Call me paranoid, but I think that if there was a chance that this protest would be in any way effective the Bush administration would simply announce it as a public holiday in advance to mask it.
You know what's interesting? This doesn't actually solve the problem of shoulder surfing. It just means that an attacker needs to be in front of you instead of behind you. What makes it even worse is that the same technology that can follow your eye movements can be used by an attacker to automatically record them. Just set up a camera that waits for the IR beam to come on, then using a telescopic lens have some software run exactly the same algorithm as the users local terminal.
Anyway - I have a bigger question: Who the hell needs this stuff?! Can you not trust your coworkers? Is your box not sitting right under your desk where they could hack it at night anyway? Aren't you on the same LAN as them? Couldn't they just use a network based attack to root your box?
Unless you work for the NSA a keyboard ought to do just fine.
If you have that kind of access to a system you can change anything you like. Probably if you're in charge of this system you are also in charge of the signing service also - go set it's clock back, recommit your modified files to the backup, set the clock correctly again, and voila!
There are no end of ways to work around the system, at some point it has to be "fit for purpose". Automating everything and locking the machines down in a secure location with logs of who accessed that location and when is probably good enough, no? After all, if there is something really damaging that you want to get rid of, "Damn, we had a fire in our storage center" or "Lost in transit" are actually much easier to pull off and leave no recovery method.
Use a version control system like Subversion. You can actually modify or delete files as much as you like, but the full change history will be available for any URL, as will all committed revisions, so even if somebody deletes something you can just request the revision where it still existed and had not been modified.
It's a simple solution that does not required any complicated storage setup. Many developers use it every day.
I was just about to disagree with you under the argument that just because I'm out in public and I don't have an expectation of privacy, I also have an expectation that I'm not being stalked, especially by police / the Government.
However, a further thought enters my mind: Maybe this is okay if all of the cameras are mounted on police vehicles - i.e. the officer would have to be able to see me anyway. If the cameras were mounted at stationary locations that might be different.
Who modded the parent post "Insightful", and why? It is a one line blanket statement cast against millions of people without discussion or foundation. I hope someone takes away your mod points.
If you use many websites that require you to log in you don't have many options. You could use one password for all of them, in which case a breach on one account by an attacker essentially breaches all other accounts that they discover, or you can use unique passwords on each site, in which case it soon becomes impossible to remember them all accurately - especially for sites that you don't use very often. Additionally, some sites have rules around the number of upper case characters, special characters, digits, etc. in passwords, and these can be particularly difficult to remember.
Certainly people are foolish if they store logins for bank accounts and the like in the password manager, but most people only have one or two really important logins.
People who use the remember passwords functions are not idiots. People who expect the "remember passwords" functionality to be secure are not idiots either - if an application used by millions includes such functionality one would expect the developers to have secured it.
That's very true. If you are insistent in completely ignoring its modern, popular usage.
If the rest of the world decided to start calling apples "oranges" tomorrow and you decided to go about correcting them, who in fact would be more wrong?
Re:What you need is a signed id3 tag with that inf
on
False Copyright Claims
·
· Score: 1
The idea is not to prevent removing of the mark. The idea is to provide the information in the first place, without placing unreasonable expectations upon it backed solely by some artificial technical enforcement, given that as you rightly state these can and will be circumvented anyway. The only protection you can realistically have is a digital signature verifying that the piece of the rights mark you originally added had not later been modified.
There is no black box that would manage this data. There would need to be an open standard unencumbered by IP, with an open-source reference library for working with the information, and use of this standard and tool set across many platforms including media editing and production tools, media players, operating systems, distribution technologies, and so forth. That's a big challenge, but maybe with the right planning and the right understanding of what we want to achieve we can move in that direction so that at some point in the future we can start to see the rewards of our work.
There is no perfect solution to this problem. I think that a successful solution will acknowledge and embrace that fact in such a way that recognizes the core goals are to make rights information widely available, even if without guarantee, in order to inform people in making their own decisions. A widely adopted method of providing information is better than no information at all, or almost as bad, a largely fragmented solution which purports to solve the problem but in reality few people are aware of and which is not universally applicable.
