen to tell inter-connected Matrix-related stories in multiple mediums," said Joel Silver, producer of the Matrix films. "Our goal in collaborating with Ubi Soft is to create a multiplayer online game that reflects the trilogy's highly stylized storytelling and innovative action, taking fans beyond the boundaries of the movie screen and into a 'persistent world' where they can fully explore the vast realm of the Matrix."
So it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that Revolutions didn't bring closure. It wasn't meant to.
Whether tying video/on-line games to a movie series is really going to work, only time will tell.
The Matrix Online game. Its supposed to be a massive role-playing on-line game where you play against others. More info here and here.
From the latter article I reference above:
"The Wachowski Brothers' vision for The Matrix is one that extends far beyond the theatrical trilogy, and the world they have created is so rich that we've chosen to tell inter-connected Matrix-related stories in multiple mediums," said Joel Silver, producer of the Matrix films. "Our goal in collaborating with Ubi Soft is to create a multiplayer online game that reflects the trilogy's highly stylized storytelling and innovative action, taking fans beyond the boundaries of the movie screen and into a 'persistent world' where they can fully explore the vast realm of the Matrix."
Revolutions wasn't supposed to give you the answers to everything. In fact, at the same time that Reloaded came out, a video game called Enter The Matrix came out, which contains some information pretaining to the Oracle and the family (father, mother, child) you see at the beginning of Revolutions in the train station. You learn who the family is, and, more importantly, what deal the father made with the Mero (french dude) in Reloaded (yes, he's in Reloaded, being led away from the table when Nero, Morpheus, and Trinity approach the Mero in the Resturant in Reloaded). In Revolutions, you only learn of the father's side of the deal. You never learn what the Mero got in return.
I've seen the movie and was dissapointed that it didn't answer my questions and I would probably have to play Enter The Matrix and The Matrix Online in order to grasp some of the answers I was expecting. I'm not a game-playing person and don't necessarily want to play the games.
If you realize that Revolutions isn't going to answer your questions and just sit back and enjoy it, it is actually a good movie. The more I think about the movie (I saw it Wednesday morning), the more I realize that it wasn't nearly as disappointing as I first thought.
I just wish it answered more questions, and, therefore, didn't force me to play the video and on-line games to fully grasp everything.
I was disappointed with the movie mostly because it didn't answer hardly any of the questions at all about the Matrix itself.
When Reloaded ended, you were left with the questions about the cycle of the One - that the Matrix needed to be reset, otherwise it would crash, and so on. Revolutions didn't address any of that, at least what I saw this morning.
The special effects and all were cool in a couple of places.
I think that many will be disappointed with the movie for the fact it doesn't have closure to what we've been fed in the past two movies. Spending some time in some of the Matrix on-line forums you'll find a lot of theories and ideas about the Matrix, the previous Ones, and all, but most expressed their disappointment.
I enjoyed the movie for what it is. If you don't micro-analyze everything, you'll probably enjoy it. To me it provided some more insight into the role of the Oracle, among other things.
I think that electronic voting machines should print out a paper receipt, but the receipt should be placed in a ballot box at the polling place.
You allow people to take their receipt with them, then you get into the possibility of vote buying.
Say person A approaches person B and offers person B a sum of money if person B will vote a certain way. Person B goes to the polls, votes, obtains the receipt, and then, later, presents person A with the receipt as proof that person B voted as person A instructed. Person A then pays person B for a job well done.
Without the receipt, person B has no way to prove that they voted as person A had instructed.
This is the same reason why Internet voting is going to be a problem. Sure, I can place my vote from my PC at work, and my co-workers can look over my shoulder to see how I vote, to make sure I cast my vote the way they want it to be cast. If I vote the way they tell me to, I'll get a reward. It isn't a matter of secure communications between the client PC and the server. Its an issue of being able to provide proof of who you voted for to other people.
When I purchased my first CD-R drive way back in 1996-ish, Zip drives were less expensive than the CD-R drive. The Zip media was more expensive than the CD-R media though (15 USD versus about 2-3 USD).
Sure, CD-R/RW drives are cheap now and Zip drives cost about the same as they did way back when. My PentiumII/350 cost a lot more 5 years ago (when I built my PC) than it costs now. In fact, it would be hard to even find a PII/350 being offered for sale these days. So did the PII chip fail? No. It was the hottest CPU to have in its day. Its just that as new technology emerges and improves in both performance and cost, old technology, unless its updated, is left behind.
