Personal crusade or not, AMD is currently starting to make Intel sweat.
I think it would be a BAD idea for AMD to make a processor incompatible with x86. Let's see... we have the Alpha and G4 and those already have TREMENDOUS support from Joe Sixpack. (Though, admittedly, the Alpha was never meant to compete with the Pentium.)
Ironic that you should bring this up, actually. Rumour has it that Intel's upcoming 64-bit chip is NOT going to be x86 compatible, but AMD's is. If anyone has the links to prove/disprove that, please post 'em.
Most of the MP3s i've heard ARE cd quality (or better).
Mmm, not really. Even if you encode the MP3 in the same bitrate and frequency width, MP3 is a lossy compression in that the algorithm tosses out information that is out of range of most people's hearing or blends similar sounds together. I've just now obscenely simplified the process, but it goes something like that. Don't get me wrong, MP3 is a really wonderful and accurate audio compression technique, but you'll never get a "perfect" copy no matter how high you crank the bitrate and freq.
PNG is to CD audio as JPG is to MP3. Ever encode a Tori Amos song and then play it back on a pair of high-quality headphones? MP3's do not do justice to her kind of music (many pure and quiet tones). However, with most kinds of audio like voice, a rock song, or a techno song, most people won't hear the difference. But I do.:P
In the interest of completely downplaying this "momentous occasion," many companies have thus far created what they like to call DVD-writable drives... however, the ONLY and SINGULAR thing they share with DVD is the fact that it stores like gigabytes and that the disc is optical. You cannot read the discs in a DVD drive, DVD player, and in most cases any other drive but the brand that wrote it.
Is this drive any different? Okay, so maybe it writes on recordable discs similar to DVDs, and uses the DVD filesystem. The questions we ought to be asking is whether the discs are readable on current DVD drives and/or players and just how closely it follows the DVD "standard". And who gives said company the right to set the DVD-R standard, since none really exists AFAIK.
And lastly, what's with the hostility towards America Online? May I please remind you that this so-called "totalitarian corporation" is largely funding this project?
Which is precisely why I'll be supporting KDEs web-browsing efforts, thankyouverymuch.
I haven't yet read any of the comments posted to this story yet, so please excuse any repetitiveness that might follow...
Now, the writer says he works at a "national lab" funded by the Department of Energy. I can say with a degree of certainty that the lab in question is Sandia National Labs, which resides on the same base as I am currently stationed at. (Kirtland AFB, NM)
Now, to answer a few of his questions...
'By using this system, the user consents to such interception, monitoring, recording, copying, auditing, inspection, and disclosure at the discretion of authorized site or Department of Energy personnel. LOG OFF IMMEDIATELY if you do not agree to the conditions stated in this warning.' What is the legality of this statement?"
Seems perfectly legal to me. I am a government employee and I see a similar message on the computers that I log into every day. Notice that they always give you the option to simply refuse and not login and or use the computer. A word on that below.
"I live under the assumption that my employer cannot tap my telephone or open mail delivered by the US postal service and that I have the right to free speech under the constitution. Why is my E-mail and my very keystrokes on the computer any different?
That is a good question, but one with a simple answer. When a package or letter is sent to you, its delievery is paid for by the sender. The US Post Office guarantees that a paid package will arrive at its destination without tampering *unless* they have sufficient evidence to believe it contains some sort of contraband that you cannot legally send in the mail.
You pay for your personal phone line, and the phone company generally agrees that they won't tap your phone line without a good reason, similar to the above.
But your employer, be it a private company or your government pays for that computer you're using and the network it is connected to. They constructed the network and bought the computer with the expectation that both would be used only for things that relate directly to your work. No employer wants to sit there looking a bill from their broadband ISP that is thousands of dollars higher than what it would be if the employees were not using it for their own personal interests. (Hope that made sense...)
Please remember my work does not involve national security.
That doesn't really matter. I do my work on government computers every day, and despite the geek and freedom activist in me, I still wait till I get home to do my MP3 downloading, which is much more painful on a 28.8 modem than it would be on the fast T1 at work.