If you browse through some of my other posts on this thread I think you'll get a better understanding of my thoughts. I think there is an almost intractable idea on any topic around rights that there has to be enforcement and artificial protection mechanisms. I don't believe that is true. In fact, I believe that is what will ultimately kill (and does kill today) existing digital rights systems.
Now all you have to do is tell me what brings all of that together across all types of media and use cases and is a globally accepted standard and I can sleep easy tonight;)
Re:What you need is a signed id3 tag with that inf
on
False Copyright Claims
·
· Score: 1
You're arguing my point:
[a] Most media uses lossy codecs that effectively modify the core data in question [b] You're designing this for future lossy codecs that are not invented yet.
The idea is not to protect the media. The idea of the digital signature is to protect the assertions of the rights holder given in the tag. Maybe there is some kind of hash or summary of the original "media" part of the file they originally signed, but at the end of the day that may gradually become irrelevant as the work is transcoded or perhaps re-used in part of another.
Conventional thinking has to be set aside when we examine "what are we ultimately trying to achieve here?". Maybe you're completely right, but I think now we're arguing technicalities whereas I'd rather discuss the principle rather than derive a solution via a thread on Slashdot:)
Thanks for responding though. I am certainly glad people are interested!
Re:What you need is a signed id3 tag with that inf
on
False Copyright Claims
·
· Score: 1
I realize that I'm replying twice to the same post here, and I do apologize, but I wanted to respond to one other point.
I don't think that rights marking would be bad for the *AA agencies. It should not hurt them to mark their content, nor should it hurt them for independent artists to mark theirs. If in fact this does hurt their bottom line, one could only assume that it is because their current licensing model (e.g. SoundExchange might be a little bit questionable, based on what I have read). But there are also benefits for the *AA agencies, too. Making popular content and associated rights easier to identify could make finding new talent easier.
I think if we are to truly believe that the members who form these agencies are suffering in the digital age they should be the first to adopt and even drive technologies that at the very least make content rights visible. What is important in that process is that we do not allow them to bastardize any proposal into something that actually imposes restrictions or even takes such actions as reporting violations, which would effectively kill any marking project.
The value in digital rights marking is to provide the information. Society must be further presented a positive value proposition in respecting the marked rights in order for content creators to benefit - and that is a much larger issue. I for one do not believe the majority of people today understand what copyright means and why it exists. Generally I think that most people also believe that respecting rights held by commercial entities benefits original artists very little. These issues need to be addressed, and they will not be addressed by adding a marking scheme. But the marking scheme can provide a foundation for change.
Re:What you need is a signed id3 tag with that inf
on
False Copyright Claims
·
· Score: 1
That's interesting, but you need far more than that.
In a sense, you need to break free from the idea of digital signatures, except for signing the data in the tag itself. Media can be transcoded, edited, remixed, users can add custom file information, and all or part of the content could be used as part of a larger work. Perhaps the media will be sent over broadcast, or a streaming service. Ideally, after investigating how all of these processes work and what can realistically be achieved, as well as what is the correct thing to achieve, there can be some solution that takes all of these things into account. This might involve a common, open-source, core application shipping with all popular operating systems that enabled management and querying of this information, freely available, patent-free libraries for consumer electronics devices, and a recognition on the part of the public that this marking scheme is a good thing. That it supports artists, and it supports them and their own works. Perhaps it even provides benefits, such as connecting to an online repository of information providing further details about the author and links to their other works, maybe even to online stores they approve of and sell through. Most importantly, that it is not a technology that imposes any restrictions on them at all - the information is there, and they are still responsible for their own decisions.
Practically, I agree it's very hard. To even get the ball rolling we need some kind of a standard that says "you encode the information this way, it should contain the following data, here are some guidelines to help you ensure that all of the contact info you enter today will still be useful in ten years time, the mark data itself should be digitally signed in this manner, your public key should be published here for ease of verification, etc.". Then we need next generation file formats to natively support this in a means that is free of IP issues, and then for the tool sets we use to read, manage, and maintain the data hierarchy as works are arranged as parts of larger productions.