I'm guessing that in 5 to 10 years, people will be saying the same thing about CD-Rs vs DVDs. Why would anyone have purchased a CD-R/RW that holds only ~700 Mbyte and is slow (remember, think 5 - 10 years in the future) compared to DVDs, which can hold a lot more and is blazing fast? It isn't because CD-R/RW was a failed technology, its just that new technology came out (DVD+/-R/RW) and improved faster than CD-R/RW technology did (remember, I'm being hypethetical 5 to 10 years down the road here).
But I definatly agree that the no-competition with the Zip specs certainly had a hand in making Zip drives less and less attractive to the now cheaper alternatives.
I don't necessarily think that it is a bug in the BIND patches, nor with VeriSign. Its more a configuration issue with BIND.
The problem is that some TLDs do more than just delegation. The article mentioned the.name domain specifically.
The problem with the BIND patch arose when people implemeting the patch decided to not allow wildcarding on all TLDs. If you used the patch to only set.com/.net to delegate-only, there wasn't a problem. If you also set.name to delegate-only, then you would have a problem with stuff in the.name domain.
For those who didn't install the patch and start using the delegate-only options, BIND doesn't automatically start enforcing a delegate-only on all TLDs. The TLDs which you want to be delegate-only have to be specified in the config file. To undo VeriSign's wildcard behavior, one would only want to set the delegate-only option on the.com and.net domains. Other TLDs had been doing wildcards prior to VeriSign's actions, and, indeed, some TLDs relied on wildcarding for some things to work. Unilaterally stopping all TLDs from doing more than delegating would break things.
The.museum TLD is in no way controlled by VeriSign. Its administered by MuseDoma.
There are also other TLDs which have a wildcard in them as well. The big difference between them and what VeriSign is doing, though, is that the.museum TLD has one registrar. You don't have a choice of which Registrar to use when registering a.museum name. With.com and.net, though, you have a large choice (register.com, godaddy.com, etc, etc, etc).
And, the.museum domain isn't just for anyone. If you mistype a.museum domain and get redirected to a page at MuseDoma, the page is likely going to say something like "The museum URL you are trying to visit does not exist. You can't purchase this domain unless you are a museum, your name reflects the domain name you typed, and you meet our other qualifications".
VeriSign's sitefinder site could say this: "The domain you are trying to visit doesn't exist. But we would be happy to sell it to you. Pay VeriSign the fee and its yours." Where does this leave the competing Registrars of the.com and.net domains? Out in the cold.
Currently, SiteFinder is this: "The domain you are trying to visit does not exist. Thanks for mis-typing it so that we (VeriSign) could show you this search engine. By visiting SiteFinder, VeriSign is going to profit from your mis-typing by way of advertising. Only VeriSign will profit from your mistype of a.com or.net domain. The other registrars for.com and.net domains won't see a penny of this. We hope this will generate over $100 Million for VeriSign."
This is in addition to the many other problems it caused.
VeriSign *IS* applying this to all expired but previously registered sites.
I know this because last weekend we got bit by this. We had a monitoring script that checked whether or not one of our web sites was in DNS. In a bizzar set of circumstances, the domain had expired 6 days prior to this. We didn't receive any email or snail mail notices about this, and it was only after 6 days had passed since the expiration that VeriSign sent an email to the admin handle, et al.
By that time customers were calling us asking us why this "sitefinder" page was coming up instead of the usual pages.
It took a little bit to figure out what had happened, and then fix it (registering a domian doesn't make it immediatly appear in DNS....). We have since ensured that all of the domains we own are on auto-renew.
In summary, if a site has been expired for as little as 6 days, VeriSign returns the Sitefinder IP instead.
Sunncomm's MediaMax CD-3 (also under the "Products" link on their web site) seems to describe the format of the CD. Its a multi-session with one containing CD-A files and the second session consisting of compressed WMA files.
If you read the whole article, toward the bottom it mentions a company named Sunncomm. If you visit their website (they have an annoying intro flash), and goto their "Products", and read up on their "License Management Technology", you'll find some of the technical aspects of the copy protection. Apparently they place some sort of markers on the CD. But I don't see how putting such "markers" on a CD will make it work in a standard music CD player but not accessible via a computer.
Also, in the original article, it says that you'll be able to download all or some of the music from the CD to your computer, but they won't play on other people's computer, so you won't be able to share the files with other computers. You'd have to give the physical disk to the user you want to share the music with and that user would have to download the music from the CD.
I'm not too familiar with the actual technical specs on the CD format, but a quick read-through of the Sunncomm stuff doesn't make much sense to me in that it would seem easy to get around.
I'm sure that one of my CD players (at least 12 years old, and yes it still works) won't be able to "decrypt" anything.
