Actually, it wasn't pearjam145 who said it. Allow me to annotate his submission slightly:
First story paragraph: A new file-sharing standard designed to distribute copyrighted music and movies legitimately has been developed by a technology consortium. The system could deliver any content format to any computer, and users might even earn rewards points for sharing the files.
Third story paragraph: Using the new standard, computer users could share small files containing information about music, video or other data, but not the content itself.
First half of second story paragraph: The Content Reference Forum (CRF), founded by Universal Music Group backed by technology companies including Microsoft,...
Last story paragraph:...is hoping the sharing file standard will be adopted by technology companies and incorporated into software music players...
The real story was written by Will Knight of the New Scientist news service, for the record.
Come on now... Or was this just an amazing use of plagerism to illustrate the point in a story about fair use rights and legal music sharing (note that quoting verbatim half the story without attribution is not fair-use, at least not in the US)?
The least expensive digital SLR I've seen is I think ~$800. The difference then is about 50 rolls of film. I don't think I've shot that many in my life.
That's too bad. With digital, you can easily shoot that many in a single trip... Which is one of the easiest ways to get better. If not the only way.
The lenses require so much light you need fast film or very expensive lenses
???
The lens has a problem that you can solve with an expensive lens? Becuase the "camera is crap"? As someone who "used to work in a camera store", surely you're aware of the difference between the lens (important) and the body (much less so)...
Just curious.
Besides, a decent canon 50mm lens is really not that cheap, even the 1.4 is under $300 - and that's a great lens by any measurement. The slightly slower one is cheap enough to be in any halfway-serious photographer's bag, too.
My beefs with digital (and my primary camera is digital) are: reaction time - i.e. the time between pressing the button & the picture being taken;...
This has a lot to do with them being low-end consumer digital cameras. A modern digital SLR like the Canon Digital Rebel can hang with the film cameras in single-image response time (ie: a very few ms), and easily take bursts of 4 (or more) high-resolution pictures with subsecond total response time.
I strongly recommend that you read http://www.photo.net/making-photographs/ . Not only does it contain some good general photographic advice, it also has some pretty good recommendations about equipment (not specifics, but enough to teach you how to pick your own).
On the other hand, IMO your budget is way low. If you're looking for an SLR, presumably you're pretty serious. Which means you'll be taking many, many pictures (the only way to get better). And buying film and having it developed.
My recommendation? Up your budget quite a bit. Check out the Canon Digital Rebel. Yes, its about $1k with a pretty good generic lens. But that may be less than you'd spend over a year with a $200-300 film camera, plus decent film, plus developing. Think TCO not just initial purchase price.
If you do go with film, then pick up a simple camera (Canon/Nikon) and a good, solid 50mm prime lens. And lots, lots, lots of film.
The Texas one is just pathetic. Huge tall, skinny ones to pair (for example) 20% of liberal Austin with 20% of conservative San Antonio (larger) - so hey, each slice of SA overwhelms the Austin piece. There's even at least one disconnected part, with a gap of several hundred miles to find a smaller Democratic group to "pair" with.
I feel bad for the voting public - I mean, you're setting it up so that the individual voters in the paired, "liberal" cities have little to no representation. Ignoring the overall effect, what is this doing to those people's rights?
Yeah, but I just went to their site - now I really want to get myself a christmas bonus - Hard Driving for $1095! I used to love that game. Of course, if they'd had the sequel (Stunt Driving - the yellow one) that would be even better...
Speaking of Mars, putting people there would have more benefits than I care to type. New world for humanity, extraterrestrial science (possibly biology), easy access to the asteroids, ability to live off the land that can't be done on the moon or deep space...
And, once self-sufficient, the classic sci-fi (Heinlien, Cerryh, etc) goal of being able to survive a planetary catastrophe - whether manmade, external (ID4esque) or incidental (passing meteor). Long-term survival of humanity becomes some dramatically-high amount more likely. Getting out of the solar system increases it likewise.
Whether or not this is a Good Thing I leave as a disucssion topic for the class... talk amongst yourselves...
The goal isn't to emmigrate from earth. Frankly, I like earth a lot, and don't want to leave for some stupid dome on Mars. Living on a planet where I can't go outside to sit among the trees because there's no breathable air and no trees is the nightmare I'm trying to prevent from happening -here-. Why would I want to go live like that somewhere else?:)
Maybe if there were choices, places where people could go and live like that by necessity, some folk would begin to realize just how nice it is down here, and do a little more to keep it that way? Trouble is, you'd need cheap off-planet manufacturing, etc, and we're talking megaYears to get there.. so not much help to you or I. Still, something to consider.
