Many years ago, I had this guy from my school leave a bunch of very bizarre and often threatening messages on other people's answering machines and voicemail - and leave my phone number on it.
I finally found one sympathetic company willing to play the message back to me over the phone - I recall it had something to do with "and I'd better be seeing that money soon, understand?" Of course, I recognized the voice, and I called my local police department to see what the law had to say on the matter... and guess what? It counted as telephone harassment, same as if he'd have called me directly.
So, if'n I was IBM's bigshot lawyers, I'd go after them for either theft of services or harassment. It seems to me that ibm.net must have gotten flooded with "die fsckin' spammer" and "delete this account" messages... sounds like the same concept to me!
Rob Pike is right. Systems research is waning, in amount of research done and influence. New operating systems are hard to find (there are lots of experimental kernels, but not too many complete systems).
Umm... check me if I'm wrong here, but PalmOS seems like a good candidate for most of the things you've described! Yeah, one could possibly make the argument that "it's not a *real* OS" but it's nonetheless clear that they put a lot of thought (read: research) into it!
You turn on the computer and it works instantly. Yup.
Whenever you feel like stopping you turn off the computer. Yup, this one too.
You never have to save your files, you always work with up-to-date information Hmm, not sure (I don't actually own a Palm yet) but I think this is true.
You never have to drag or resize a window Okay, PalmOS kinda breaks here with the whole multiple-window concept.
My mom can store her weaving project ideas on it without any help I don't think anyone will argue that there is a lot of room for ease-of-use research!
You never have to remember obscure names, everything is built out of a small set of simple blocks Have you seen "The Brain"? It's certainly not an ideal solution - but it's definitely some damn impressive research in this direction.
You never think about "connecting to the internet", you just work with data that happens to be located somewhere else Now don't get me wrong - I am certainly no supporter of M$ - but I give credit where it's due. I won't claim they did a good job of it, but isn't that what Billy Boy was claiming they were trying to do when they pushed for IE integration?
I think that there is some damn good research being done - even some of it by people we "may not like" such as MicroSloth. As an example, their new optical mouse is damn impressive - not dreadfully useful *yet*, but wait until someone figures out that this technology could be used to build a industrial-ruggedized version!
I know that AudioCatalyst has a built-in option to do this - it is defined as "if the peak volume of this track is less than x% or more than y%, normalize it to z%."
It seems to do a pretty good job. Unfortunately it only does it on a track-by-track basis... hardly ideal, say, for classical music. If someone knows of a good way to do it over the course of an entire album, I'd like to know too!
Even the most advanced AI cannot make the kind of intelligent value judgements that are required.
As soon as I get finished writing that subject-general Turing Test program, I'll put it right to work on running a blocklist:) (er, or should that be blacklist? HH1/2J)
This is the message I sent to several e-mail addresses that appeared like they might be relevant (and to the customer service at BMG Music Service, which I'm a member of:)
I realize that this message may be misplaced in its delivery to one or more of the people who have received it, but I am sending it to any and all addresses for BMG employees that appear to be potentially applicable (or who may know where it should be forwarded).
It has come to light that recently BMG has begun releasing copy-protected music CDs to the general public. Due to the fact that these CD's are not Red Book compliant, they do not play on many conventional CD players, nor do they play on computer CD drives. They do not bear a label or message anywhere on them that states this. Now, I don't know if you're aware or not, but many retail outlets do not accept returns of opened CD's (after all, someone might have copied it). This means that I, as a consumer of music, stand an indefinite chance of purchasing a useless plastic coaster anytime I purchase a CD from BMG Entertainment or its subsidiary companies. I also am a significant user of the MP3 music format. I have a household network with computers in many rooms of my home, including one hooked up to my stereo system. I have an MP3 player in my car, and also a portable player. By removing (or, as I'll illustrate in a momeny, simply complicating) my ability to convert a CD that I legally purchase into a *legal* copy for listening, you have removed a great portion of the reason for me to purchase that CD. In fact, you have not even removed my ability to perform that conversion; there are several ways that such copy-protection could be circumvented - and one of them is certain to work.
I am a long-time member of the BMG Music Service in the United States. As things stand, I have no guarantee that when I purchase a CD from you that it will in fact be a CD Audio (Red Book) compliant disc, nor that it will work in my high-end (but old) CD player. If this matter is not resolved acceptibly, this leaves me no choice other than to cancel my membership with BMG Music Service.
Unfortunately, with the political climate of late, I fully expect mandatory filters to become passed into law as a requirement in the near future, with lengthy court battles to follow for years to come. After all, sooner or later someone with both a conservative agenda *and* a little technical knowhow will put together a bill that might be construed as constitutional... CDA III? CDA IV? Who knows, but they sure aren't going to stop trying, not while there's still people who call themselves good Christians but warn you "'bout them niggers, now..."