The size of the MBOX files are indeed a real issue. Two jobs ago we were using wu-imapd, and it worked well for ~100 users, except for those users who seemed to have the need to store massive amounts of email. A few users had MBOX files larger than 150 Mbyte and wondered why they always had problems. And I was the one always trying to educate those users (and fix the problem). We eventually implemented iPlanet/Sun's Messenger server (now called Sun One Messenger server), and it isn't free.
I'm running wu-imapd/procmail/sendmail/Horde-IMP on my home machine, but with wu-imapd using the MBX format instead of the MBOX format. I haven't had any problems whatsoever.
On the front end, I use Horde's IMP. Users connect to a web server running Horde IMP, and then IMP makes the IMAP connection to wu-imapd. It works fairly well. Users can be anywhere on the Internet and access their email as long as they have a web browser that supports SSL (I run Horde's web interface over https)
Overall, I like wu-imapd. I've tried Cyrus but didn't get very far in the install before determining I didn't need anything but a simple IMAP server, so I stuck with wu-imapd. I went with Horde as the front-end simply to give my users a uniform interface regardless of their location. It enabled me to only allow users access to port 443 on the web server while not opening ports 143/993 to the Internet (the web server is the only application that needs to talk to the imap server, which is on the same box). Horde-IMP does leave some things to be desired, but I can live with it.
If you use wu-imapd, I would recommend running it over SSL (port 993) only, and make it use the MBX format instead of the MBOX format. There is documentation available describing how to do this. If you don't like Horde-IMP or want to use something else as a client, any mail client that supports IMAP over SSL will work fine.
As I posted a few days ago in another SCO post, unless the vendor from whom you obtained your Linux distro has somehow provided SCO with your name and address, SCO probably doesn't have any idea whether or not you are running Linux, let alone who you are or what your IP address space is (so that they can do a network scan to try and figure it out).
Calling SCO and asking for a license is nothing more than calling SCO and saying "Hey SCO, I'm using Linux. Put me down on your list of known people using Linux, and while you are at it, add me to the list of people/companies you will audit to determine whether or not I'm being truthful about how many Linux licenses I need.".
If you don't fess up to SCO, its unlikely that SCO knows about your Linux machine(s), and likely that they will never know, unless someone says something. Don't let that someone be you!
I know of people who work for companies who have Linux machines on internal networks with no access to the outside world. In order for SCO to know they exist they would have to physically go to the companies in question and force someone to log into every machine, on console, to ensure that every machine has been checked. I don't see that happening in my lifetime. Or maybe the disgruntled employee will spill the beans...
If SCO is indeed considering sending Linux invoices to end users, be it commercial entites or the home user, how in the heck is SCO even going to obtain a list of Linux users?
I don't think that Red Hat, SuSE, or any of the other Linux vendors are going to give SCO a list of people who have purchased Linux so that SCO can turn around and send out invoices.
Sure, SCO can assume that some Fortune 500 companies are using Linux in some way and send out invoices to those, but, I don't see how SCO will have any solid proof that any of them is using, say, Red Hat Linux unless someone tells SCO first that such and such company is using Red Hat.
So company X gets an invoice from SCO and ignores it. What is SCO going to do? Send someone out from SCO, unannounced, that just shows up and expects to be able to do a thourough audit of the companie's computer networks to find any trace of Linux? Even though SCO may have said that they'd do audits like this, do you really think that SCO is going to have the manpower and money to audit literally thousands of companies?
If you think SCO can do that, I'll show up at your company Monday morning and demand an on-site audit so that I can do a complete network audit and look for any Linux machines that might be running any code that I have personally written. I expect full cooperation. I'll send my bill to you the day before I get there.
The bottom line is that while SCO may send out invoices to customers for using Linux, SCO doesn't have much of an idea which of those customers are using Linux, unless Linux vendors have shared their customer list with SCO in the first place. That, or SCO is doing some sort of Internet scanning looking for Linux systems. And don't think for a minute that most companies will put up with SCO coming to do a audit of all their computers.
Its time that SCO puts up or shuts up. I'm getting tired of reading the SCO posts on/. and in the media, even for their entertainment value.
For those who read the original article in the Register,
DirectTV was only going after people who had purchased their SmartCard programmer "from one of the equipment vendors shut down in the DMCA raids".
The same article (further down) appears suggest that the vendors in the DMCA raids were companies who's primary business was devoted to selling equipment to steal satellite TV programming
Here's the relevent quote from the article that suggests this:
"...how innocent is someone who goes to website that is clearly identified as a pirate website that is devoted to selling equipment to steal satellite TV programming, and orders the equipment, knowing full well what they're getting?"