In a two-turn system (such as in France), such an issue doesn't exist. To win in on turn you need an absolute majority (i.e. more than 50% of the votes; 49% against an opponent who has 48% is not enough). If no one has an absolute majority, the two top-ranking candidates face each other in a second turn, which determines the winner.
I've always wondered why this is neccesary. When you vote for someone, you're basically saying, "I trust this person to represent my interests." So instead of having the inconvenience of another public election, why not just have the losing candidates (from the lowest-number of votes on up, maybe tossing out those under a certain floor) "assign" their votes to another candidate who's still in the running? After all, the people who voted for them are alright with him representing them in government for one term, why not at the polls for the elections for the same term?
Yeah, there are details to work out, but still... it wouldn't be that big a deal to implement. And it would allow a true multiParty system without increasing election expenses.
After chatting with Caesar (who also helped test the airpanel), we agreed that this device is really a "glimpse of the future". We imagine that one day we will not need to be right in front of a computer just to control our other computers. We will be able to travel anywhere in a modern city and use an independent, portable device (cell phone, PDA, tablet PC, airpanel, etc.) to access or control the PC sitting at home. Will such a day ever arrive? Who's to say? But the airpanel does seem kind of futuristic.
Not that I necessarily agree with these comments, but if such a future were to come to pass, the likely hood of me choosing my living room to host my desktop-server would be slim to none. Ah, centrailized computing, here we come again... At least the iterations are close enough to each other now that we don't ever have to implement anything - by the time we might be thinking about actually moving towards centralizing, decentralizing will be the "next (er, current) big thing" again.
So it's OK if a corporation does anything within the law to profit?
Actually, depending on their corporate charter, they may have to. Put it this way - let's pretend that you're a MSFT shareholder (and if you own any mutual funds, you probably are - if a small one). You have an expectation that the company you are a part owner of does everything within their charter power to give you a return on your investment. If they fail to do this, and they are a declared for-profit company (which they are), you could potentially sue them. They probably don't want people to sue them.
To restate, for-profit corporations, especially public ones, have a fudiciary obligation to make money. Sitting on a resource (such as this IP) and failing to use it, is potentially actionable on their part. Make sense?
Its pretty easy - the bank, legally, has to release the funds from the check within five days. If the inbound check is on an out-of-the-country bank, it may take more than that amount of time to clear. So the bank releases funds to you, provisionally. The mistake that people make is in using the point when their balance jumps instead of when the check actually clears.
If I lived in my own house, or was a business? Yeah, I probably would be annoyed. Then again, people use AOL because they don't want to deal with all that crap. What if you knew people who lived in assisted living units and who sometimes left their back doors unlocked (even though they'd never used them, and many of them didn't even realize that the door was there behind the wall hanging)? Wouldn't it make sense for the complex to lock all of the doors, and unlock them or point out the key to the small percentage of residents who a) noticed, and b) couldn't unlock the door themselves?
Interestingly enough, that company can make its money two ways - first, as a waste management organization, and second, as an oil producer. If it truly scales out proplerly, this is indeed an amazing opportunity.
And no, they're neither hiring nor publicly traded.
Add in controller costs. Figure about $12648 for each XServe RAID, with full cache memory, et cetera, and another $5999 for a dual proc XServe to manage it. Of course, for something that size I'd run it through the ADC program if eligible ($3500 to join, drops the combined price from $18647 to $15307 per 2.5tb).
The Senate just approved an anti-spam bill 97-0 and the House is working on a similar bill (story here). Hopefully this will keep normal people from getting duped into buying the crap that floods our inboxes.
Very cool. I hope that they come up with anti-virus legislation soon - then we'll all be virus free! Seriously, there are so many other issues (such as international traffic, outsourcing to remote companies who use US servers but bounce mail through Uganda to China and back to the US...) how do you legislate that from inside a single country? And would it do any good even if you could?
Panther is 100 in the UK; 70 would seem like a reasonable price point for those who paid for 10.2. Still, I know people who still scrabble after cracked copies of XP Pro because they can't afford to buy a copy at 250 RRP; Panther is a bargain by comparison...
Fair enough. The price of Mac OS X is US$260 or GBP200. If you own a copy of Mac OS already, even an ancient one, you get it for half price (US$130 or GBP100). You don't even have to prove it - Apple will trust you!