Might I suggest, for the video card, checking out LeadTek? They make some truly gawdawesome video cards that are specifically designed for applications performance (OpenGL, etc.) instead of gaming. I've been very happy with my L2300, under both Windows NT and Linux. At the time you couldn't do much better for the dollar!
Glad someone else thought of this. I'll go from personal experience here.
Let's see... take a first-grader who finds school's "see spot run" a bit dull after reading L'Engle at home. Put this obvious "problem child" into a school full of them - he needs the discipline, it will help him. Well gee, the social structure in this school is based on how disruptive you can be - is anyone truly surprised by this? So now, instead of a bored kid, you have a bored kid that knows that it's cool to pick fights with teachers.
Oops, this (now) fourth-grader is clearly a more serious case than we first thought. Enter school psychiatrist. Clearly we need to get this child into a more... stringent program. Ship him off to the kiddie psych hospital (for which said psychiatrist just happens to be on the Board of Directors) for a 30-day evaluation which we'll turn into six months, pump him full of anti-psychotic drugs - he's nice and quiet now, isn't he? Oh, and on top of it, add in various forms of abuse by the "counselors".
Fortunately for me, I escaped - the hospital by a court order, and the school by moving out of its district. And you know what? Despite no longer having any relevant social structure to use to interact with others my age; despite the number and frequency of changes that rocked my world in order to pull me out of that; despite the fact that I was pretty seriously unbalanced for several months after all of this... I was able to function quite normally after enrolling in a school where the teachers understood what had happened to me, and actually gave a damn about me, and were willing to help.
And even that wouldn't have been possible if my parents hadn't also given a damn - and were willing to fight for me.
As far as the profiling goes... yes, it could be a good thing... IF it were used as a single data point, with perhaps some common sense liberally applied; and IF it were used as a warning flag to get help, instead of further reasons to ostracize and punish the individual; and IF... if... if lots of things occurred that, given the current sorry-ass state of the American educational system, if you think they're really going to... well, I've got a higher opinion of/.'s reader's than that.
Shouldn't the music of such masters be free to be distributed to everyone? I think that once the artists/creator of a work of art is dead their property should enter the public domain. Up until their death they can do anything they want with that property, sell it to companies whatever. But when they die, no matter WHO owns the work, it enters to the public domain.
First problem with this is, there's a difference between their work (which is already in the PD) and someone's recording of their work. You're proposing to make the latter forbidden to sell, as I understand it. This would remove the primary source of income that struggling young classical musicians have - potential record contracts. As it is now, they're already struggling for it. If you're not Luciano Pavarotti or Yitzhak Perlman, you don't generally get picked up. This, in turn, appears to be a partial cause of a waning interest in orchestras and the like - after all, would you go to see someone that you've never heard of?
Yes, it's clear that the music "industry" - and not just the record execs - need to do some adapting. But with music, like with code, free.open != free.beer; you're proposing the latter, which would put a lot of people out of a job.
One thing to consider is that it's really easy to provide the "simpler" network services (DNS, basic routing, that sort of thing) on separate, low-powered boxen (you know, all those old '486s you've got laying about.) That way, a single failure is less likely to take down a bunch of services - and, you've off-loaded some system load.
(Yeah, I know, it's a moot point, they've denied everything.)
No, what you really need here is a Tempest system. 'Cause you know if Coke does this and it works, Pepsi will be soon to follow. So, your Coke machine's got an antenna in it to try and pick up what price the Pepsi machine's set at... run through its algorithm... set its price accordingly... etc.
The sick and wrong thing is, they're still using that beast to teach classes... the really sick and wrong thing is that they're using it to replace the Teaching Assistants - face it, an obsolete computer is a lot cheaper.
This is to some great extent why my very brief stint at the U of I sucked so badly and why it was so very very brief.
Hey, a dishwasher is the perfect thing to clean out those old keyboards! Five things to remember, though:
Don't use soap.
Do wash it by itself; crusty spaghetti-sauce bits aren't good for it.
Don't try this if you live somewhere with really really hard water.
Do remember to use a "warm" setting instead of "hot" (this includes turning off "heated dry").
Let it dry for a few days!
In all seriousness, though, this was just the trick to recover my old Amiga keyboard after someone dropped a baked potato with butter and sour cream into it... yeccch.
Seti@home and Distributed.net are pretty useless for a Beowulf - they're designed to be distributed over multiple machines. You wouldn't see any performance increase out of a Beowulf-aware version of any of these.
