"Since this thing is a Sony, I'm sure it will be overloaded with DRM."
I did some work at the Sony Broadcast Lab in Whitby. Sony is a damn big company and there's a major disconnect between the video people and the music publishing poeple. They may as well be different companies for all practical purposes.
I've never met Ballmer but I've met Jobs. I've nevr met a more arrogant rude prick in all my life - to people he doesn't know. To people he knows he's just an average guy. Weird.
"Would it be possible for the open source community to launch a project to essentially make it impossible for a government to cut off its own people from the outside world? "
It's called UUCP.
In the 70s the CIA did a report on this to answer the question "can the government control email" and the report said "as long as people have phone lines and modems, no".
"Actually, there are no cockroaches in Norway. Unless you manage to bring some back from vacation. Do they exist in Canada and the Northern US?"
Being born in Wales and having grown up in Ontario Canada I'd never seen a cockroach until at 22 I moved to Los Angeles in 1979.
I saw lots there. Boric acid in every crack and crevice seems to kill them BTW and is about as safe as you can get.
I've seen one or two of them in Toronto in old houses and restaurants, but other than that I've seen none. They're not real common here from what I've seen. I've seen the odd silverfish and this year, lots of earwigs. But no roaches. Uh, cockroaches.
We have mosquitos instead. My god how we have mosquitos instead. And you really don't want to be here for blackfly season.
Ya know what? I recently bought a few guitars and haven't played in years. At first my fingers hurt from fingering chords but after a while they calloused up, got stronger and I could finger chords like a madman.
Think of it as exercise.
Let's all sing together now: "four dead in O-hi-o"
on
Replacing a Thinkpad?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
"Well, at least they don't shoot demonstrators in the US. "
Just for a lark once I tried to find something in Canadian Tire NOT made in China (that wasn't automotive). After about an hour I found some Corningware cleaner that was actually made in the US.
Interestingly I found the reverse true in Berlin when I was there once. Everything I found in the hotel (Adlon) I was in was made in Germany and in fact there was a store called "The China Store" mearby that had really cool and well made but very expensive stuff made in China. I'd guess all of Germany isn't like that but near the Brandernburg gate that's what I saw.
Aren't Toshiba and Sony laptops made in Japan any more?
My initial reaction to this was "oh god poor bastard". But after reading the indictment it's pretty obvious to me that want to send a message: "if you order bugs and aren't bona fide, you're going down.
From their point of view he could have ordered any bug.
Plus, he ordered two bugs he thought were harmless and then by his own admission "turns out one is not so harmless and can cause pbuemonia".
Is he being made an example of? Probably.
Is it warrented? Tough call. Might this make any other bio prof think twice before ordering bugs for some purpose not what they claimed? Probably.
Will this stop a bio terrorist? No.
The liability for the USG is pretty big here. Somebody goes to see his show then gets pnuemonia, then dies. The investigation reveals an artist surrepticuously ordered bacteria breaking all sort of safeguards and rules along the way. He could have used flourescine powder not real bacteria and just as effective a demonstration
Would it seem reasonable to you that the USG's response in this case would be "yeah it happens". Or, if it were, say your daughter who died would you want them to "do something" like maybe punish the bio-guy who flat out violated the terms and conditions under which they were able to get the bugs?
The govt is a big dumb machine. It has rules. Break them and you really can't expect nothing will happen.
I can't say I feel sorry for these guys. I appreciate their ideas and work, but this was just callously stupid. I doubt he'll get 20 years but my guess is they won't get off scot free. And I'm not sure they should.
Try to catch a look at the President of Bolivia on the Daily show last night. Other than that you sound like time traveller zero.
Makes me wonder if somebody posting here today gets a visit.
And for the record I know a guy, fairly high profile in ICANN that stole some Anthrax from U of T and kept it in his fridge "just in case". He disposed of it in a city dump.
"read about the crusades of Ebay seller Tabberone "
This is the coolest thing I've read in a very long time. I thought I knew a little about copyright and trademark law but had no idea that stuff produced by slave or force labour invalidates copyright.