Can it be done? Not unless we try. Are there going to be problems? Surely. Maybe I don't want to publish a short film and have all the internal details open for viewing by hundreds of people. But at least the information is there up until a point. If someone chooses to erase or ignore it then eventually, once this marking becomes common, on most occasions they will have done so knowingly. And for most works, assuming society at large accepts such a schema, the majority of copies of the original works with the correct information will be readily available. You could still file your work with a digitally signed digital rights mark with the copyright office if you wanted to.
I don't think the intention of such a scheme would be to prevent idea theft, after all patents and copyright are already two somewhat separate concepts.
Is a digital rights mark system impossible to create? I'm not so sure. If I look at the JPEG format today it's possible to write copyright information in fields of the EXIF data and most modern editing applications preserve that information after the image has been edited. We need something more global that supports all (or the majority) of the common media use cases today, and is extensible by design.
Personally I don't like digital rights management, but I would love to be able to publish media online and know that if my work becomes popular in five years time people can still see who actually created it and if it's being used in a way I indicated was acceptable to me, even knowing that realistically I didn't have an option of actually restricting that use via the marking scheme itself (there are already other ways to challenge infringers if it's important enough to you).
But we need an effective way for marking content with important details such as copyright owner, copyright date, contact details, and perhaps even licensing details in terms of what the licensor explicitly allows to be done with the content, even if there is no artificial technology restriction imposed on what is disallowed.
For example, if I find a piece of music on the Internet and I want to use it in something that I'm creating, how do I know if I can? Who do I contact? What if I don't even know what the song actually is? Sure enough, even knowing that the copyright holder doesn't want me to do such a thing might not stop me from doing it, but at least I know I'm acting against their wishes.
If we could have some form of DRM that was actually more like "digital rights marking", and survived transcoding/editing, that would probably be very interesting. To the extent that it wasn't used to restrict our actions, but merely make us aware of what we were doing (in terms of our actions being acceptable or otherwise), maybe that's something we as a society could agree to adopt.
I know this will be an unpopular post, but it does irk me that any time DRM is mentioned somebody always resorts to "somebody will crack it anyway" and usually with a sense of fanboyism for piracy (although granted not seen in the parent post). At the end of the day there are cases where someone owns or has licensed content and they either desire or are legally required to make it available only under certain conditions. In a sense you have a group of people (the BBC in this case) trying to provide better access to content, albeit under some restrictions, and the rest of the world trying to crack it. Why do we think we have the right to do that? Just because we want the content? Just because we don't recognize the merits of DRM in any circumstance?
Note: I'm not trying to justify the BBC's use of DRM. I don't know what there reasons are for applying it, but I bet you don't either. This post is more along the lines of "why should we blatantly ignore and actively counteract the publishers wishes?". Yes, there are cases where you may have a legitimate claim for excersizing your rights - such as when you buy a DVD and want to move the content to a personal media server. If you don't pay a terrestrial license in the UK I'm not so sure such claims are valid in this case.
I'm not even sure I can explain how badly you fail to understand what I'm saying.
I'm talking about the terminal server marking up the language transparently so that the client can render it correctly. If you want anything other than a terminal that simply echo's then you need to have a set of control codes, why not make them markup language?
I consider "wrong" to be locking displays to 80 columns regardless of the end-point device, or specifying another similarly inflexible standard for the future. We have everything from text mode consoles to graphical windowed solutions with true type fonts, why not create a solution that can work with all of these?
My suggestion is to use some kind of markup language to handle the formatting. There is no reason it couldn't include a feature to manage line wrap appropriately for both plain text and code.
Why should it matter when we have line wrap? Hasn't HTML taught us to mark up documents for presentation on a multitude of different output devices? This would also be the case in a world where you did move away from 80 columns - you would need to consider writing for both 80 column and non-80 column devices, and depending on just how many standards you have the only way you can really ensure the presentation is to consider that you don't know much about the output device at all, which is what HTML does. Text mode graphical interfaces even become a similar concept, with tables representing windows perhaps.
Maybe we should consider implementing HTML-like terminals instead of changing the number of columns - which makes sense because then you can differentiate between 80 column output devices and HTML output devices. And most of us already have HTML viewers on our boxes.
Just don't invent a new fixed standard where somebody in 5 years time posts to Slashdot and asks, "Are 120 columns enough?".