It's a joke newspaper, like the Onion - I can't believe you guys don't know that.
Unlike the Onion, it's just barely believeable enough so that folks with IQ's under 90 will tend to believe it.
Hey, the way that I look at it, they're *actually* doing us and the rest of the world an invaluable, though often misunderstood, service: they're encouraging the removal of those people who are too creduluous, unthinking, or just plain dumb from being potential mates to the rest of us. They're making it completely obvious to us that this is pretty clearly not someone we should be paying attention to; a habitual reader of the WWN is either someone intelligent with a well-honed (though admittedly slightly twisted) sense of humour, or else... well... eek. It should be rapidly clear which one is which.
If you could figure out an appropriate method for "characterizing" processes, you could use this as a *real* version of Core Wars... hey, it'd put to rest all the stories about whether Linux is better than NT...
"ALLLLright, Microsoft lamers! Bring on yer Service Packs... I got a Linux box with a BFG here, an' I ain't afraid to use it! Bwahahahahaha!"
One of the things that has been holding Linux back (to its detractors) is the lack of perceived compatibility and interoperability. If you've got Windoze source code, suddenly... Wine is at least as compatible with Windoze as the various versions of Windoze are with each other, Samba for Linux suddenly works flawlessly, Linux supports ActiveX, DCOM, DirectX, etc., etc.
Now, you may be able to argue that "xyz technology sucks, why the heck would we want a Linux version" but first, do you think it will still suck after being re-written by the Open Source community, and second, news flash, most of the world doesn't care. Joe Q. Executive doesn't give a wet slap whether CORBA is technically superior to DCOM, and Bob Gamehead just wants his DirectX games to run. If suddenly Linux talks to all the big app packages, well... it's not too hard to see world domination in sight.:)
Basically, if you're Micro$oft, Windows+Linux = Windows; but if you're the Open Source community, Windows+Linux = Linux with more features.
Unfortunately, this operation will *only* work for SMTP-type mail... for Microsoft Mail/Exchange Server-type mail, there *are* no headers, folks, at least none that Billy-boy wants you to know about...
Sure it is... why else do you think they can make them so cheaply?:)
They really don't want people to know this because if we did, someone might figure out that they don't need to buy the $50 disks when they could just stick a piece of, say, good optical-quality Plexiglas into it.
Information wants to be free... er, wait, that's not what they meant, er...
Well, heck... I would (and apparently will) take Qwest over US We^Horst... Even good ol' Ameritheft was better than US West.
Until you've moved into a thirty-year-old apartment complex, in an apartment that someone was living in just three days earlier, and you have the telephone company tell you that there's NO PHONE SERVICE AVAILABLE THERE...
I should stop ranting now. My "complain about US West" rant usually takes about two hours speaking...
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Many years ago, I had this guy from my school leave a bunch of very bizarre and often threatening messages on other people's answering machines and voicemail - and leave my phone number on it.
I finally found one sympathetic company willing to play the message back to me over the phone - I recall it had something to do with "and I'd better be seeing that money soon, understand?" Of course, I recognized the voice, and I called my local police department to see what the law had to say on the matter... and guess what? It counted as telephone harassment, same as if he'd have called me directly.
So, if'n I was IBM's bigshot lawyers, I'd go after them for either theft of services or harassment. It seems to me that ibm.net must have gotten flooded with "die fsckin' spammer" and "delete this account" messages... sounds like the same concept to me!
--
Make Money on the 'Net
Umm... check me if I'm wrong here, but PalmOS seems like a good candidate for most of the things you've described! Yeah, one could possibly make the argument that "it's not a *real* OS" but it's nonetheless clear that they put a lot of thought (read: research) into it!
You turn on the computer and it works instantly.
Yup.
Whenever you feel like stopping you turn off the computer.
Yup, this one too.
You never have to save your files, you always work with up-to-date information
Hmm, not sure (I don't actually own a Palm yet) but I think this is true.
You never have to drag or resize a window
Okay, PalmOS kinda breaks here with the whole multiple-window concept.
My mom can store her weaving project ideas on it without any help
I don't think anyone will argue that there is a lot of room for ease-of-use research!
You never have to remember obscure names, everything is built out of a small set of simple blocks
Have you seen "The Brain"? It's certainly not an ideal solution - but it's definitely some damn impressive research in this direction.
You never think about "connecting to the internet", you just work with data that happens to be located somewhere else
Now don't get me wrong - I am certainly no supporter of M$ - but I give credit where it's due. I won't claim they did a good job of it, but isn't that what Billy Boy was claiming they were trying to do when they pushed for IE integration?