Is DirectTV going after people who purchased their SmartCard programmer from other places, or is it still just those consumers who were unfortunate enough to purchase their SmartCard programmer from the wrong company?
I'm not at all for a company going out and suing people for something in which the person is not guilty, at least without giving the person the benefit of the doubt.
As I see it, the problem is that DirectTV shut down some companies that, at least in DirectTV opinion, were advertising that their SmartCard programmers, if purchased, could be used to program a SmartCard in such a way as to enable the person to watch free DirectTV. DirectTV then took the customer list from the shut down companies and assumed that everyone who purchased a SmartCard programmer did it for the purpose of stealing satellite TV.
Now, if you were one of the customers of one of these companies, and you did purchase your SmartCard programmer to steal satellite TV, what are you going to do when DirectTV comes knocking? Are you going to fess up, or are you going to invent a cover story?
But assuming that everyone obtained their SmartCard reader for illegal purposes (and, hence, creates a cover story when DirectTV comes knocking) is assuming that everyone is guilty, and in DirectTV's case, without the possibility of being proven innocent.
It really gets me that DirectTV can do this - assume guilt without the possibility of being proven innocent. I thought the US justice system was based on the principle of innocent until proven guilty. Isn't the burden of proof on DirectTV to prove guilt of the defendant?
"In the old days, there used to be a term, 'buying your gross,' " Rick Sands, chief operating officer at Miramax, told the Los Angeles Times. "You could buy your gross for the weekend and overcome bad word of mouth, because it took time to filter out into the general audience."
But those days are over, because the technology of hand-held text-message devices has drastically cut down the time it takes for movie-goers to tell their friends that a heavily promoted summer action movie is a waste of time and money.
Shhhhh. Don't tell anyone. The movie sucks. But if no one finds out, they'll all come see it!
If Hollywood actually made good, quality movies and droves went to see them, would the movie industry then say that the success of the movies is because of text messaging (i.e., people find out quicker that the movie is actually good)?
Just as with the music industry. If you put crap into the machine, crap comes out, and few people want to spend their money on crap.
In a Wall Street Journal article appearing in today's edition of the Deseret Morning News (article here), in conjunction with other recent stories, it seems as though at least some of the things we've been saying on Slashdot and elsewhere is finally being noticed.
I find the article's most interesting point being that
Among the many bizarre things about the complaint, though, is that SCO itself used to be a Linux company called Caldera, and as such eagerly distributed free of charge the very same software it now is claiming infringes its copyrights.
A new CEO came up with the business strategy in the fall. But a new plan doesn't immunize the company from the precedents it helped set. It's as if a magician gave away his secrets, then started suing his audience for learning how he did his tricks.
because SCO will then claim that whatever code is written to replace the offending code is a derivative work.
At least one of the FUD statements that SCO has made in the past couple of months is that they own the control over derivative works. They have said as much when clarifying the IBM suite by conceeding that they don't own the copyright to the IBM-written code, but they should have control over it becuase it is a derived work.
Anyone who looks at the offending code and then proceedes to write their own code to replace the offending code has been tainted, and their work could be considered a derivative.
Besides discussing the patent issues on/. (there have been a few of these lately), those who are in the US should write Congress, if for nothing else to elevate its awareness, at least in the United States.
I can't wait for someone like Amazon to be served notice over this patent. Hopefully it will be squashed like a little pest that it is.
I mean, what's next? A patent on discussion boards such as/.?
Since then I've owned three different burners myself and exchanged discs with many people, and the one consistent "feature" seems to be you never know exactly when (or why) a disc will just "go bad." I've had discs that worked one week suddenly refuse to respond the next week even when trying to pull the data off with something like isobuster.
Its for this very reason that when I make a CD-R backup of anything I want to keep around, I make two (or more) copies and put one copy in storage and never touch it unless the other copies go bad. If that happens, I then make a copy of the sole remaing good copy and put it back in storage.
I've too had several CD-R discs go bad for no apparent reason. I do have some from 6 years ago that were made on a IMS CD-R at 2x speed and they still work great, but others (some from that 6 year old period, some newer), have gone bad for no apparent reason.
And because the current incarnation of CD-R/CD-RW/DVD-RW hasn't been around for more than ~10 years, it is hard to say how long the media will last. Does anyone have a CD-R or DVD-R that was created using today's CD-R/DVD-R technology 20 years ago who can verify the 20 year old disc still works?:-)
Caller ID: telemarketers are going to have to use equipment that identifies the calling number, even across state lines.