Nice to see the little guy take on a handful of huge companies and win fairly consistanly by simply pointing out that what these big companies do it flat out illegal.
Earliesr this week we had a "story" about wordpress that proved to be utterly false and now this paranoia over what looks to be a hardware failure at best, or unsubstantiated rumours at worse.
It's "news for nerds" not "rumours that make us look like fools". Geesh.
"HEY SHITHEADS: I JUST PAID TO SEE YOUR FUCKING MOVIE. PLEASE STOP THREATENING ME WITH A FUCKING PRISON TERM"
I stopped going to movies as much when they started showing commercials. How bout I just watch it at home for a fraction of the price and no commercials?
And as somebody here pointed out last winter, I would steal a car if I could download one.
"Many people were doing similar things at the time. The difference was how Wozniak went about engineering focusing on usability and openness. Rather than making personal computers an engineering device (something you make), he made them an engineering platform
The way I see it was this. At the time lots of people were doing exactly what Woz was doing, building the hardware and software, but they were for business or scientific applications.
The end result of hat Woz did was, in a nutshell, for hackers. Nasa didn't use Apple II's, neither did business. It was poeple lke you and I (modulo the ones that already HAD computers). In that sense, he's a hero.
"I believe that without Apple, our user interfaces would look substantially different. I mean, try this: Get the latest Ubuntu Live CD and boot it. Now compare this to the UI of the Apple Lisa."
The Lisa "borrowed heavily" from the Xerox Star, the hardware for which was done in Palo Alto and the software in El Segundo. Bitmapped graphics, mice, icons are what made the Star what it was (never mind Xerox couldn't and bever has had a commercially viable product).
Do you really believe if Apple hadn't copied from this heavily then we'd never have got where we are now? Nonsense. In the day X windows and Sun's NeWS (much nicer than X, too bad it died, it would have fixed a LOT of problems with the web today) also copies the Xerox paradigm.
You could buy Apollo computers that used these before the Lisa came out.
Iconic interfaces are a time saving tool. I contend we would have ended up here anyway even if Apple had never existed.
Apple just made the fitst consumer level device that did this, before it was just industrial grade (Sun, Apollo) "workstations" that had this and were very very expensive. But good ideas have a way of being adopted no matter what.
"His Dr Dobbs article early on where he argued people should *gasp* buy software went down like a lead balloon at the time. "
Yeah. And every time an open source project complains about being broke or folds from lack or money, keep this in mind.
Balance in all things. At one end of the spectrum we have free software with no ("vendor") support and at the other end we have pay for software with pay for support. I sorta wonder where the compromise exists. Free software with pay for support?
I dunno. I don't think anybody else does either. As a user of free software who doesn't need any support I appreciate this model. But as a programmer, ya know, what am I supposed to do, shovel shit to pay the rent and iove away what I've in at least one case spent 14 years writing?
You know, back in the day (70s) gates published code in dr. dobbs documenting undocumented Z-80 instructions. Woz just made $2500 computers that those of us with s-100 systems found rather irrelevant. Gates built his own machine but had no interest in selling hardware, just software, which I kinda wish Apple had done.
Point is, back then Gates seemed like a fellow hacked and woz was just one of 100 guys that started a computer company and did all the hardware design.
I can't say I'm real impressed at having written machine code or done a (very non-statndard) disk controller. We all did that back then.
The first x86 on the net was an S-100 system running Gates Xenix in LA (gryphon.com). I don't think an Apple II ever talked to the network.
Obviously I'm not talking about now. Woz is cool, Bill is not. But that's not how it looked back then. The Apple II was regarded by people that already HAD a computer as a toy not worthy of much of anything and never understood what the fuss was all about. I think the reverance of Woz was strictly by people whose first computer was an Apple.
In a world without Apple there were still lots of choices and I have a greater revernce for say, Jay Miner than Woz. But if Apple hed nevr existed I'm not sure the landscape now would have changed much. Again, much as I hate to say it, MS drove the market and was responsible for the advent of cheap usable computers even your grandmother could use.