You could certainly just refuse to agree to the conditions that the splash-window displays upon booting up, but then you aren't allowed to log on to the network or use that computer. Consequently, you probably won't be able to get much work done, and if your boss notices you aren't doing any work, you are going to get fired.
In short, I reason that it all comes down to resources. If you're at home, downloading pr0n or whatever using the account that you paid for, fine. Posting messages to newgroups, emailing a friend in antarctica, fine. There is no problem with that. But a company or agency has to pay for the box that sits in your office, and the miles of cabling in the walls. If you are using that setup for things that don't help you get your work done, then you're costing the company money the same as you would if you were stealing office supplies.
No, I don't like it. But yes, it seems fair.
NAS [Johnny Mnemonic]
on
Silicon Hell
·
· Score: 1
From the way the/. post was worded, it almost sounds like NAS (Nerve Attenuation Syndrom, I think it was) from the movie Johnny Mnemonic.:P
People who read these./ threads frequently might recognize me as the guy who works on military aircraft avionics. Therefore, I have some knowledge in this area, so I'm just going to try and add my knowledge to this topic.
The GPS reciever that I'm familiar with is the one in the Enhanced Navigation System in the MH-53J Pavelow III helicopter. It can use both "civilian" and "military" GPS signal format. The unencrypted singal has an error radius of about 100 meters. With the proper encryption keys (our manuals don't state what kind of encryption or what the key format is, as we're not the ones who enter them), the GPS signal receieved is accurate to a radius of 15 meters. You need to have at least 3 satellite signals captured by the GPS receiver to get present position, while you'll have the *most* accurate coordinates with 5 satellites captured. The GPS recievers most people think of can fit in the palm of your hand, but on aircraft, they are about as long and wide as a PC keyboard and around 10" high. AFAIK, GPS works on the principle of triangulation of radio signals... i.e. measuring the angles of incoming radio signals. The encryption keys are changed something like every 48 hours or every week.
I'm deeply interested in learning more about this, but I'm afraid they just don't tell us any more than we need to know.:P Maybe I'll get one of my ComNav friends to help me out. I will take a look tomorrow at some of our tech manuals and see if there's anything I missed.
A PSX development kit (commercial one and Net-Yarouze I believe) will have the ability to burn correct PSX CDs, but a PC CDR drive does not and will likely never due to the fact that it involves deliberately messing up the checksums on the disk.
The easy solution is a modchip. Buy one for $20 (or make your own for a little more, it's not that hard), solder the sucker in and you're in business. I've done it, I ought to know. Soldering is not difficult once you've a few hours practice and someone to teach you.
Please, PLEASE stay away from the Game Enhancer clones. They work fine for some games, but not with many. The problem has mostly to do with fact that all they do is send stop and start commands to the CD drive's spindle so that you can do the swap trick without ruining the drive motor. Any games that use redbook audio or have multpile discs will not work or will not work properly. I don't have time to explain why, but there are plenty of web pages explaining why on the net. Google is your friend.
An open platform is exactly what Sony and Sega DO NOT WANT. Their money comes from licensing the games developed by third parties. To (legally) create a PlayStaion game, you need a) a license and b) a developers kit, which last I heard cost around US$30,000 for hardware + software. Small change for developers, large change for me and you.
This all goes back to the Quality Control rant I posted in a thread above.
Oh, and other thing about the license. All games developed by a third party under a license from Sony undergo constant quality assessment during development by some Sony representative. This is to prevent games from being released that don't match up to Sony's standards of what kind of game they want on their system. (Note that they don't have to be FUN or ENTERTAINING games to meet Sony's requirements sometimes.:P) All the big console makers do this, and this is the primary reason you never saw any blood or gore in a Super Nintendo game prior to cicra-1994.
IANAL, but your analogy is terribly skewed in this instance... No company owns the format that a television station sends out it's information in. (NTSC or PAL, I think). The FCC owns the airwaves here in the US, but that's a different story. It's a completely different kind of market.
