Look, it's more of a computer and systems issue than protecting innocent minds from classified spillage. If someone, on an unclassified US government computer, downloads a classified document, then the computer has to be sanitized. The stress on the IT staff would be enormous, and the exposure of the unclass network to classified would result in security violations. Yes, one might say that hey, it's out in public, why is it classified? Because the process of declassification does not include "because it's out in public". Just because something is exposed doesn't mean it's suddenly unclassified material; the reasons for classification still apply, and the expiration of that information (by default 10 years from production) still applies. This isn't anything I expect people who haven't worked in a classified environment to automatically know, and clearly, the press has no clue.
Note, Alienware (http://www.alienware.com) is still offering XP as an option on new systems. They see the writing on the wall, I imagine, given their target audience.
I run WGA, but then I use my Windows machine for games, and my Ubuntu server for everything else. It's definitely a specific-use machine, and as such, the only MS product on it is OEM-installed XP Pro. So... unless there's something about WGA that I'm missing with that limited setup, it's fine for/me/. YMMV.
I find it funny that people who are wary of online banking (not necessarily the OP here) seem to have no problem handing their credit card to the waitor and letting them walk out of sight with it. Much less expertise needed to steal that one!
I have a Sharp Zaurus C-3100, and it's a sweet little machine. Sure it doesn't have a full size keyboard or screen, but it really does everything this thing says it does, including the instant on and off. Plus I just attach a folding USB keyboard if I want, though I find the built-in keyboard is very easy and fast to thumb through. Batterylife is extreme, too. Normal PDA-like usage, I don't plug it in for recharge for at least 2 weeks.
Alas, they stopped making the Zaurus recently, even in Japan. Didn't Palm notice the fate of the Zaurus, or did they really think making a laptop-sized Zaurus would fare better in the market?
Agreed. What I noticed is that the MMORPGs offer a whole lot of different experiences and fun things to do, but with roleplay, a character concept does not include all of them. I found myself playing two games: one in which I kept to a character concept and background, and another where I went off and killed stuff and did things that would make absolutely no sense if they were part of a story. So in effect, one could easily get that from a single-player game, if that's the draw for them.
Maybe it's an issue of lack of flexibility in the right places. I come from text MU*s for roleplay. I didn't need to find a mob that dropped a certain armor with the look that fit my mental idea; I wrote it in prose. That's kind of the flexibility I mean.
Of course, I usually play both games, each for their strengths.:)
Yep, I have a Deck (the red one) and/love/ it. The keys are a joy to type on, and I was at normal typing speed with it right from minute one. The letters on the keys glow so you can see them in the dark, and, thusly, they don't wear off the keys with heavy use.
Love it. Would be hard pressed to replace my Deck even if I wanted to speed 4 figures for the Optimus. Would highly recommend for a realistic keyb.
I don't know about widespread or anything, but I know on the Sony Star Wars Galaxies MMORPG (which I don't play anymore), I stopped taking advantage of the player bounties because, as a female player and character, I was harranged with some pretty foul and offensive language by my targets (we're not talking the b**** word, but the c*** word, which was hardly necessary). I'm not easily offended, but it's hardly Star Wars RP to use any of the insults, and hardly in the spirit of play to do so.
In general, maybe people forget there's real humans on the other side, and do things they wouldn't dream of doing to people face to face. Not just in name calling and whatnot, but in general, the "that toon is controlled by a person and not the game" doesn't occur to a lot of people. *shrug*
I didn't read the responses to this AC's post, but I have to say something for and against the reasoning.
1) The American public cannot tell the media what to report. If the local paper isn't covering something enough, one cannot phone up the editor and tell him to do more stories on ____. Just not how it works here, and I don't think it works that way in other countries. Adversely...
2) The American media reports on what it's reader base wants to read. Independent studies of media bias by watchdog organizations (sorry, not at home and can't cite their websites, alas) have shown that political media bias is related to the existing political bias in their circulation areas. So indeed, papers pay attention when their subscriptions slip because people read something else that is reporting what they want to know about, and this is how one affects news.