Let me be clear, I loathe gates and ms. But if you strip the emotion away gates has done more to get us where we are then woz ever did.
You may now mod me down to "-5, asshole". But you know I'm right. And don't worry it pains me as much to write this as it does you to read it.
"He's he first man who built modern computer hardware, then personally wrote the software that ran on top of it, all the while providing an extensible hardware and software system that other engineers could (and did, wildly) build upon. He literally built a huge chunk of this industry by himself, and another huge chunk was built on his shoulders."
I hate to say this but you could say the same thing about Gates.
Woz is a legend because he's been there, and got out at a good time and hasn't had the chance to screw anything up for a while.
I had an S-100 system and just sneered at the apple frankly, then got an Amiga. Until OSX Apple was utterly irrelevent to me.
Woz is a celebrity because he's a celebrity and a decent guy. But lots of people did far more to get you an I where we are now.
His Steviness is indeed (from personal obervation at a meeting) a real prick, but current Apple users owe more to him than Woz.
I can't get too excited whether it's a $400 phone or a $600 phone. My phone was $50 and came with $50 of airtime. New stuff from Apple is always expensive.
Slashdot Mirror
" Since this thing is a Sony, I'm sure it will be overloaded with DRM. "
I did some work at the Sony Broadcast Lab in Whitby. Sony is a damn big company and there's a major disconnect between the video people and the music publishing poeple. They may as well be different companies for all practical purposes.
"Where's my 2-way wrist radio, which we'd now call a "wristphone"?" "
Have you SEEN the size of high end watches these days? Like a Panarai? Most modern cel phones are smaller.
Just put a friggin cel phone on a Panarai watch strap. Voila. Done.
I've never met Ballmer but I've met Jobs. I've nevr met a more arrogant rude prick in all my life - to people he doesn't know. To people he knows he's just an average guy. Weird.
"Whatever the americans have done it's not as bad as killing people in the street. "
'Four dead in O-hi-o. La da de da da de da da'
" Would it be possible for the open source community to launch a project to essentially make it impossible for a government to cut off its own people from the outside world? "
It's called UUCP.
In the 70s the CIA did a report on this to answer the question "can the government control email" and the report said "as long as people have phone lines and modems, no".
"Actually, there are no cockroaches in Norway. Unless you manage to bring some back from vacation. Do they exist in Canada and the Northern US?"
Being born in Wales and having grown up in Ontario Canada I'd never seen a cockroach until at 22 I moved to Los Angeles in 1979.
I saw lots there. Boric acid in every crack and crevice seems to kill them BTW and is about as safe as you can get.
I've seen one or two of them in Toronto in old houses and restaurants, but other than that I've seen none. They're not real common here from what I've seen. I've seen the odd silverfish and this year, lots of earwigs. But no roaches. Uh, cockroaches.
We have mosquitos instead. My god how we have mosquitos instead. And you really don't want to be here for blackfly season.
"Rubbing the clit point all day hurts my finger "
Uh-huh.
Ya know what? I recently bought a few guitars and haven't played in years. At first my fingers hurt from fingering chords but after a while they calloused up, got stronger and I could finger chords like a madman.
Think of it as exercise.
"Well, at least they don't shoot demonstrators in the US. "
You mean recently I presume?
Just for a lark once I tried to find something in Canadian Tire NOT made in China (that wasn't automotive). After about an hour I found some Corningware cleaner that was actually made in the US.
Interestingly I found the reverse true in Berlin when I was there once. Everything I found in the hotel (Adlon) I was in was made in Germany and in fact there was a store called "The China Store" mearby that had really cool and well made but very expensive stuff made in China. I'd guess all of Germany isn't like that but near the Brandernburg gate that's what I saw.
Aren't Toshiba and Sony laptops made in Japan any more?
Cool. So the US has now caught up to East Germany circa 1989 ?
Almost.