However, Sony DOES have the right to take legal action against a company or person that produces and markets a PSX game that is NOT licensed through Sony. You want to make a PSX game, you have to buy a license. Legal Docmentiation? I have none, but it exists.
Sony does not make money from selling their consoles or making games, they make their dough from selling licenses that allow publishers and developers to sell games that were designed to work with a Sony PlayStation(tm). Squaresoft, Electronic Arts, Activision, all of them have licenses to sell their games. In short, no license == no game. If you break that rule, you'll find yourself sitting in court.
Yes, it could further the spread of emualtors. Will it? Probably not. Except for some bloke setting out to create one simply for the joy of perfect emulation. (aka NESticle, UltraHLE) I don't see emulators getting much popular than they already are. The old cart-based systems are different than a PSX. They gave people a chance to play great games for their old skewl systems that they never got a chance to play, or sold years ago. ROMs could be downloaded in minutes.
With a PSX OTOH, the consoles are cheap enough and plentiful enough that anyone wanting to code an emulator for the purpose of cheap gaming has the intelligence quotient of a fruit fly. And with a little bit of effort, any PSX game can be copied and played on a minimally-modified PSX. Downloading a PSX ISO over the internet is pretty much impractical for Joe Sixpack. Even if he had a decent broadband connection, the ISO images are incredibly difficult to find.
And about PSX-compatible machine... it will NEVER happen in the conumer market. Sony holds all kinds of copyrights and patents that deal with how the PSX works, thereby making it impossible for someone to create a working clone. Don't believe me? Does the Apple Computer Corporation ring a bell?
As a matter of fact, I can already see Sony sueing The Playstation Documentation Project within a few weeks, claiming that the information violates some law dealing with trade secrets.
An SRPM doesn't imply program source... an SRPM is a collection of the files used to build a binary RPM. This makes the building of a binary rpm package on different architectures and OSes several orders of magnitude easier.
nVidia states on their site that the drivers are binary-only.
And as a side note, the space shuttle you refer to was actually named after its fictional Star Trek namesake, ye olde NCC-1701. I saw a picture of it once with the Star Trek cast standing in the foreground at some type of chrisening ceremony.
I work on military aircraft avionics, which are (theoretically speaking) not really a lot different than space navigation systems. Right now most of our aircraft are still using 60's and 70's technology in the avionics systems.
Anyway, in a system with a glass cockpit, they will usually have a separate computer for every main function (navigation, guidance, heading, etc), and each computer will run on its own custom hardware. Software usually comes from dozens of banks of ROM chips. Although, if this system is still being designed from scratch, or was recently, then I don't see why they wouldn't use some sort of small RAID arrangement. If it even runs an OS (at least, how *we* define OS), chances are it will be very low level, and custom-coded by either NASA or a high-profile aviation company like Lockheed. Remember, custom (and very expensive) hardwear.
If they *were* to run a PC-type OS in this glass cockpit, I forsee them choosing either MS-DOS, (hey, it's been proven stable) or some Unix variant or clone known to be very stable (BSD?).
I'm almost certain they aren't going with Linux because don't you think they would have announced it by now? I mean, Open Source == Publicity these days.
And to you guys worring about Wince... 1) NASA is not really that stupid and I doubt it could handle shuttle avionics anyway 2) There are always two or three backup systems for every major system.:P
NOTE: This is all pure speculation which therefore means that it will probably be moderated down as flamebait.:P
But a closer look at AOL's content, services, and business practices leads us to wonder if AOL's dominance will further open the Web, or just turn it into another homogenized, lifeless medium. (Editor's Note: CNET provides content for AOL's Computing channel.)
I just can't help but bust out laughing while falling out of my chair when I try to imagine the look on the editors face as he was typing that one out...
That's all fine and dandy, but the Napster program that people install on their computers is not a server. It is a client. A Napster server acts only as a live database for all of the clients currently connected. From there on, everyone acts pretty much as a peer-to-peer client.