I haven't read anywhere that caller-id is part of the law. Even if it is, I'm waiting to see how well it will be enforced.
If I get a telemarketing call with a bogus or no caller-ID, I don't know how to tell the FCC/FTC about the caller-ID violation when I don't even get that information from the telemarketer.
Sure I could complain that some unknown telemarketer called me, but then what? Does the phone company have the resources to track down every instance of this so that the violation can be reported?
Maybe caller-ID should be revamped so that it is manditory, and make it so that the caller-id info that is sent can't be set by the caller (at least if your business does telemarketing). Make the phone company solely responsible for the caller-ID info that gets sent.
In order for the FCC/FTC to enforce the do-not-call list, they are going to have to get complaints from us the consumer.
When filing a complaint, the consumer must be able to report either the company name or telephone number that belongs to the telemarketer. Even though its the law that telemarketers need to provide this information up-front, often they don't. If the consumer doesn't know who to complain about, then how is the FCC/FTC going to impose fines on any telemarketer?
Slashdot Mirror
"The Wachowski Brothers' vision for The Matrix is one that extends far beyond the theatrical trilogy, and the world they have created is so rich that we've chosen to tell inter-connected Matrix-related stories in multiple mediums," said Joel Silver, producer of the Matrix films. "Our goal in collaborating with Ubi Soft is to create a multiplayer online game that reflects the trilogy's highly stylized storytelling and innovative action, taking fans beyond the boundaries of the movie screen and into a 'persistent world' where they can fully explore the vast realm of the Matrix."
So it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that Revolutions didn't bring closure. It wasn't meant to.
Whether tying video/on-line games to a movie series is really going to work, only time will tell.
From the latter article I reference above:
"The Wachowski Brothers' vision for The Matrix is one that extends far beyond the theatrical trilogy, and the world they have created is so rich that we've chosen to tell inter-connected Matrix-related stories in multiple mediums," said Joel Silver, producer of the Matrix films. "Our goal in collaborating with Ubi Soft is to create a multiplayer online game that reflects the trilogy's highly stylized storytelling and innovative action, taking fans beyond the boundaries of the movie screen and into a 'persistent world' where they can fully explore the vast realm of the Matrix."
Revolutions wasn't supposed to give you the answers to everything. In fact, at the same time that Reloaded came out, a video game called Enter The Matrix came out, which contains some information pretaining to the Oracle and the family (father, mother, child) you see at the beginning of Revolutions in the train station. You learn who the family is, and, more importantly, what deal the father made with the Mero (french dude) in Reloaded (yes, he's in Reloaded, being led away from the table when Nero, Morpheus, and Trinity approach the Mero in the Resturant in Reloaded). In Revolutions, you only learn of the father's side of the deal. You never learn what the Mero got in return.
I've seen the movie and was dissapointed that it didn't answer my questions and I would probably have to play Enter The Matrix and The Matrix Online in order to grasp some of the answers I was expecting. I'm not a game-playing person and don't necessarily want to play the games.
If you realize that Revolutions isn't going to answer your questions and just sit back and enjoy it, it is actually a good movie. The more I think about the movie (I saw it Wednesday morning), the more I realize that it wasn't nearly as disappointing as I first thought.
I just wish it answered more questions, and, therefore, didn't force me to play the video and on-line games to fully grasp everything.
When Reloaded ended, you were left with the questions about the cycle of the One - that the Matrix needed to be reset, otherwise it would crash, and so on. Revolutions didn't address any of that, at least what I saw this morning.
The special effects and all were cool in a couple of places.
I think that many will be disappointed with the movie for the fact it doesn't have closure to what we've been fed in the past two movies. Spending some time in some of the Matrix on-line forums you'll find a lot of theories and ideas about the Matrix, the previous Ones, and all, but most expressed their disappointment.
I enjoyed the movie for what it is. If you don't micro-analyze everything, you'll probably enjoy it. To me it provided some more insight into the role of the Oracle, among other things.
You allow people to take their receipt with them, then you get into the possibility of vote buying.
Say person A approaches person B and offers person B a sum of money if person B will vote a certain way. Person B goes to the polls, votes, obtains the receipt, and then, later, presents person A with the receipt as proof that person B voted as person A instructed. Person A then pays person B for a job well done.
Without the receipt, person B has no way to prove that they voted as person A had instructed.
This is the same reason why Internet voting is going to be a problem. Sure, I can place my vote from my PC at work, and my co-workers can look over my shoulder to see how I vote, to make sure I cast my vote the way they want it to be cast. If I vote the way they tell me to, I'll get a reward. It isn't a matter of secure communications between the client PC and the server. Its an issue of being able to provide proof of who you voted for to other people.