Thanks for your note on the moderation, I also was a little surprised by that.
Towards the rest of your post, you make good points around the rising cost of labor in countries which are currently industry favorites for outsourcing (and perhaps immigration), but I do disagree with one point,
"I understand you have a financial incentive to think everything is rosy but really it isn't."
In fact I am from the UK and have little financial incentive to be in America:) I love the people, my job, and the country (minus the current administration). There is not as much bias in my original post as one might initially believe.
However, to the extent that any company is abusing the system, I genuinely hope they are heavily penalized for doing so because it casts a large shadow over everyone who does use the visa program legitimately.
I'm here on a visa. I don't get paid less than my American counterparts, and I pay taxes just like everybody else or face jail time and deportation.
There are many IT topics where discussion on Slashdot is interesting and valid. Immigration is not one of them. All discussions get flooded with angry Americans proclaiming low paid H1B workers are stealing their jobs. If I look around the company I work for all of the H1B positions are filled by people who are highly skilled and/or experts at what they do.
I can completely understant Microsofts move. If you want to lead the world in R&D then you want to be able to hire talented people regardless of which country they originate from. It's that simple.
It's really disheartening to repeatedly read the same old BS here on/. , it's like the site turns into Digg for the day and popular opinion rules over reality.
I've cleaned many keyboards, not in the dishwasher but using the shower.
The process is simple and obvious:
1 - Unscrew keyboard 2 - Remove electronics 3 - Shake or brush out as much of the crap that falls between the keys as you can 4 - Run face plate under a warm shower 5 - Dry thoroughly (shake out most of the water then use paper towels for fastest drying) 6 - Re-assemble
The only time consuming part is putting all the little rubber contact cups that some keyboards have under their keys back in their place. I'd say that I can usually I can clean, dry, and re-assemble a keyboard in about an hour, and you don't have to do it very often (unless you often eat lunch at your desk).
Not only that, but perhaps more significantly TW is a media/content company. The moment that they start shaping traffic to Internet media sites of various kinds (e.g. online video), which is more likely due to higher bandwidth consumption, aren't they being anti-competitive?
Slashdot Mirror
Call me paranoid, but I think that if there was a chance that this protest would be in any way effective the Bush administration would simply announce it as a public holiday in advance to mask it.
You know what's interesting? This doesn't actually solve the problem of shoulder surfing. It just means that an attacker needs to be in front of you instead of behind you. What makes it even worse is that the same technology that can follow your eye movements can be used by an attacker to automatically record them. Just set up a camera that waits for the IR beam to come on, then using a telescopic lens have some software run exactly the same algorithm as the users local terminal.
Anyway - I have a bigger question: Who the hell needs this stuff?! Can you not trust your coworkers? Is your box not sitting right under your desk where they could hack it at night anyway? Aren't you on the same LAN as them? Couldn't they just use a network based attack to root your box?
Unless you work for the NSA a keyboard ought to do just fine.
I wouldn't buy a game that writes to my registry. Make a damn Config file and leave my registry alone.
You should buy Linux games!
If you have that kind of access to a system you can change anything you like. Probably if you're in charge of this system you are also in charge of the signing service also - go set it's clock back, recommit your modified files to the backup, set the clock correctly again, and voila!
There are no end of ways to work around the system, at some point it has to be "fit for purpose". Automating everything and locking the machines down in a secure location with logs of who accessed that location and when is probably good enough, no? After all, if there is something really damaging that you want to get rid of, "Damn, we had a fire in our storage center" or "Lost in transit" are actually much easier to pull off and leave no recovery method.
Use a version control system like Subversion. You can actually modify or delete files as much as you like, but the full change history will be available for any URL, as will all committed revisions, so even if somebody deletes something you can just request the revision where it still existed and had not been modified.
It's a simple solution that does not required any complicated storage setup. Many developers use it every day.
I was just about to disagree with you under the argument that just because I'm out in public and I don't have an expectation of privacy, I also have an expectation that I'm not being stalked, especially by police / the Government.
However, a further thought enters my mind: Maybe this is okay if all of the cameras are mounted on police vehicles - i.e. the officer would have to be able to see me anyway. If the cameras were mounted at stationary locations that might be different.