Then what would you rather he offer them as evidence of his point of view? I don't see anyone else in this entire thread doing anything about personal freedom and rights. All I see, (for the most part), is a lot of whining.
I'm absolutely sick and tired of seeing Jon Katz go out on a limb for stories like this, only to be ridiculed further down in the comments. He is certainly not you're everyday columnist. Katz actually takes action on the things he writes about, whereas every AC and his dog would rather just discuss it and mull it over with each other. He even got Pinkerton Corp. to revise their policy (however slight) and clarify some of the more important points on their website.
Jon, if you read this, I commend you for your actions. I'd like to drop you an email someday if ever I come up with something worthwhile to say.
Since we're talking about shoes and quality, I'd like to iterate what I discovered the last time I bought a pair of shoes.
The only kind of shoes I will wear are ones of the Airwalk or Vans style. (Lowtops, suede-like material) When I went looking for some, even at supposed bargain stores, the cheapest I could find them for was $50, and those were styles I didn't even like. Somewhere within the last few years, Airwalk and Vans must have gotten popular or something because their prices were nearly double what they used to be. So disgruntled, I was about to walk out of the mall, but figured I'd try Payless (no, this isn't an endorsement.:P). Well guess what? I found an awesome looking pair of Airwalk clones that were only $20! They have no name on them except for a tag on the inside, but look pretty damn cool. I've had them since chirstmas and so far they show no signs of wear, except for being a little dirty.
So the moral here is that something that doesn't have to cost a lot of money to be high quality. And many times the stuff that is high priced isn't worth half of what you pay for it. Case in point, my Tekram SCSI card.:P
Just occured to me, that this is probably a LOT off-topic.:P
Slashdot Mirror
Personal crusade or not, AMD is currently starting to make Intel sweat.
I think it would be a BAD idea for AMD to make a processor incompatible with x86. Let's see... we have the Alpha and G4 and those already have TREMENDOUS support from Joe Sixpack. (Though, admittedly, the Alpha was never meant to compete with the Pentium.)
Ironic that you should bring this up, actually. Rumour has it that Intel's upcoming 64-bit chip is NOT going to be x86 compatible, but AMD's is. If anyone has the links to prove/disprove that, please post 'em.
Her??? How do you know the agent isn't a male?!
Most of the MP3s i've heard ARE cd quality (or better).
:P
Mmm, not really. Even if you encode the MP3 in the same bitrate and frequency width, MP3 is a lossy compression in that the algorithm tosses out information that is out of range of most people's hearing or blends similar sounds together. I've just now obscenely simplified the process, but it goes something like that. Don't get me wrong, MP3 is a really wonderful and accurate audio compression technique, but you'll never get a "perfect" copy no matter how high you crank the bitrate and freq.
PNG is to CD audio as JPG is to MP3. Ever encode a Tori Amos song and then play it back on a pair of high-quality headphones? MP3's do not do justice to her kind of music (many pure and quiet tones). However, with most kinds of audio like voice, a rock song, or a techno song, most people won't hear the difference. But I do.
In the interest of completely downplaying this "momentous occasion," many companies have thus far created what they like to call DVD-writable drives... however, the ONLY and SINGULAR thing they share with DVD is the fact that it stores like gigabytes and that the disc is optical. You cannot read the discs in a DVD drive, DVD player, and in most cases any other drive but the brand that wrote it.
Is this drive any different? Okay, so maybe it writes on recordable discs similar to DVDs, and uses the DVD filesystem. The questions we ought to be asking is whether the discs are readable on current DVD drives and/or players and just how closely it follows the DVD "standard". And who gives said company the right to set the DVD-R standard, since none really exists AFAIK.
In other words justify your existance, sport.
You mentioned two cultures, whereas I count four:
hackers: programmers or particularly genius system administrators (context dependent)
hackers: someone looking to learn as much as possible about a given piece of software or hardware, regardless of legality
skript kiddies: ones who run scripts, almost always claim to be one or both of the aforementioned "hackers".
crackers: thin crusty wafers not dissimilar to bread, but dryer.