Sure, CD-R/RW drives are cheap now and Zip drives cost about the same as they did way back when. My PentiumII/350 cost a lot more 5 years ago (when I built my PC) than it costs now. In fact, it would be hard to even find a PII/350 being offered for sale these days. So did the PII chip fail? No. It was the hottest CPU to have in its day. Its just that as new technology emerges and improves in both performance and cost, old technology, unless its updated, is left behind.
I'm guessing that in 5 to 10 years, people will be saying the same thing about CD-Rs vs DVDs. Why would anyone have purchased a CD-R/RW that holds only ~700 Mbyte and is slow (remember, think 5 - 10 years in the future) compared to DVDs, which can hold a lot more and is blazing fast? It isn't because CD-R/RW was a failed technology, its just that new technology came out (DVD+/-R/RW) and improved faster than CD-R/RW technology did (remember, I'm being hypethetical 5 to 10 years down the road here).
But I definatly agree that the no-competition with the Zip specs certainly had a hand in making Zip drives less and less attractive to the now cheaper alternatives.
So does this mean that VeriSign will have to pay NSI for every unregistered domain if/when VeriSign puts the wildcard back in?
The problem is that some TLDs do more than just delegation. The article mentioned the .name domain specifically.
The problem with the BIND patch arose when people implemeting the patch decided to not allow wildcarding on all TLDs. If you used the patch to only set .com/.net to delegate-only, there wasn't a problem. If you also set .name to delegate-only, then you would have a problem with stuff in the .name domain.
For those who didn't install the patch and start using the delegate-only options, BIND doesn't automatically start enforcing a delegate-only on all TLDs. The TLDs which you want to be delegate-only have to be specified in the config file. To undo VeriSign's wildcard behavior, one would only want to set the delegate-only option on the .com and .net domains. Other TLDs had been doing wildcards prior to VeriSign's actions, and, indeed, some TLDs relied on wildcarding for some things to work. Unilaterally stopping all TLDs from doing more than delegating would break things.
VeriSign must suspend the changes to the .com and .net top-level domains introduced on 15 September 2003 by 6:00 PM PDT on 4 October 2003
The letter is dated October 3, 2003. October 4, 2003, 6:00PM PDT is 36 hours away, not 36 days.
There are also other TLDs which have a wildcard in them as well. The big difference between them and what VeriSign is doing, though, is that the .museum TLD has one registrar. You don't have a choice of which Registrar to use when registering a .museum name. With .com and .net, though, you have a large choice (register.com, godaddy.com, etc, etc, etc).
And, the .museum domain isn't just for anyone. If you mistype a .museum domain and get redirected to a page at MuseDoma, the page is likely going to say something like "The museum URL you are trying to visit does not exist. You can't purchase this domain unless you are a museum, your name reflects the domain name you typed, and you meet our other qualifications".
VeriSign's sitefinder site could say this: "The domain you are trying to visit doesn't exist. But we would be happy to sell it to you. Pay VeriSign the fee and its yours." Where does this leave the competing Registrars of the .com and .net domains? Out in the cold.
Currently, SiteFinder is this: "The domain you are trying to visit does not exist. Thanks for mis-typing it so that we (VeriSign) could show you this search engine. By visiting SiteFinder, VeriSign is going to profit from your mis-typing by way of advertising. Only VeriSign will profit from your mistype of a .com or .net domain. The other registrars for .com and .net domains won't see a penny of this. We hope this will generate over $100 Million for VeriSign."
This is in addition to the many other problems it caused.
I know this because last weekend we got bit by this. We had a monitoring script that checked whether or not one of our web sites was in DNS. In a bizzar set of circumstances, the domain had expired 6 days prior to this. We didn't receive any email or snail mail notices about this, and it was only after 6 days had passed since the expiration that VeriSign sent an email to the admin handle, et al.
By that time customers were calling us asking us why this "sitefinder" page was coming up instead of the usual pages.
It took a little bit to figure out what had happened, and then fix it (registering a domian doesn't make it immediatly appear in DNS....). We have since ensured that all of the domains we own are on auto-renew.
In summary, if a site has been expired for as little as 6 days, VeriSign returns the Sitefinder IP instead.
Sunncomm's MediaMax CD-3 (also under the "Products" link on their web site) seems to describe the format of the CD. Its a multi-session with one containing CD-A files and the second session consisting of compressed WMA files.