My initial reaction to this was "oh god poor bastard". But after reading the indictment it's pretty obvious to me that want to send a message: "if you order bugs and aren't bona fide, you're going down.
From their point of view he could have ordered any bug.
Plus, he ordered two bugs he thought were harmless and then by his own admission "turns out one is not so harmless and can cause pbuemonia".
Is he being made an example of? Probably.
Is it warrented? Tough call. Might this make any other bio prof think twice before ordering bugs for some purpose not what they claimed? Probably.
Will this stop a bio terrorist? No.
The liability for the USG is pretty big here. Somebody goes to see his show then gets pnuemonia, then dies. The investigation reveals an artist surrepticuously ordered bacteria breaking all sort of safeguards and rules along the way. He could have used flourescine powder not real bacteria and just as effective a demonstration
Would it seem reasonable to you that the USG's response in this case would be "yeah it happens". Or, if it were, say your daughter who died would you want them to "do something" like maybe punish the bio-guy who flat out violated the terms and conditions under which they were able to get the bugs?
The govt is a big dumb machine. It has rules. Break them and you really can't expect nothing will happen.
I can't say I feel sorry for these guys. I appreciate their ideas and work, but this was just callously stupid. I doubt he'll get 20 years but my guess is they won't get off scot free. And I'm not sure they should.
Try to catch a look at the President of Bolivia on the Daily show last night. Other than that you sound like time traveller zero.
Makes me wonder if somebody posting here today gets a visit.
And for the record I know a guy, fairly high profile in ICANN that stole some Anthrax from U of T and kept it in his fridge "just in case". He disposed of it in a city dump.
This was about 4 years ago.
" read about the crusades of Ebay seller Tabberone "
This is the coolest thing I've read in a very long time. I thought I knew a little about copyright and trademark law but had no idea that stuff produced by slave or force labour invalidates copyright.
Nice to see the little guy take on a handful of huge companies and win fairly consistanly by simply pointing out that what these big companies do it flat out illegal.
" For some reason you seem to believe that you can't resell a license. Why not? "
Look at domain names. You never own one. When you grt right down to it you're licensing them. And you sure can resell them.
Earliesr this week we had a "story" about wordpress that proved to be utterly false and now this paranoia over what looks to be a hardware failure at best, or unsubstantiated rumours at worse.
It's "news for nerds" not "rumours that make us look like fools". Geesh.
Forget the alto, that was a research prototype (or something). You need to look at the Xerox star and compare that to modern interfaces.
Xerox actually sold a small number of Star systems in the US and Japan, where it was called the Jstar.
No, my 13 year old fixed my 15 year olds computer. I just watched.
If I could get her to lie about her age I swear I'd rent her out as a consultant. She can evrn make the VCR stop flashing 12.
Come to think of it I'll paypal anybody $5 who can show me a picture of a vcr flashing 12 inside Unisys.
Translation: some wonk at DHS caught an MSN IM virus from a chick on a dating site.
Hey DHS, look for servicer.exe in the registry. Put a semi colon in front of the key. I'll sent you a bill. With lots of zeros.
"HEY SHITHEADS: I JUST PAID TO SEE YOUR FUCKING MOVIE. PLEASE STOP THREATENING ME WITH A FUCKING PRISON TERM"
I stopped going to movies as much when they started showing commercials. How bout I just watch it at home for a fraction of the price and no commercials?
And as somebody here pointed out last winter, I would steal a car if I could download one.
"so we could sell beef, sugar and steel"
The US just bought our biggest steel company.
Sugar? We grow sugar here? Huh?
"Many people were doing similar things at the time. The difference was how Wozniak went about engineering focusing on usability and openness. Rather than making personal computers an engineering device (something you make), he made them an engineering platform
The way I see it was this. At the time lots of people were doing exactly what Woz was doing, building the hardware and software, but they were for business or scientific applications.
The end result of hat Woz did was, in a nutshell, for hackers. Nasa didn't use Apple II's, neither did business. It was poeple lke you and I (modulo the ones that already HAD computers). In that sense, he's a hero.