And lastly, what's with the hostility towards America Online? May I please remind you that this so-called "totalitarian corporation" is largely funding this project?
Which is precisely why I'll be supporting KDEs web-browsing efforts, thankyouverymuch.
I haven't yet read any of the comments posted to this story yet, so please excuse any repetitiveness that might follow...
Now, the writer says he works at a "national lab" funded by the Department of Energy. I can say with a degree of certainty that the lab in question is Sandia National Labs, which resides on the same base as I am currently stationed at. (Kirtland AFB, NM)
Now, to answer a few of his questions...
'By using this system, the user consents to such interception, monitoring, recording, copying, auditing, inspection, and disclosure at the discretion of authorized site or Department of Energy personnel. LOG OFF IMMEDIATELY if you do not agree to the conditions stated in this warning.' What is the legality of this statement?"
Seems perfectly legal to me. I am a government employee and I see a similar message on the computers that I log into every day. Notice that they always give you the option to simply refuse and not login and or use the computer. A word on that below.
"I live under the assumption that my employer cannot tap my telephone or open mail delivered by the US postal service and that I have the right to free speech under the constitution. Why is my E-mail and my very keystrokes on the computer any different?
That is a good question, but one with a simple answer. When a package or letter is sent to you, its delievery is paid for by the sender. The US Post Office guarantees that a paid package will arrive at its destination without tampering *unless* they have sufficient evidence to believe it contains some sort of contraband that you cannot legally send in the mail.
You pay for your personal phone line, and the phone company generally agrees that they won't tap your phone line without a good reason, similar to the above.
But your employer, be it a private company or your government pays for that computer you're using and the network it is connected to. They constructed the network and bought the computer with the expectation that both would be used only for things that relate directly to your work. No employer wants to sit there looking a bill from their broadband ISP that is thousands of dollars higher than what it would be if the employees were not using it for their own personal interests. (Hope that made sense...)
Please remember my work does not involve national security.
That doesn't really matter. I do my work on government computers every day, and despite the geek and freedom activist in me, I still wait till I get home to do my MP3 downloading, which is much more painful on a 28.8 modem than it would be on the fast T1 at work.
You could certainly just refuse to agree to the conditions that the splash-window displays upon booting up, but then you aren't allowed to log on to the network or use that computer. Consequently, you probably won't be able to get much work done, and if your boss notices you aren't doing any work, you are going to get fired.
In short, I reason that it all comes down to resources. If you're at home, downloading pr0n or whatever using the account that you paid for, fine. Posting messages to newgroups, emailing a friend in antarctica, fine. There is no problem with that. But a company or agency has to pay for the box that sits in your office, and the miles of cabling in the walls. If you are using that setup for things that don't help you get your work done, then you're costing the company money the same as you would if you were stealing office supplies.
No, I don't like it. But yes, it seems fair.
From the way the /. post was worded, it almost sounds like NAS (Nerve Attenuation Syndrom, I think it was) from the movie Johnny Mnemonic. :P
15 meters, actually. Your dog would cease to exist.
People who read these ./ threads frequently might recognize me as the guy who works on military aircraft avionics. Therefore, I have some knowledge in this area, so I'm just going to try and add my knowledge to this topic.
:P Maybe I'll get one of my ComNav friends to help me out. I will take a look tomorrow at some of our tech manuals and see if there's anything I missed.
The GPS reciever that I'm familiar with is the one in the Enhanced Navigation System in the MH-53J Pavelow III helicopter. It can use both "civilian" and "military" GPS signal format. The unencrypted singal has an error radius of about 100 meters. With the proper encryption keys (our manuals don't state what kind of encryption or what the key format is, as we're not the ones who enter them), the GPS signal receieved is accurate to a radius of 15 meters. You need to have at least 3 satellite signals captured by the GPS receiver to get present position, while you'll have the *most* accurate coordinates with 5 satellites captured. The GPS recievers most people think of can fit in the palm of your hand, but on aircraft, they are about as long and wide as a PC keyboard and around 10" high. AFAIK, GPS works on the principle of triangulation of radio signals... i.e. measuring the angles of incoming radio signals. The encryption keys are changed something like every 48 hours or every week.