Taking the mickey? Not quite - since Apple is a hardware vendor, its impossible to buy a Mac without getting an OS license. And the OS is, currently, useless without a Mac. So in effect, everyone who gets a new version is paying an upgrade price for an upgrade version.
You normally buy enough RAM for your applications, not for spare buffering (at least on my databases that's the case, spare RAM there is a waste, because normally writes are sync'ed, or you have two copies, one in the DB cache, and one in the filesystem cache), so for most of my I/O performance needs, extra RAM is relatively wasteful.
What the fsck? You talk about running high performance databases, and yet you're running them through a cooked filesystem instead of on raw files (which are by definition not buffered by the filesystem)? Come on... At least try to be realistic here.
Ah, so that may explain why I haven't heard of him before. I was wondering, are they going to use this as a test - look, we released this CD (from a relative unknown) and nobody's sharing his music! And no complaints! Use it for everyone!
...which arrives in stores today, may look like a traditional CD.
Could be a problem. Can they enforce some sort of labelling? Probably not if it does indeed comply with red book, haven't read that in years to see if it allows for extra data tracks or not.
When put into a Macintosh (news - web sites) or Windows PC, the disc installs software to keep the music secure
Wonder if it asks permission first?
Another link allows you to send e-mail to friends so they can download a copy of the song playable for 10 days. "You're sharing music, but you are not giving it away forever," Whitmore says.
You know, they'll take a lot of flak for this, but it honestly does seem like they're at least trying to provide fair-use copies, preview opportunities, et cetera. Not bad, actually. Of course, we'll see what the reality is, but they should get some points for effort here.
From the article, "really, all they wanted to do was send digital pictures of the kids to Grandma. Heistad came back with a shopping list that would get them that, plus a home theater, a wireless network, new computing, a tricked-out music system, and GPS positioning capabilities."
Pathetic. How about a 6 month followup (honestly reported)? After all, what are the odds that most of this equipment will just be gathering dust by then?
Of course, while your example is an exaggeration, there is some truth to it. Then again, in the (remote but nonzero) possibility that you did cut yourself:
ASP would randomly write some data into weird places, and put up a pretty page telling the world that it had a problem...
PHP would just return a plain, white page saying, "PHP: Warning: could not un-recut in/usr/human/hand/finger on line 29371"
and Java would call 911 for you.
Right tool, right job. If you don't need complete production stability for a moderate webapp with a short lifetime, by all means use PHP. For a production control system, I'd pick Java.
I can't be the only one that has used a crack on software purchased legally in order to not have to have the stupid CD in the drive.
To label me a criminal because of this is asinine.
Agreed. However, accusing you of violating the (admittedly, possibly stupid) license agreements of the software, that you agreed to when you installed it, would be entirely correct and the company would be within their rights to do so.
Indeed, if they found out that enough people were doing this, maybe they'd change their CD-presence policies?
Slashdot Mirror
The real story was written by Will Knight of the New Scientist news service, for the record.
Come on now... Or was this just an amazing use of plagerism to illustrate the point in a story about fair use rights and legal music sharing (note that quoting verbatim half the story without attribution is not fair-use, at least not in the US)?
The least expensive digital SLR I've seen is I think ~$800. The difference then is about 50 rolls of film. I don't think I've shot that many in my life.
That's too bad. With digital, you can easily shoot that many in a single trip... Which is one of the easiest ways to get better. If not the only way.
The lenses require so much light you need fast film or very expensive lenses
???
The lens has a problem that you can solve with an expensive lens? Becuase the "camera is crap"? As someone who "used to work in a camera store", surely you're aware of the difference between the lens (important) and the body (much less so)...
Just curious.
Besides, a decent canon 50mm lens is really not that cheap, even the 1.4 is under $300 - and that's a great lens by any measurement. The slightly slower one is cheap enough to be in any halfway-serious photographer's bag, too.
This has a lot to do with them being low-end consumer digital cameras. A modern digital SLR like the Canon Digital Rebel can hang with the film cameras in single-image response time (ie: a very few ms), and easily take bursts of 4 (or more) high-resolution pictures with subsecond total response time.
I bought a Pentax ME, used, for a girlfriend years ago
Really? I wonder how much you'd get for a girlfriend now? Does she have to be in really good shape, and can you negotiate well with the camera seller?
I strongly recommend that you read http://www.photo.net/making-photographs/ . Not only does it contain some good general photographic advice, it also has some pretty good recommendations about equipment (not specifics, but enough to teach you how to pick your own).