Also, in the original article, it says that you'll be able to download all or some of the music from the CD to your computer, but they won't play on other people's computer, so you won't be able to share the files with other computers. You'd have to give the physical disk to the user you want to share the music with and that user would have to download the music from the CD.
I'm not too familiar with the actual technical specs on the CD format, but a quick read-through of the Sunncomm stuff doesn't make much sense to me in that it would seem easy to get around.
I'm sure that one of my CD players (at least 12 years old, and yes it still works) won't be able to "decrypt" anything.
I'm running wu-imapd/procmail/sendmail/Horde-IMP on my home machine, but with wu-imapd using the MBX format instead of the MBOX format. I haven't had any problems whatsoever.
On the front end, I use Horde's IMP. Users connect to a web server running Horde IMP, and then IMP makes the IMAP connection to wu-imapd. It works fairly well. Users can be anywhere on the Internet and access their email as long as they have a web browser that supports SSL (I run Horde's web interface over https)
Overall, I like wu-imapd. I've tried Cyrus but didn't get very far in the install before determining I didn't need anything but a simple IMAP server, so I stuck with wu-imapd. I went with Horde as the front-end simply to give my users a uniform interface regardless of their location. It enabled me to only allow users access to port 443 on the web server while not opening ports 143/993 to the Internet (the web server is the only application that needs to talk to the imap server, which is on the same box). Horde-IMP does leave some things to be desired, but I can live with it.
If you use wu-imapd, I would recommend running it over SSL (port 993) only, and make it use the MBX format instead of the MBOX format. There is documentation available describing how to do this. If you don't like Horde-IMP or want to use something else as a client, any mail client that supports IMAP over SSL will work fine.
Calling SCO and asking for a license is nothing more than calling SCO and saying "Hey SCO, I'm using Linux. Put me down on your list of known people using Linux, and while you are at it, add me to the list of people/companies you will audit to determine whether or not I'm being truthful about how many Linux licenses I need.".
If you don't fess up to SCO, its unlikely that SCO knows about your Linux machine(s), and likely that they will never know, unless someone says something. Don't let that someone be you!
I know of people who work for companies who have Linux machines on internal networks with no access to the outside world. In order for SCO to know they exist they would have to physically go to the companies in question and force someone to log into every machine, on console, to ensure that every machine has been checked. I don't see that happening in my lifetime. Or maybe the disgruntled employee will spill the beans...
I don't think that Red Hat, SuSE, or any of the other Linux vendors are going to give SCO a list of people who have purchased Linux so that SCO can turn around and send out invoices.
Sure, SCO can assume that some Fortune 500 companies are using Linux in some way and send out invoices to those, but, I don't see how SCO will have any solid proof that any of them is using, say, Red Hat Linux unless someone tells SCO first that such and such company is using Red Hat.
So company X gets an invoice from SCO and ignores it. What is SCO going to do? Send someone out from SCO, unannounced, that just shows up and expects to be able to do a thourough audit of the companie's computer networks to find any trace of Linux? Even though SCO may have said that they'd do audits like this, do you really think that SCO is going to have the manpower and money to audit literally thousands of companies?
If you think SCO can do that, I'll show up at your company Monday morning and demand an on-site audit so that I can do a complete network audit and look for any Linux machines that might be running any code that I have personally written. I expect full cooperation. I'll send my bill to you the day before I get there.
The bottom line is that while SCO may send out invoices to customers for using Linux, SCO doesn't have much of an idea which of those customers are using Linux, unless Linux vendors have shared their customer list with SCO in the first place. That, or SCO is doing some sort of Internet scanning looking for Linux systems. And don't think for a minute that most companies will put up with SCO coming to do a audit of all their computers.
Its time that SCO puts up or shuts up. I'm getting tired of reading the SCO posts on /. and in the media, even for their entertainment value.
For those who read the original article in the Register, DirectTV was only going after people who had purchased their SmartCard programmer "from one of the equipment vendors shut down in the DMCA raids".
The same article (further down) appears suggest that the vendors in the DMCA raids were companies who's primary business was devoted to selling equipment to steal satellite TV programming
Here's the relevent quote from the article that suggests this: "...how innocent is someone who goes to website that is clearly identified as a pirate website that is devoted to selling equipment to steal satellite TV programming, and orders the equipment, knowing full well what they're getting?"
Is DirectTV going after people who purchased their SmartCard programmer from other places, or is it still just those consumers who were unfortunate enough to purchase their SmartCard programmer from the wrong company?
I'm not at all for a company going out and suing people for something in which the person is not guilty, at least without giving the person the benefit of the doubt.