I'm deeply interested in learning more about this, but I'm afraid they just don't tell us any more than we need to know.
A PSX development kit (commercial one and Net-Yarouze I believe) will have the ability to burn correct PSX CDs, but a PC CDR drive does not and will likely never due to the fact that it involves deliberately messing up the checksums on the disk.
The easy solution is a modchip. Buy one for $20 (or make your own for a little more, it's not that hard), solder the sucker in and you're in business. I've done it, I ought to know. Soldering is not difficult once you've a few hours practice and someone to teach you.
Please, PLEASE stay away from the Game Enhancer clones. They work fine for some games, but not with many. The problem has mostly to do with fact that all they do is send stop and start commands to the CD drive's spindle so that you can do the swap trick without ruining the drive motor. Any games that use redbook audio or have multpile discs will not work or will not work properly. I don't have time to explain why, but there are plenty of web pages explaining why on the net. Google is your friend.
An open platform is exactly what Sony and Sega DO NOT WANT. Their money comes from licensing the games developed by third parties. To (legally) create a PlayStaion game, you need a) a license and b) a developers kit, which last I heard cost around US$30,000 for hardware + software. Small change for developers, large change for me and you.
This all goes back to the Quality Control rant I posted in a thread above.
Oh, and other thing about the license. All games developed by a third party under a license from Sony undergo constant quality assessment during development by some Sony representative. This is to prevent games from being released that don't match up to Sony's standards of what kind of game they want on their system. (Note that they don't have to be FUN or ENTERTAINING games to meet Sony's requirements sometimes. :P) All the big console makers do this, and this is the primary reason you never saw any blood or gore in a Super Nintendo game prior to cicra-1994.
IANAL, but your analogy is terribly skewed in this instance... No company owns the format that a television station sends out it's information in. (NTSC or PAL, I think). The FCC owns the airwaves here in the US, but that's a different story. It's a completely different kind of market.
However, Sony DOES have the right to take legal action against a company or person that produces and markets a PSX game that is NOT licensed through Sony. You want to make a PSX game, you have to buy a license. Legal Docmentiation? I have none, but it exists.
Sony does not make money from selling their consoles or making games, they make their dough from selling licenses that allow publishers and developers to sell games that were designed to work with a Sony PlayStation(tm). Squaresoft, Electronic Arts, Activision, all of them have licenses to sell their games. In short, no license == no game. If you break that rule, you'll find yourself sitting in court.
Yes, it could further the spread of emualtors. Will it? Probably not. Except for some bloke setting out to create one simply for the joy of perfect emulation. (aka NESticle, UltraHLE) I don't see emulators getting much popular than they already are. The old cart-based systems are different than a PSX. They gave people a chance to play great games for their old skewl systems that they never got a chance to play, or sold years ago. ROMs could be downloaded in minutes.
With a PSX OTOH, the consoles are cheap enough and plentiful enough that anyone wanting to code an emulator for the purpose of cheap gaming has the intelligence quotient of a fruit fly. And with a little bit of effort, any PSX game can be copied and played on a minimally-modified PSX. Downloading a PSX ISO over the internet is pretty much impractical for Joe Sixpack. Even if he had a decent broadband connection, the ISO images are incredibly difficult to find.
And about PSX-compatible machine... it will NEVER happen in the conumer market. Sony holds all kinds of copyrights and patents that deal with how the PSX works, thereby making it impossible for someone to create a working clone. Don't believe me? Does the Apple Computer Corporation ring a bell?
As a matter of fact, I can already see Sony sueing The Playstation Documentation Project within a few weeks, claiming that the information violates some law dealing with trade secrets.
No.