On the other hand, IMO your budget is way low. If you're looking for an SLR, presumably you're pretty serious. Which means you'll be taking many, many pictures (the only way to get better). And buying film and having it developed.
My recommendation? Up your budget quite a bit. Check out the Canon Digital Rebel. Yes, its about $1k with a pretty good generic lens. But that may be less than you'd spend over a year with a $200-300 film camera, plus decent film, plus developing. Think TCO not just initial purchase price.
If you do go with film, then pick up a simple camera (Canon/Nikon) and a good, solid 50mm prime lens. And lots, lots, lots of film.
The Texas one is just pathetic. Huge tall, skinny ones to pair (for example) 20% of liberal Austin with 20% of conservative San Antonio (larger) - so hey, each slice of SA overwhelms the Austin piece. There's even at least one disconnected part, with a gap of several hundred miles to find a smaller Democratic group to "pair" with.
I feel bad for the voting public - I mean, you're setting it up so that the individual voters in the paired, "liberal" cities have little to no representation. Ignoring the overall effect, what is this doing to those people's rights?
Yeah, but I just went to their site - now I really want to get myself a christmas bonus - Hard Driving for $1095! I used to love that game. Of course, if they'd had the sequel (Stunt Driving - the yellow one) that would be even better...
P ub lic/Hard_Driving.htm
http://www.american-amusements.com/am/home.nsf/
Speaking of Mars, putting people there would have more benefits than I care to type. New world for humanity, extraterrestrial science (possibly biology), easy access to the asteroids, ability to live off the land that can't be done on the moon or deep space...
And, once self-sufficient, the classic sci-fi (Heinlien, Cerryh, etc) goal of being able to survive a planetary catastrophe - whether manmade, external (ID4esque) or incidental (passing meteor). Long-term survival of humanity becomes some dramatically-high amount more likely. Getting out of the solar system increases it likewise.
Whether or not this is a Good Thing I leave as a disucssion topic for the class... talk amongst yourselves...
The goal isn't to emmigrate from earth. Frankly, I like earth a lot, and don't want to leave for some stupid dome on Mars. Living on a planet where I can't go outside to sit among the trees because there's no breathable air and no trees is the nightmare I'm trying to prevent from happening -here-. Why would I want to go live like that somewhere else? :)
.. so not much help to you or I. Still, something to consider.
Maybe if there were choices, places where people could go and live like that by necessity, some folk would begin to realize just how nice it is down here, and do a little more to keep it that way? Trouble is, you'd need cheap off-planet manufacturing, etc, and we're talking megaYears to get there
In a two-turn system (such as in France), such an issue doesn't exist. To win in on turn you need an absolute majority (i.e. more than 50% of the votes; 49% against an opponent who has 48% is not enough). If no one has an absolute majority, the two top-ranking candidates face each other in a second turn, which determines the winner.
... it wouldn't be that big a deal to implement. And it would allow a true multiParty system without increasing election expenses.
I've always wondered why this is neccesary. When you vote for someone, you're basically saying, "I trust this person to represent my interests." So instead of having the inconvenience of another public election, why not just have the losing candidates (from the lowest-number of votes on up, maybe tossing out those under a certain floor) "assign" their votes to another candidate who's still in the running? After all, the people who voted for them are alright with him representing them in government for one term, why not at the polls for the elections for the same term?
Yeah, there are details to work out, but still
After chatting with Caesar (who also helped test the airpanel), we agreed that this device is really a "glimpse of the future". We imagine that one day we will not need to be right in front of a computer just to control our other computers. We will be able to travel anywhere in a modern city and use an independent, portable device (cell phone, PDA, tablet PC, airpanel, etc.) to access or control the PC sitting at home. Will such a day ever arrive? Who's to say? But the airpanel does seem kind of futuristic.
Not that I necessarily agree with these comments, but if such a future were to come to pass, the likely hood of me choosing my living room to host my desktop-server would be slim to none. Ah, centrailized computing, here we come again... At least the iterations are close enough to each other now that we don't ever have to implement anything - by the time we might be thinking about actually moving towards centralizing, decentralizing will be the "next (er, current) big thing" again.
To restate, for-profit corporations, especially public ones, have a fudiciary obligation to make money. Sitting on a resource (such as this IP) and failing to use it, is potentially actionable on their part. Make sense?
