For those color-blind people, the worst are red on green or purple/pink on blue.
There's nothing worse than going to sit through a PowerPoint presentation where the whole thing has used red text to highlight important points, but you can't read it because you can't pick out that level of contrast between red and the background.
For color-blind people it's usually a matter of color contrast and quantity - you can see red or green in big lumps, but when in smaller quantities, you just can't see it.
The red laser pointer is a pain too on some green backgrounds.
Why is it that the user can be held responsible for someone else using his internet connection through an unsecured access point, but the ISPs are not in any way responsible for what is sent over their connection? or will he get off based on "someone else was using my connection"? Not that I want the ISPs to be responsible - I just wonder: why the appearance of a double standard?
It's not like a wireless router is a "smart connection" it's just part of the infrastructure.
I'd like to see some way to integrate more with the IM. Ok, so I'm mostly on MSN now, but I've also recently used Gaim and Kopete. What I'd love my IM tool to do?
"easy things" 1. If IM is offline - auto send an email. Don't tell me, "your contact might not respond because they appear to be offline". Deliver it anyway goddammit. It should be like the mail service. 2. Alert Volume mixing. In windows, it seems to me that it uses whatever the "Wave" channel is set to. But I'd like to balance it against the music I'm listening to, or maybe I want to play a game, or maybe i want some alerts to be quiet - like yeah, I'm sitting at my computer right now, so that alert 1 can be nice and quiet, but alert 2, no, I want that DAMN LOUD!
"medium hard" 3. Share calendar tool. Meetings / events / to-do lists. 4. Extendible xml based event protocol. So anyone can come up with a new type of event. And support for each event could be as simple as a new plugin.
"harder" 5. Seeing as how they're my contacts, and theres things like ICQ's shared folders, how about an type manager interface for that? Photo sharing? music sharing? private blogs? anything else?
See - I see the IM as the key tool to achieve some degree of controlled data sharing within your select peer group, where peer groupings are relativily easy to manage. and if you can take that to the next level - how about data redundancy across your peer group. easier streaming of your own data to multiple locations. IM could make all of these tasks EASY for the end user.
if it weren't for a pair of legitimate concerns that all the home users in a neighbourhood have like:
- ISPs putting ridiculously low monthly bandwidth limits on users - like mine, 10Gb/month down... If I download one Mandriva install DVD, that just about uses it up! Add in that Finnish Star Trek spoof, and I'll probably be getting a phone call saying I'm downloading too much.
- ease of setting up a network where your LAN is private, but the wireless router will allow other LANs to be set up... then people could reasonably share a single access point.
When I set up my network 2 years ago, there were 2 other detectable wireless networks. Now there's 10; 1 is open. If I could be made to feel that my home network is reasonably secure (with wireless), and I didn't have to worry about download limits, then mine would be a public access point.
And what happened there is that the apps were never developed to make the Palm PDAs friendly to everyone. Want to play MP3s? 2 years ago, Palm's were coming with Real Player. The player itself is decent, but you you need to sync it to Real Player on your pc. A couple of years ago, it seemed no-one wanted to touch Real with a 10 foot pole. Sure, now you can use your card reader with your SD and load up music that way, but then you need 2 devices, plus spend the time browsing through folders for the music you want. Finally, the palm usb 1.0 connection is stupidly slow.
Then there's video. Sure, even my Tungsten E can play video (with something called Kinoma player)... but you have to convert files to their format using their program, and transcoding video isn't exactly a fast process. So there wasn't any standard support - how about MPEG-1 even?
Email? Hah! The Tungsten E comes with a mail app sure, and it can sync to: Outlook only... but then, when palm does come up with wifi sd cards, you can't use them except on the top end models.
What it comes down to: PDAs said "yeah, we can do it all" - but then they didn't provide any of it well.
It would be easy enough to make a recent model Palm into something with all the soft features of an iPod nano (except the size)... if you ad a 2Gb SD card, and then some media apps so you can use iTunes/Winamp/WMP/AmaroK or your favorite player to sync them, but it still needs a faster connection - like USB 2.
Why don't people see that it's a bad idea for Open source to have a monopoly?
While OSS could dominate an industry, unless everyone loves the current incarnation of the product, it will never create a monopoly. When a closed source vendor dominates, they control formats, pricing, licensing, etc. If a large enough group ever finds a fault in OSS that the developers aren't willing to work on, the code base generally forks, allowing for features to be implemented or corrected in a new program. In fact, this makes creating a competing product easy, thus removing the monopoly.
People can beat Microsoft because they make poor software, OSS (generally) doesn't.. but 1 or 2 features doesn't make it "better" then "being free". So if OSS gets a monopoly like Microsoft has it could very well mean the end of the IT industry got a good decade.