An SRPM doesn't imply program source... an SRPM is a collection of the files used to build a binary RPM. This makes the building of a binary rpm package on different architectures and OSes several orders of magnitude easier.
nVidia states on their site that the drivers are binary-only.
Rob, quit benefitting the cybersquatters.
And as a side note, the space shuttle you refer to was actually named after its fictional Star Trek namesake, ye olde NCC-1701. I saw a picture of it once with the Star Trek cast standing in the foreground at some type of chrisening ceremony.
I work on military aircraft avionics, which are (theoretically speaking) not really a lot different than space navigation systems. Right now most of our aircraft are still using 60's and 70's technology in the avionics systems.
Anyway, in a system with a glass cockpit, they will usually have a separate computer for every main function (navigation, guidance, heading, etc), and each computer will run on its own custom hardware. Software usually comes from dozens of banks of ROM chips. Although, if this system is still being designed from scratch, or was recently, then I don't see why they wouldn't use some sort of small RAID arrangement. If it even runs an OS (at least, how *we* define OS), chances are it will be very low level, and custom-coded by either NASA or a high-profile aviation company like Lockheed. Remember, custom (and very expensive) hardwear.
If they *were* to run a PC-type OS in this glass cockpit, I forsee them choosing either MS-DOS, (hey, it's been proven stable) or some Unix variant or clone known to be very stable (BSD?).
I'm almost certain they aren't going with Linux because don't you think they would have announced it by now? I mean, Open Source == Publicity these days.
And to you guys worring about Wince... 1) NASA is not really that stupid and I doubt it could handle shuttle avionics anyway 2) There are always two or three backup systems for every major system.
NOTE: This is all pure speculation which therefore means that it will probably be moderated down as flamebait.
My favourite quote out of the article, by far:
But a closer look at AOL's content, services, and business practices leads us to wonder if AOL's dominance will further open the Web, or just turn it into another homogenized, lifeless medium. (Editor's Note: CNET provides content for AOL's Computing channel.)
I just can't help but bust out laughing while falling out of my chair when I try to imagine the look on the editors face as he was typing that one out...
That's all fine and dandy, but the Napster program that people install on their computers is not a server. It is a client. A Napster server acts only as a live database for all of the clients currently connected. From there on, everyone acts pretty much as a peer-to-peer client.
This is just plain sick. I lasted a whole 20 seconds on that site before my mouse found itself hovering over the File|Close menu item...
Then what would you rather he offer them as evidence of his point of view? I don't see anyone else in this entire thread doing anything about personal freedom and rights. All I see, (for the most part), is a lot of whining.
I'm absolutely sick and tired of seeing Jon Katz go out on a limb for stories like this, only to be ridiculed further down in the comments. He is certainly not you're everyday columnist. Katz actually takes action on the things he writes about, whereas every AC and his dog would rather just discuss it and mull it over with each other. He even got Pinkerton Corp. to revise their policy (however slight) and clarify some of the more important points on their website.
Jon, if you read this, I commend you for your actions. I'd like to drop you an email someday if ever I come up with something worthwhile to say.
Since we're talking about shoes and quality, I'd like to iterate what I discovered the last time I bought a pair of shoes.
:P). Well guess what? I found an awesome looking pair of Airwalk clones that were only $20! They have no name on them except for a tag on the inside, but look pretty damn cool. I've had them since chirstmas and so far they show no signs of wear, except for being a little dirty.
:P
:P
The only kind of shoes I will wear are ones of the Airwalk or Vans style. (Lowtops, suede-like material) When I went looking for some, even at supposed bargain stores, the cheapest I could find them for was $50, and those were styles I didn't even like. Somewhere within the last few years, Airwalk and Vans must have gotten popular or something because their prices were nearly double what they used to be. So disgruntled, I was about to walk out of the mall, but figured I'd try Payless (no, this isn't an endorsement.
So the moral here is that something that doesn't have to cost a lot of money to be high quality. And many times the stuff that is high priced isn't worth half of what you pay for it. Case in point, my Tekram SCSI card.
Just occured to me, that this is probably a LOT off-topic.