So really, in a way, AC is right. It's not making news because the media doesn't think their subscribers are interested, for whatever reason (usually polls).
The answer: If one has access to the Internet, you can read about just about anything without being forced to read at the whims of your majority around where you live. It just takes effort, something people in general are loathe to do for their reasons. As someone who actually reads Gonzales hearings transcripts... I guess the latest scandel is more interesting reading for most.
I'm not sure how that helps people whose numbers don't work and who are using a fresh install of GAIM (me!). But I'm sure they won't speak to one of "those clients".;)
A coworker familiar with the manufacture of jet engines mentioned there's a requirement for car manufacturers (and Prat-Whitney engines) to provide parts for their products for at least seven years. So far I've only found a mention that "both US and foreign car makers are only required by law to provide replacement parts for something like seven years ( http://www.scca.com/garage/forum/forum_posts.asp?T ID=5003&get=last )" and a lot of mention of Lemon Laws in various states.
I wonder how long it will be before Microsoft is put in the same catagory as Ford Motor and Lockheed Martin for supplier of vital and expensive products.:P
I used to work for one of those hosting companies back in the mid-90s. Porn sites were, indeed, big business; about 30% of the servers in the machine room were some porn company or another. They were big clients, until sales noticed they tended to get a big machine and run as long as they could before they were turned off for non-payment. Then the porn site moved to the next hosting company, and so on. It was big money, too, through paying for links to other sites, i.e., everytime a pop-up in the pornado blinked up, someone got closer to paying cash for their new Porche.
On the other hand, I believe porn drove the big bandwidth push back then, just as the gaming industry pushes hardware advances. Who needed broadband-level bandwidth in 1997 for web-browsing, anyway?;)
FYI, the new passports featuring RFID chips also have Faraday cage-like covers to block the transmission when the passport is closed. At least one article:
Believe maybe these days, people have also forgotten that just because it's on the internet, doesn't mean it's true. Press releases and even blogs now seem to have the same "authority" as paper printed newspapers, when people who actually check the facts know better. Fact checking takes more effort than most people want to do, ergo, the majority of people who read RIAA's weird claims will believe they are true.
For some reason, this tactic smells suspiciously like the same odds-are-someone-will-believe tactic that spammers and Nigerian scams use.
Anyone remember taking their Halloween candy to the local hospital to have it X-rayed for free, because moms were sure evil people were putting razor blades in apples and poisoning candy? I mean, I don't think America has changed all that much when it comes to projecting imagination to the point of irrational paranoia, and from a little research, it seems that persistant urban legend started and survived without much to prove it.
I'd also like to see more factual discussion of why people are scared of this. I know that in Washington DC, the Metro system linked their rechargable Metro cards to real names and other personal information (to be used if you ever lost it and wanted to get the money on it back). Having a private company, which has less regulations about what can and can't be done with private information than the federal government, be able to track your movement around on their system didn't raise any howls at the time, and in the past *eight years* it's been in place there. So what?
I fail to see how the average law-abiding citizen's rights are threatened by an ID card that could potentially tell the federal government information about activities that violate no law. If you're worried that any illegal activities might be exposed by these cards, well...
There isn't this kind of outcry about passports and international travel, and that information is collected by people who don't have your best interests at heart. And you know, I bet a week of dumpster diving your trash would tell someone a lot more potentially harmful things about your habits than an ID card would, just as handing your credit card to the waitor is much less secure and easier to take advantage of than low-grade encryption on a shopping website.
There needs to be a little better perspective here. Irrational fear and recreational paranoia are not good.
I've had a SL account for little over a year now, and know a few people who are making in the four and five figures a year profit from it (mostly land). My impression is that unless you're actually doing a scam, it's very time consuming to make a lot of money. People join thinking that just because it's a game, and it has a real money output if they make enough in-game, it must be less work and time than it would be to make money in the real world. I'm seeing that that just isn't true. Most of the big earners I know end up spending huge amounts of time tending their business, so it's far from get-rich-quick.