Closed Source vs Open Source business models differ. Making it hard to sell software does not mean that IT cannot be profitable. It shifts the generation of revenue from selling the product, to selling a service. And to be clear, IT encompasses far more than just writing software. I'd guess that most IT pros already are employed in a service capacity.
So: 1. OSS would be hard pressed to ever create a monopoly and maintain it. 2. OSS does not destroy industries. It changes the business model.
who knows that a particular
recording or audiovisual work is commercial, to knowingly
electronically disseminate all or substantially all of that
commercial recording or audiovisual work to more than 10 other people
without disclosing his or her e-mail address, and the title of the
recording or audiovisual work
Back to the questions... Is this only for legal files sharing?
Actually, its for commercial audio/visual recordings only. That seems to mean a work with an audio or visual component to it. Plain text works are not included.
IANAL, but it also implies that the work is copyrighted, and that someone has a commercial interest in the work
c (2) If the copyright owner, or a person acting under the authority of the copyright owner, of a commercial recording or audiovisual work has explicitly given permission for all or substantially all of that recording or audiovisual work to be freely disseminated electronically by or to anyone without limitation.
there you go - if you are the copyright owner, the law does not apply.
If the file sharing app has to provide a way to advertise an email, does this make app incapable of this illegal?
I can't think of a file sharing program that doesn't also let you share (in some way) text files. Even if they aren't found by a search, you'd still be sharing that information for someone who looks for it appropriately.
So are companies still going to allow people to have PDAs and cellphones?
My PDA plugs into the USB port, and I consider it a pretty essential part of my keeping organized. Thing is, it's pretty easy to buy a big SD card and stick it into the thing. But there are other workarounds, like bluetooth, IR, and WiFi cards for these things.
And now that Nokia is making MP3 capable phones, you know that they're going to have plenty of storage space available.
So yeah, manufacturers and current device makers will push for some kind of backwards compatibility option or device driver upgrade. There are other means of communicating with our devices, people are going to find workarounds, and manufacturers will provide others.
If companies want to prevent data from being carried out, then they're going to have to ban all such devices anyway. I don't see work banning cellphones anytime soon!
It's too bad the article doesn't specify whether the 'security' features will allow IT to distiguish between devices on that USB port.
Is this a read/write thing that only affects mass storage devices, or will it support a higher level of granularity to select tools like PDAs and blackberries?
Slashdot Mirror
For those color-blind people, the worst are red on green or purple/pink on blue. There's nothing worse than going to sit through a PowerPoint presentation where the whole thing has used red text to highlight important points, but you can't read it because you can't pick out that level of contrast between red and the background. For color-blind people it's usually a matter of color contrast and quantity - you can see red or green in big lumps, but when in smaller quantities, you just can't see it. The red laser pointer is a pain too on some green backgrounds.
Why is it that the user can be held responsible for someone else using his internet connection through an unsecured access point, but the ISPs are not in any way responsible for what is sent over their connection? or will he get off based on "someone else was using my connection"? Not that I want the ISPs to be responsible - I just wonder: why the appearance of a double standard?
It's not like a wireless router is a "smart connection" it's just part of the infrastructure.
I'd like to see some way to integrate more with the IM. Ok, so I'm mostly on MSN now, but I've also recently used Gaim and Kopete. What I'd love my IM tool to do?
"easy things"
1. If IM is offline - auto send an email. Don't tell me, "your contact might not respond because they appear to be offline". Deliver it anyway goddammit. It should be like the mail service.
2. Alert Volume mixing. In windows, it seems to me that it uses whatever the "Wave" channel is set to. But I'd like to balance it against the music I'm listening to, or maybe I want to play a game, or maybe i want some alerts to be quiet - like yeah, I'm sitting at my computer right now, so that alert 1 can be nice and quiet, but alert 2, no, I want that DAMN LOUD!
"medium hard"
3. Share calendar tool. Meetings / events / to-do lists.
4. Extendible xml based event protocol. So anyone can come up with a new type of event. And support for each event could be as simple as a new plugin.
"harder"
5. Seeing as how they're my contacts, and theres things like ICQ's shared folders, how about an type manager interface for that? Photo sharing? music sharing? private blogs? anything else?
See - I see the IM as the key tool to achieve some degree of controlled data sharing within your select peer group, where peer groupings are relativily easy to manage. and if you can take that to the next level - how about data redundancy across your peer group. easier streaming of your own data to multiple locations. IM could make all of these tasks EASY for the end user.
if it weren't for a pair of legitimate concerns that all the home users in a neighbourhood have like:
- ISPs putting ridiculously low monthly bandwidth limits on users - like mine, 10Gb/month down... If I download one Mandriva install DVD, that just about uses it up! Add in that Finnish Star Trek spoof, and I'll probably be getting a phone call saying I'm downloading too much.