Who modded the parent post "Insightful", and why? It is a one line blanket statement cast against millions of people without discussion or foundation. I hope someone takes away your mod points.
If you use many websites that require you to log in you don't have many options. You could use one password for all of them, in which case a breach on one account by an attacker essentially breaches all other accounts that they discover, or you can use unique passwords on each site, in which case it soon becomes impossible to remember them all accurately - especially for sites that you don't use very often. Additionally, some sites have rules around the number of upper case characters, special characters, digits, etc. in passwords, and these can be particularly difficult to remember.
Certainly people are foolish if they store logins for bank accounts and the like in the password manager, but most people only have one or two really important logins.
People who use the remember passwords functions are not idiots. People who expect the "remember passwords" functionality to be secure are not idiots either - if an application used by millions includes such functionality one would expect the developers to have secured it.
That's very true. If you are insistent in completely ignoring its modern, popular usage.
If the rest of the world decided to start calling apples "oranges" tomorrow and you decided to go about correcting them, who in fact would be more wrong?
The idea is not to prevent removing of the mark. The idea is to provide the information in the first place, without placing unreasonable expectations upon it backed solely by some artificial technical enforcement, given that as you rightly state these can and will be circumvented anyway. The only protection you can realistically have is a digital signature verifying that the piece of the rights mark you originally added had not later been modified.
There is no black box that would manage this data. There would need to be an open standard unencumbered by IP, with an open-source reference library for working with the information, and use of this standard and tool set across many platforms including media editing and production tools, media players, operating systems, distribution technologies, and so forth. That's a big challenge, but maybe with the right planning and the right understanding of what we want to achieve we can move in that direction so that at some point in the future we can start to see the rewards of our work.
There is no perfect solution to this problem. I think that a successful solution will acknowledge and embrace that fact in such a way that recognizes the core goals are to make rights information widely available, even if without guarantee, in order to inform people in making their own decisions. A widely adopted method of providing information is better than no information at all, or almost as bad, a largely fragmented solution which purports to solve the problem but in reality few people are aware of and which is not universally applicable.
If you browse through some of my other posts on this thread I think you'll get a better understanding of my thoughts. I think there is an almost intractable idea on any topic around rights that there has to be enforcement and artificial protection mechanisms. I don't believe that is true. In fact, I believe that is what will ultimately kill (and does kill today) existing digital rights systems.
Perfect!
;)
Now all you have to do is tell me what brings all of that together across all types of media and use cases and is a globally accepted standard and I can sleep easy tonight
You're arguing my point:
:)
[a] Most media uses lossy codecs that effectively modify the core data in question
[b] You're designing this for future lossy codecs that are not invented yet.
The idea is not to protect the media. The idea of the digital signature is to protect the assertions of the rights holder given in the tag. Maybe there is some kind of hash or summary of the original "media" part of the file they originally signed, but at the end of the day that may gradually become irrelevant as the work is transcoded or perhaps re-used in part of another.
Conventional thinking has to be set aside when we examine "what are we ultimately trying to achieve here?". Maybe you're completely right, but I think now we're arguing technicalities whereas I'd rather discuss the principle rather than derive a solution via a thread on Slashdot
Thanks for responding though. I am certainly glad people are interested!
I realize that I'm replying twice to the same post here, and I do apologize, but I wanted to respond to one other point.
I don't think that rights marking would be bad for the *AA agencies. It should not hurt them to mark their content, nor should it hurt them for independent artists to mark theirs. If in fact this does hurt their bottom line, one could only assume that it is because their current licensing model (e.g. SoundExchange might be a little bit questionable, based on what I have read). But there are also benefits for the *AA agencies, too. Making popular content and associated rights easier to identify could make finding new talent easier.
I think if we are to truly believe that the members who form these agencies are suffering in the digital age they should be the first to adopt and even drive technologies that at the very least make content rights visible. What is important in that process is that we do not allow them to bastardize any proposal into something that actually imposes restrictions or even takes such actions as reporting violations, which would effectively kill any marking project.