As I see it, the problem is that DirectTV shut down some companies that, at least in DirectTV opinion, were advertising that their SmartCard programmers, if purchased, could be used to program a SmartCard in such a way as to enable the person to watch free DirectTV. DirectTV then took the customer list from the shut down companies and assumed that everyone who purchased a SmartCard programmer did it for the purpose of stealing satellite TV.
Now, if you were one of the customers of one of these companies, and you did purchase your SmartCard programmer to steal satellite TV, what are you going to do when DirectTV comes knocking? Are you going to fess up, or are you going to invent a cover story?
But assuming that everyone obtained their SmartCard reader for illegal purposes (and, hence, creates a cover story when DirectTV comes knocking) is assuming that everyone is guilty, and in DirectTV's case, without the possibility of being proven innocent.
It really gets me that DirectTV can do this - assume guilt without the possibility of being proven innocent. I thought the US justice system was based on the principle of innocent until proven guilty. Isn't the burden of proof on DirectTV to prove guilt of the defendant?
"In the old days, there used to be a term, 'buying your gross,' " Rick Sands, chief operating officer at Miramax, told the Los Angeles Times. "You could buy your gross for the weekend and overcome bad word of mouth, because it took time to filter out into the general audience."
But those days are over, because the technology of hand-held text-message devices has drastically cut down the time it takes for movie-goers to tell their friends that a heavily promoted summer action movie is a waste of time and money.
Shhhhh. Don't tell anyone. The movie sucks. But if no one finds out, they'll all come see it!
If Hollywood actually made good, quality movies and droves went to see them, would the movie industry then say that the success of the movies is because of text messaging (i.e., people find out quicker that the movie is actually good)?
Just as with the music industry. If you put crap into the machine, crap comes out, and few people want to spend their money on crap.
I find the article's most interesting point being that
Among the many bizarre things about the complaint, though, is that SCO itself used to be a Linux company called Caldera, and as such eagerly distributed free of charge the very same software it now is claiming infringes its copyrights.
A new CEO came up with the business strategy in the fall. But a new plan doesn't immunize the company from the precedents it helped set. It's as if a magician gave away his secrets, then started suing his audience for learning how he did his tricks.
At least one of the FUD statements that SCO has made in the past couple of months is that they own the control over derivative works. They have said as much when clarifying the IBM suite by conceeding that they don't own the copyright to the IBM-written code, but they should have control over it becuase it is a derived work.
Anyone who looks at the offending code and then proceedes to write their own code to replace the offending code has been tainted, and their work could be considered a derivative.
I can't wait for someone like Amazon to be served notice over this patent. Hopefully it will be squashed like a little pest that it is.
I mean, what's next? A patent on discussion boards such as /.?
Its for this very reason that when I make a CD-R backup of anything I want to keep around, I make two (or more) copies and put one copy in storage and never touch it unless the other copies go bad. If that happens, I then make a copy of the sole remaing good copy and put it back in storage.
I've too had several CD-R discs go bad for no apparent reason. I do have some from 6 years ago that were made on a IMS CD-R at 2x speed and they still work great, but others (some from that 6 year old period, some newer), have gone bad for no apparent reason.
And because the current incarnation of CD-R/CD-RW/DVD-RW hasn't been around for more than ~10 years, it is hard to say how long the media will last. Does anyone have a CD-R or DVD-R that was created using today's CD-R/DVD-R technology 20 years ago who can verify the 20 year old disc still works? :-)
The breech on Atlantis was attributed to something other than a foam impact though.
The story can be found here. About 2/3 of the way down is where it discusses the cause of the Atlantis incident.
In this case, though, STS-87 did fly before STS-91.
I haven't read anywhere that caller-id is part of the law. Even if it is, I'm waiting to see how well it will be enforced.
If I get a telemarketing call with a bogus or no caller-ID, I don't know how to tell the FCC/FTC about the caller-ID violation when I don't even get that information from the telemarketer.
Sure I could complain that some unknown telemarketer called me, but then what? Does the phone company have the resources to track down every instance of this so that the violation can be reported?
Maybe caller-ID should be revamped so that it is manditory, and make it so that the caller-id info that is sent can't be set by the caller (at least if your business does telemarketing). Make the phone company solely responsible for the caller-ID info that gets sent.
In order for the FCC/FTC to enforce the do-not-call list, they are going to have to get complaints from us the consumer. When filing a complaint, the consumer must be able to report either the company name or telephone number that belongs to the telemarketer. Even though its the law that telemarketers need to provide this information up-front, often they don't. If the consumer doesn't know who to complain about, then how is the FCC/FTC going to impose fines on any telemarketer?