I think that there is some damn good research being done - even some of it by people we "may not like" such as MicroSloth. As an example, their new optical mouse is damn impressive - not dreadfully useful *yet*, but wait until someone figures out that this technology could be used to build a industrial-ruggedized version!
--
Make Money on the 'Net
Whaddaya mean, "would be"? Try "was", for similar reasons. It's gotten worse; that doesn't mean that it wasn't bad before.
--
Make Money on the 'Net
It seems to do a pretty good job. Unfortunately it only does it on a track-by-track basis... hardly ideal, say, for classical music. If someone knows of a good way to do it over the course of an entire album, I'd like to know too!
--
Make Money on the 'Net
As soon as I get finished writing that subject-general Turing Test program, I'll put it right to work on running a blocklist :) (er, or should that be bl a cklist? HH1/2J)
--
Make Money on the 'Net
I realize that this message may be misplaced in its delivery to one or more of the people who have received it, but I am sending it to any and all addresses for BMG employees that appear to be potentially applicable (or who may know where it should be forwarded).
It has come to light that recently BMG has begun releasing copy-protected music CDs to the general public. Due to the fact that these CD's are not Red Book compliant, they do not play on many conventional CD players, nor do they play on computer CD drives. They do not bear a label or message anywhere on them that states this. Now, I don't know if you're aware or not, but many retail outlets do not accept returns of opened CD's (after all, someone might have copied it). This means that I, as a consumer of music, stand an indefinite chance of purchasing a useless plastic coaster anytime I purchase a CD from BMG Entertainment or its subsidiary companies. I also am a significant user of the MP3 music format. I have a household network with computers in many rooms of my home, including one hooked up to my stereo system. I have an MP3 player in my car, and also a portable player. By removing (or, as I'll illustrate in a momeny, simply complicating) my ability to convert a CD that I legally purchase into a *legal* copy for listening, you have removed a great portion of the reason for me to purchase that CD. In fact, you have not even removed my ability to perform that conversion; there are several ways that such copy-protection could be circumvented - and one of them is certain to work.
I am a long-time member of the BMG Music Service in the United States. As things stand, I have no guarantee that when I purchase a CD from you that it will in fact be a CD Audio (Red Book) compliant disc, nor that it will work in my high-end (but old) CD player. If this matter is not resolved acceptibly, this leaves me no choice other than to cancel my membership with BMG Music Service.
Here's a link to an article (in German) if you hadn't already heard about this: /data/cm-25.01.00-000/
http://www.heise.de/newsticker
For those that can't read German, here it is (poorly) translated through Babelfish:c ker/data/cm-25.01.00-000/&lp=de_en
http://babelfish.altavista.com/cgi-bin/trans late?doit=done&urltext=http://www.heise.de/newsti
Oh yeah, first rant^H^H^H^Hpost...
Might I suggest, for the video card, checking out LeadTek? They make some truly gawdawesome video cards that are specifically designed for applications performance (OpenGL, etc.) instead of gaming. I've been very happy with my L2300, under both Windows NT and Linux. At the time you couldn't do much better for the dollar!
Yes, yes it is.
Let's see... take a first-grader who finds school's "see spot run" a bit dull after reading L'Engle at home. Put this obvious "problem child" into a school full of them - he needs the discipline, it will help him. Well gee, the social structure in this school is based on how disruptive you can be - is anyone truly surprised by this? So now, instead of a bored kid, you have a bored kid that knows that it's cool to pick fights with teachers.
Oops, this (now) fourth-grader is clearly a more serious case than we first thought. Enter school psychiatrist. Clearly we need to get this child into a more... stringent program. Ship him off to the kiddie psych hospital (for which said psychiatrist just happens to be on the Board of Directors) for a 30-day evaluation which we'll turn into six months, pump him full of anti-psychotic drugs - he's nice and quiet now, isn't he? Oh, and on top of it, add in various forms of abuse by the "counselors".
Fortunately for me, I escaped - the hospital by a court order, and the school by moving out of its district. And you know what? Despite no longer having any relevant social structure to use to interact with others my age; despite the number and frequency of changes that rocked my world in order to pull me out of that; despite the fact that I was pretty seriously unbalanced for several months after all of this... I was able to function quite normally after enrolling in a school where the teachers understood what had happened to me, and actually gave a damn about me, and were willing to help.
And even that wouldn't have been possible if my parents hadn't also given a damn - and were willing to fight for me.