The value in digital rights marking is to provide the information. Society must be further presented a positive value proposition in respecting the marked rights in order for content creators to benefit - and that is a much larger issue. I for one do not believe the majority of people today understand what copyright means and why it exists. Generally I think that most people also believe that respecting rights held by commercial entities benefits original artists very little. These issues need to be addressed, and they will not be addressed by adding a marking scheme. But the marking scheme can provide a foundation for change.
That's interesting, but you need far more than that.
In a sense, you need to break free from the idea of digital signatures, except for signing the data in the tag itself. Media can be transcoded, edited, remixed, users can add custom file information, and all or part of the content could be used as part of a larger work. Perhaps the media will be sent over broadcast, or a streaming service. Ideally, after investigating how all of these processes work and what can realistically be achieved, as well as what is the correct thing to achieve, there can be some solution that takes all of these things into account. This might involve a common, open-source, core application shipping with all popular operating systems that enabled management and querying of this information, freely available, patent-free libraries for consumer electronics devices, and a recognition on the part of the public that this marking scheme is a good thing. That it supports artists, and it supports them and their own works. Perhaps it even provides benefits, such as connecting to an online repository of information providing further details about the author and links to their other works, maybe even to online stores they approve of and sell through. Most importantly, that it is not a technology that imposes any restrictions on them at all - the information is there, and they are still responsible for their own decisions.
Prehistory for tomorrow begins today.
Practically, I agree it's very hard. To even get the ball rolling we need some kind of a standard that says "you encode the information this way, it should contain the following data, here are some guidelines to help you ensure that all of the contact info you enter today will still be useful in ten years time, the mark data itself should be digitally signed in this manner, your public key should be published here for ease of verification, etc.". Then we need next generation file formats to natively support this in a means that is free of IP issues, and then for the tool sets we use to read, manage, and maintain the data hierarchy as works are arranged as parts of larger productions.
Can it be done? Not unless we try. Are there going to be problems? Surely. Maybe I don't want to publish a short film and have all the internal details open for viewing by hundreds of people. But at least the information is there up until a point. If someone chooses to erase or ignore it then eventually, once this marking becomes common, on most occasions they will have done so knowingly. And for most works, assuming society at large accepts such a schema, the majority of copies of the original works with the correct information will be readily available. You could still file your work with a digitally signed digital rights mark with the copyright office if you wanted to.
I don't think the intention of such a scheme would be to prevent idea theft, after all patents and copyright are already two somewhat separate concepts.
Is a digital rights mark system impossible to create? I'm not so sure. If I look at the JPEG format today it's possible to write copyright information in fields of the EXIF data and most modern editing applications preserve that information after the image has been edited. We need something more global that supports all (or the majority) of the common media use cases today, and is extensible by design.
Personally I don't like digital rights management, but I would love to be able to publish media online and know that if my work becomes popular in five years time people can still see who actually created it and if it's being used in a way I indicated was acceptable to me, even knowing that realistically I didn't have an option of actually restricting that use via the marking scheme itself (there are already other ways to challenge infringers if it's important enough to you).
Don't go into convulsions just yet!
But we need an effective way for marking content with important details such as copyright owner, copyright date, contact details, and perhaps even licensing details in terms of what the licensor explicitly allows to be done with the content, even if there is no artificial technology restriction imposed on what is disallowed.
For example, if I find a piece of music on the Internet and I want to use it in something that I'm creating, how do I know if I can? Who do I contact? What if I don't even know what the song actually is? Sure enough, even knowing that the copyright holder doesn't want me to do such a thing might not stop me from doing it, but at least I know I'm acting against their wishes.
If we could have some form of DRM that was actually more like "digital rights marking", and survived transcoding/editing, that would probably be very interesting. To the extent that it wasn't used to restrict our actions, but merely make us aware of what we were doing (in terms of our actions being acceptable or otherwise), maybe that's something we as a society could agree to adopt.
I know this will be an unpopular post, but it does irk me that any time DRM is mentioned somebody always resorts to "somebody will crack it anyway" and usually with a sense of fanboyism for piracy (although granted not seen in the parent post). At the end of the day there are cases where someone owns or has licensed content and they either desire or are legally required to make it available only under certain conditions. In a sense you have a group of people (the BBC in this case) trying to provide better access to content, albeit under some restrictions, and the rest of the world trying to crack it. Why do we think we have the right to do that? Just because we want the content? Just because we don't recognize the merits of DRM in any circumstance?