" I believe that without Apple, our user interfaces would look substantially different. I mean, try this: Get the latest Ubuntu Live CD and boot it. Now compare this to the UI of the Apple Lisa. "
The Lisa "borrowed heavily" from the Xerox Star, the hardware for which was done in Palo Alto and the software in El Segundo.
Bitmapped graphics, mice, icons are what made the Star what it was (never mind Xerox couldn't and bever has had a commercially viable product).
Do you really believe if Apple hadn't copied from this heavily then we'd never have got where we are now? Nonsense. In the day X windows and Sun's NeWS (much nicer than X, too bad it died, it would have fixed a LOT of problems with the web today) also copies the Xerox paradigm.
You could buy Apollo computers that used these before the Lisa came out.
Iconic interfaces are a time saving tool. I contend we would have ended up here anyway even if Apple had never existed.
Apple just made the fitst consumer level device that did this, before it was just industrial grade (Sun, Apollo) "workstations" that had this and were very very expensive. But good ideas have a way of being adopted no matter what.
"His Dr Dobbs article early on where he argued people should *gasp* buy software went down like a lead balloon at the time. "
Yeah. And every time an open source project complains about being broke or folds from lack or money, keep this in mind.
Balance in all things. At one end of the spectrum we have free software with no ("vendor") support and at the other end we have pay for software with pay for support. I sorta wonder where the compromise exists. Free software with pay for support?
I dunno. I don't think anybody else does either. As a user of free software who doesn't need any support I appreciate this model. But as a programmer, ya know, what am I supposed to do, shovel shit to pay the rent and iove away what I've in at least one case spent 14 years writing?
You know, back in the day (70s) gates published code in dr. dobbs documenting undocumented Z-80 instructions. Woz just made $2500 computers that those of us with s-100 systems found rather irrelevant. Gates built his own machine but had no interest in selling hardware, just software, which I kinda wish Apple had done.
Point is, back then Gates seemed like a fellow hacked and woz was just one of 100 guys that started a computer company and did all the hardware design.
I can't say I'm real impressed at having written machine code or done a (very non-statndard) disk controller. We all did that back then.
The first x86 on the net was an S-100 system running Gates Xenix in LA (gryphon.com). I don't think an Apple II ever talked to the network.
Obviously I'm not talking about now. Woz is cool, Bill is not. But that's not how it looked back then. The Apple II was regarded by people that already HAD a computer as a toy not worthy of much of anything and never understood what the fuss was all about. I think the reverance of Woz was strictly by people whose first computer was an Apple.
In a world without Apple there were still lots of choices and I have a greater revernce for say, Jay Miner than Woz. But if Apple hed nevr existed I'm not sure the landscape now would have changed much. Again, much as I hate to say it, MS drove the market and was responsible for the advent of cheap usable computers even your grandmother could use.
Let me be clear, I loathe gates and ms. But if you strip the emotion away gates has done more to get us where we are then woz ever did.
You may now mod me down to "-5, asshole". But you know I'm right. And don't worry it pains me as much to write this as it does you to read it.
" He's he first man who built modern computer hardware, then personally wrote the software that ran on top of it, all the while providing an extensible hardware and software system that other engineers could (and did, wildly) build upon. He literally built a huge chunk of this industry by himself, and another huge chunk was built on his shoulders."
I hate to say this but you could say the same thing about Gates.
Woz is a legend because he's been there, and got out at a good time and hasn't had the chance to screw anything up for a while.
I had an S-100 system and just sneered at the apple frankly, then got an Amiga. Until OSX Apple was utterly irrelevent to me.
Woz is a celebrity because he's a celebrity and a decent guy. But lots of people did far more to get you an I where we are now.
His Steviness is indeed (from personal obervation at a meeting) a real prick, but current Apple users owe more to him than Woz.
I can't get too excited whether it's a $400 phone or a $600 phone. My phone was $50 and came with $50 of airtime. New stuff from Apple is always expensive.
I just don't see how this is news.