As far as the profiling goes... yes, it could be a good thing... IF it were used as a single data point, with perhaps some common sense liberally applied; and IF it were used as a warning flag to get help, instead of further reasons to ostracize and punish the individual; and IF... if... if lots of things occurred that, given the current sorry-ass state of the American educational system, if you think they're really going to... well, I've got a higher opinion of /.'s reader's than that.
Would that I had the solution, though.
First problem with this is, there's a difference between their work (which is already in the PD) and someone's recording of their work. You're proposing to make the latter forbidden to sell, as I understand it. This would remove the primary source of income that struggling young classical musicians have - potential record contracts. As it is now, they're already struggling for it. If you're not Luciano Pavarotti or Yitzhak Perlman, you don't generally get picked up. This, in turn, appears to be a partial cause of a waning interest in orchestras and the like - after all, would you go to see someone that you've never heard of?
Yes, it's clear that the music "industry" - and not just the record execs - need to do some adapting. But with music, like with code, free.open != free.beer; you're proposing the latter, which would put a lot of people out of a job.
Oh yeah, first post :-P
No, what you really need here is a Tempest system. 'Cause you know if Coke does this and it works, Pepsi will be soon to follow. So, your Coke machine's got an antenna in it to try and pick up what price the Pepsi machine's set at... run through its algorithm... set its price accordingly... etc.
There's one out in Boulder, the Colorado Internet Co-op. Unfortunately, their prices are rather higher.
No pad at all. I have run it on:
- the bare desktop
- my pants leg
- a Celtic t-shirt
- the top of my head (not a good idea, too hard to navigate)
- the back cover of a hardware manual which is completely black
So far, nothing has confused it. Except the top of my head a little, since it isn't completely flat. I'm very impressed.This is to some great extent why my very brief stint at the U of I sucked so badly and why it was so very very brief.
- Don't use soap.
- Do wash it by itself; crusty spaghetti-sauce bits aren't good for it.
- Don't try this if you live somewhere with really really hard water.
- Do remember to use a "warm" setting instead of "hot" (this includes turning off "heated dry").
- Let it dry for a few days!
In all seriousness, though, this was just the trick to recover my old Amiga keyboard after someone dropped a baked potato with butter and sour cream into it... yeccch.Seti@home and Distributed.net are pretty useless for a Beowulf - they're designed to be distributed over multiple machines. You wouldn't see any performance increase out of a Beowulf-aware version of any of these.
Unlike the Onion, it's just barely believeable enough so that folks with IQ's under 90 will tend to believe it.
Hey, the way that I look at it, they're *actually* doing us and the rest of the world an invaluable, though often misunderstood, service: they're encouraging the removal of those people who are too creduluous, unthinking, or just plain dumb from being potential mates to the rest of us. They're making it completely obvious to us that this is pretty clearly not someone we should be paying attention to; a habitual reader of the WWN is either someone intelligent with a well-honed (though admittedly slightly twisted) sense of humour, or else... well... eek. It should be rapidly clear which one is which.
"ALLLLright, Microsoft lamers! Bring on yer Service Packs... I got a Linux box with a BFG here, an' I ain't afraid to use it! Bwahahahahaha!"
One of the things that has been holding Linux back (to its detractors) is the lack of perceived compatibility and interoperability. If you've got Windoze source code, suddenly... Wine is at least as compatible with Windoze as the various versions of Windoze are with each other, Samba for Linux suddenly works flawlessly, Linux supports ActiveX, DCOM, DirectX, etc., etc.
Now, you may be able to argue that "xyz technology sucks, why the heck would we want a Linux version" but first, do you think it will still suck after being re-written by the Open Source community, and second, news flash, most of the world doesn't care. Joe Q. Executive doesn't give a wet slap whether CORBA is technically superior to DCOM, and Bob Gamehead just wants his DirectX games to run. If suddenly Linux talks to all the big app packages, well... it's not too hard to see world domination in sight. :)
Basically, if you're Micro$oft, Windows+Linux = Windows; but if you're the Open Source community, Windows+Linux = Linux with more features.
Unfortunately, this operation will *only* work for SMTP-type mail... for Microsoft Mail/Exchange Server-type mail, there *are* no headers, folks, at least none that Billy-boy wants you to know about...
They really don't want people to know this because if we did, someone might figure out that they don't need to buy the $50 disks when they could just stick a piece of, say, good optical-quality Plexiglas into it.
Information wants to be free... er, wait, that's not what they meant, er...
CyberSwap often has a lot of Amiga stuff up there.
Until you've moved into a thirty-year-old apartment complex, in an apartment that someone was living in just three days earlier, and you have the telephone company tell you that there's NO PHONE SERVICE AVAILABLE THERE...
I should stop ranting now. My "complain about US West" rant usually takes about two hours speaking...