;)
Note: I'm not trying to justify the BBC's use of DRM. I don't know what there reasons are for applying it, but I bet you don't either. This post is more along the lines of "why should we blatantly ignore and actively counteract the publishers wishes?". Yes, there are cases where you may have a legitimate claim for excersizing your rights - such as when you buy a DVD and want to move the content to a personal media server. If you don't pay a terrestrial license in the UK I'm not so sure such claims are valid in this case.
Bye bye karma, it was nice knowing you
Because the compulsory TV license covers UK viewers, and we're talking about Internet distribution now?
I'm not even sure I can explain how badly you fail to understand what I'm saying.
I'm talking about the terminal server marking up the language transparently so that the client can render it correctly. If you want anything other than a terminal that simply echo's then you need to have a set of control codes, why not make them markup language?
I consider "wrong" to be locking displays to 80 columns regardless of the end-point device, or specifying another similarly inflexible standard for the future. We have everything from text mode consoles to graphical windowed solutions with true type fonts, why not create a solution that can work with all of these?
It's not such a hard concept to grasp...
Use blockquote or some other markup feature?
My suggestion is to use some kind of markup language to handle the formatting. There is no reason it couldn't include a feature to manage line wrap appropriately for both plain text and code.
Why should it matter when we have line wrap? Hasn't HTML taught us to mark up documents for presentation on a multitude of different output devices? This would also be the case in a world where you did move away from 80 columns - you would need to consider writing for both 80 column and non-80 column devices, and depending on just how many standards you have the only way you can really ensure the presentation is to consider that you don't know much about the output device at all, which is what HTML does. Text mode graphical interfaces even become a similar concept, with tables representing windows perhaps.
Maybe we should consider implementing HTML-like terminals instead of changing the number of columns - which makes sense because then you can differentiate between 80 column output devices and HTML output devices. And most of us already have HTML viewers on our boxes.
Just don't invent a new fixed standard where somebody in 5 years time posts to Slashdot and asks, "Are 120 columns enough?".
Thanks for your note on the moderation, I also was a little surprised by that.
:) I love the people, my job, and the country (minus the current administration). There is not as much bias in my original post as one might initially believe.
Towards the rest of your post, you make good points around the rising cost of labor in countries which are currently industry favorites for outsourcing (and perhaps immigration), but I do disagree with one point,
"I understand you have a financial incentive to think everything is rosy but really it isn't."
In fact I am from the UK and have little financial incentive to be in America
However, to the extent that any company is abusing the system, I genuinely hope they are heavily penalized for doing so because it casts a large shadow over everyone who does use the visa program legitimately.
I'm here on a visa. I don't get paid less than my American counterparts, and I pay taxes just like everybody else or face jail time and deportation.
/. , it's like the site turns into Digg for the day and popular opinion rules over reality.
There are many IT topics where discussion on Slashdot is interesting and valid. Immigration is not one of them. All discussions get flooded with angry Americans proclaiming low paid H1B workers are stealing their jobs. If I look around the company I work for all of the H1B positions are filled by people who are highly skilled and/or experts at what they do.
I can completely understant Microsofts move. If you want to lead the world in R&D then you want to be able to hire talented people regardless of which country they originate from. It's that simple.
It's really disheartening to repeatedly read the same old BS here on
I've cleaned many keyboards, not in the dishwasher but using the shower.
The process is simple and obvious:
1 - Unscrew keyboard
2 - Remove electronics
3 - Shake or brush out as much of the crap that falls between the keys as you can
4 - Run face plate under a warm shower
5 - Dry thoroughly (shake out most of the water then use paper towels for fastest drying)
6 - Re-assemble
The only time consuming part is putting all the little rubber contact cups that some keyboards have under their keys back in their place. I'd say that I can usually I can clean, dry, and re-assemble a keyboard in about an hour, and you don't have to do it very often (unless you often eat lunch at your desk).
Not only that, but perhaps more significantly TW is a media/content company. The moment that they start shaping traffic to Internet media sites of various kinds (e.g. online video), which is more likely due to higher bandwidth consumption, aren't they being anti-competitive?