Its pretty easy - the bank, legally, has to release the funds from the check within five days. If the inbound check is on an out-of-the-country bank, it may take more than that amount of time to clear. So the bank releases funds to you, provisionally. The mistake that people make is in using the point when their balance jumps instead of when the check actually clears.
If I lived in my own house, or was a business? Yeah, I probably would be annoyed. Then again, people use AOL because they don't want to deal with all that crap. What if you knew people who lived in assisted living units and who sometimes left their back doors unlocked (even though they'd never used them, and many of them didn't even realize that the door was there behind the wall hanging)? Wouldn't it make sense for the complex to lock all of the doors, and unlock them or point out the key to the small percentage of residents who a) noticed, and b) couldn't unlock the door themselves?
Interestingly enough, that company can make its money two ways - first, as a waste management organization, and second, as an oil producer. If it truly scales out proplerly, this is indeed an amazing opportunity.
And no, they're neither hiring nor publicly traded.
Add in controller costs. Figure about $12648 for each XServe RAID, with full cache memory, et cetera, and another $5999 for a dual proc XServe to manage it. Of course, for something that size I'd run it through the ADC program if eligible ($3500 to join, drops the combined price from $18647 to $15307 per 2.5tb).
The Senate just approved an anti-spam bill 97-0 and the House is working on a similar bill (story here). Hopefully this will keep normal people from getting duped into buying the crap that floods our inboxes.
Very cool. I hope that they come up with anti-virus legislation soon - then we'll all be virus free! Seriously, there are so many other issues (such as international traffic, outsourcing to remote companies who use US servers but bounce mail through Uganda to China and back to the US...) how do you legislate that from inside a single country? And would it do any good even if you could?
Panther is 100 in the UK; 70 would seem like a reasonable price point for those who paid for 10.2. Still, I know people who still scrabble after cracked copies of XP Pro because they can't afford to buy a copy at 250 RRP; Panther is a bargain by comparison...
Fair enough. The price of Mac OS X is US$260 or GBP200. If you own a copy of Mac OS already, even an ancient one, you get it for half price (US$130 or GBP100). You don't even have to prove it - Apple will trust you!
Taking the mickey? Not quite - since Apple is a hardware vendor, its impossible to buy a Mac without getting an OS license. And the OS is, currently, useless without a Mac. So in effect, everyone who gets a new version is paying an upgrade price for an upgrade version.
You normally buy enough RAM for your applications, not for spare buffering (at least on my databases that's the case, spare RAM there is a waste, because normally writes are sync'ed, or you have two copies, one in the DB cache, and one in the filesystem cache), so for most of my I/O performance needs, extra RAM is relatively wasteful.
What the fsck? You talk about running high performance databases, and yet you're running them through a cooked filesystem instead of on raw files (which are by definition not buffered by the filesystem)? Come on... At least try to be realistic here.
-Richard
Ah, so that may explain why I haven't heard of him before. I was wondering, are they going to use this as a test - look, we released this CD (from a relative unknown) and nobody's sharing his music! And no complaints! Use it for everyone!
Could be a problem. Can they enforce some sort of labelling? Probably not if it does indeed comply with red book, haven't read that in years to see if it allows for extra data tracks or not.
Wonder if it asks permission first?
You know, they'll take a lot of flak for this, but it honestly does seem like they're at least trying to provide fair-use copies, preview opportunities, et cetera. Not bad, actually. Of course, we'll see what the reality is, but they should get some points for effort here.
From the article, "really, all they wanted to do was send digital pictures of the kids to Grandma. Heistad came back with a shopping list that would get them that, plus a home theater, a wireless network, new computing, a tricked-out music system, and GPS positioning capabilities."
Pathetic. How about a 6 month followup (honestly reported)? After all, what are the odds that most of this equipment will just be gathering dust by then?
Alright, probably not the Tivo... but still...
Of course, while your example is an exaggeration, there is some truth to it. Then again, in the (remote but nonzero) possibility that you did cut yourself:
/usr/human/hand/finger on line 29371"
ASP would randomly write some data into weird places, and put up a pretty page telling the world that it had a problem...
PHP would just return a plain, white page saying, "PHP: Warning: could not un-recut in
and Java would call 911 for you.
Right tool, right job. If you don't need complete production stability for a moderate webapp with a short lifetime, by all means use PHP. For a production control system, I'd pick Java.
-Richard
Because even 15 minutes is quite a long time to be putting out 27 megawatts. Besides, $30mm is pretty damn cheap for a project of that scale, IMO.
Indeed, if they found out that enough people were doing this, maybe they'd change their CD-presence policies?