- ease of setting up a network where your LAN is private, but the wireless router will allow other LANs to be set up... then people could reasonably share a single access point.
When I set up my network 2 years ago, there were 2 other detectable wireless networks. Now there's 10; 1 is open.
If I could be made to feel that my home network is reasonably secure (with wireless), and I didn't have to worry about download limits, then mine would be a public access point.
Exactly.
And what happened there is that the apps were never developed to make the Palm PDAs friendly to everyone. Want to play MP3s? 2 years ago, Palm's were coming with Real Player. The player itself is decent, but you you need to sync it to Real Player on your pc. A couple of years ago, it seemed no-one wanted to touch Real with a 10 foot pole. Sure, now you can use your card reader with your SD and load up music that way, but then you need 2 devices, plus spend the time browsing through folders for the music you want. Finally, the palm usb 1.0 connection is stupidly slow.
Then there's video. Sure, even my Tungsten E can play video (with something called Kinoma player)... but you have to convert files to their format using their program, and transcoding video isn't exactly a fast process. So there wasn't any standard support - how about MPEG-1 even?
Email? Hah! The Tungsten E comes with a mail app sure, and it can sync to: Outlook only... but then, when palm does come up with wifi sd cards, you can't use them except on the top end models.
What it comes down to: PDAs said "yeah, we can do it all" - but then they didn't provide any of it well.
It would be easy enough to make a recent model Palm into something with all the soft features of an iPod nano (except the size)... if you ad a 2Gb SD card, and then some media apps so you can use iTunes/Winamp/WMP/AmaroK or your favorite player to sync them, but it still needs a faster connection - like USB 2.
Why don't people see that it's a bad idea for Open source to have a monopoly?
While OSS could dominate an industry, unless everyone loves the current incarnation of the product, it will never create a monopoly. When a closed source vendor dominates, they control formats, pricing, licensing, etc. If a large enough group ever finds a fault in OSS that the developers aren't willing to work on, the code base generally forks, allowing for features to be implemented or corrected in a new program. In fact, this makes creating a competing product easy, thus removing the monopoly.People can beat Microsoft because they make poor software, OSS (generally) doesn't.. but 1 or 2 features doesn't make it "better" then "being free". So if OSS gets a monopoly like Microsoft has it could very well mean the end of the IT industry got a good decade.
Closed Source vs Open Source business models differ. Making it hard to sell software does not mean that IT cannot be profitable. It shifts the generation of revenue from selling the product, to selling a service. And to be clear, IT encompasses far more than just writing software. I'd guess that most IT pros already are employed in a service capacity.
So: 1. OSS would be hard pressed to ever create a monopoly and maintain it. 2. OSS does not destroy industries. It changes the business model.
Here's a nice quote from the bill:
who knows that a particular recording or audiovisual work is commercial, to knowingly electronically disseminate all or substantially all of that commercial recording or audiovisual work to more than 10 other people without disclosing his or her e-mail address, and the title of the recording or audiovisual work
Back to the questions...
Is this only for legal files sharing?
Actually, its for commercial audio/visual recordings only. That seems to mean a work with an audio or visual component to it. Plain text works are not included.
IANAL, but it also implies that the work is copyrighted, and that someone has a commercial interest in the work
c (2) If the copyright owner, or a person acting under the authority of the copyright owner, of a commercial recording or audiovisual work has explicitly given permission for all or substantially all of that recording or audiovisual work to be freely disseminated electronically by or to anyone without limitation.
there you go - if you are the copyright owner, the law does not apply.
If the file sharing app has to provide a way to advertise an email, does this make app incapable of this illegal?
I can't think of a file sharing program that doesn't also let you share (in some way) text files. Even if they aren't found by a search, you'd still be sharing that information for someone who looks for it appropriately.
Are FTP and websites affected by this law?
Yes.
That's all I can help with...
So are companies still going to allow people to have PDAs and cellphones?
My PDA plugs into the USB port, and I consider it a pretty essential part of my keeping organized. Thing is, it's pretty easy to buy a big SD card and stick it into the thing. But there are other workarounds, like bluetooth, IR, and WiFi cards for these things.
And now that Nokia is making MP3 capable phones, you know that they're going to have plenty of storage space available.
So yeah, manufacturers and current device makers will push for some kind of backwards compatibility option or device driver upgrade. There are other means of communicating with our devices, people are going to find workarounds, and manufacturers will provide others.
If companies want to prevent data from being carried out, then they're going to have to ban all such devices anyway. I don't see work banning cellphones anytime soon!
It's too bad the article doesn't specify whether the 'security' features will allow IT to distiguish between devices on that USB port.
Is this a read/write thing that only affects mass storage devices, or will it support a higher level of granularity to select tools like PDAs and blackberries?