Me, I keep out of the earning part of the game. Like any entertainment, you should spend only what you think the entertainment is worth. The whole idea of it becoming so important because of earnings seems... I got a full time job already!
Most people are getting Vista with a new computer and are junking old systems irrespective. Also you don't have to junk it at all just because you choose to upgrade. I've a 7 year old Thinkpad that happily runs vector.
The "most people" assumption seems to ignore the corporations and government entities running XP/2000 right now, who *will* have to budget a lot of money, plus the deployment, to meet the hardware requirements of Vista. True, the average home user will just get it bundled with their next PC purchase, but that's not all of the demographic, nor, I'm guessing, the money.
The large scale users will simply wait until they upgrade hardware in a few years. That may give those organizations the time to test all their own apps and custom stuff for usability in Vista. That would be another hidden cost; paying to have those apps redone in whatever way to work with Vista.
XP for another five years+, in that case. It seems like a lot of money to spend on a multimedia machine that office workers don't need.
There's actually a fairly big culture along with Jedi Creed. Another main one is Force Academy. While you can call it fiction, the ideas are taken seriously by a lot of people. A tree is a tree, but if you come up with a religion while sitting under it, it's immortal. It's all the people and ideas, using what they see and what it prompts them to think. I'm not surprised that it takes on the trappings of a religion.
It's always seemed to me, with this hate item and gun and game violence that they're missing the point. Items don't cause hate, people do. It would be a far better thing to -teach people- why it's bad, what to do, so coming into contact with items are handled in a sane and civilized way. This kind of bassackwards idea that games/guns/hate_items kill people just covers up the fact that people aren't being taught the sane way of dealing with it, and a fraction of them act on it.
It takes an educated mind to entertain a notion without accepting it. Banning's just a lazy copout to a deeper problem.
I asked someone in the know about this and he says that there's a clause in the law that says if you claim the data is pre-publication, it's covered under first amendment rights and they can -copy- it but not take it all away. Basically, since we all publish stuff on the web, it's very plausible.
Oh, and call a lawyer, he says.:) Hope this helps folks if it happens to them.
Great article, Jon, liked reading it. I do plan on voting this year and have been bringing it to the attention, at least of people around me to do so. One of the frequent responses I get to questions about voting for Nader is "I don't want to vote for him, he doesn't have a chance at winning." So, from this, do people vote to be on the winning side or do they vote what they feel is right?
I don't know of this is a usual battle between external influences and internal drive, or maybe people view it as a social contest. Maybe these are the people who support their local football team only when they're winning. It seems like a support founded on insecurity to me.
What a scary article. It really does show how threatened the music intermediation industry feels by the digital age; I didn't get the feeling that Sony was really interested in merging with traffic, just fiddling with the road signs.
What they and other of their sort needs to understand is that there -is- still a future that will make them money, just not within the old business model. The day media went digital, they should have felt the clock ticking on the old dogma. They currently make their money by mediation of music. That is going away. I'd really like to see some other proposals on business models that take into account that information can't be contained as easily as it used to be.
I'm all for testing limits, someone out there has to do it (whether you have a lot of money or just a workspace in your garage), but one question comes to mind about the push for more devices running Linux in the home, etc.
Is the shortage of UNIX-savvy folks still a problem, and if so, is the gap between demand and supply of UNIX people widening with all these new applications? Growth market for us UNIX weenies, but if the plumber has to be a sysadmin in the future, are we going to run out of plumbers?
Slashdot Mirror
Look, it's more of a computer and systems issue than protecting innocent minds from classified spillage. If someone, on an unclassified US government computer, downloads a classified document, then the computer has to be sanitized. The stress on the IT staff would be enormous, and the exposure of the unclass network to classified would result in security violations. Yes, one might say that hey, it's out in public, why is it classified? Because the process of declassification does not include "because it's out in public". Just because something is exposed doesn't mean it's suddenly unclassified material; the reasons for classification still apply, and the expiration of that information (by default 10 years from production) still applies. This isn't anything I expect people who haven't worked in a classified environment to automatically know, and clearly, the press has no clue.
Think of the new realms origami could explore... :D
Note, Alienware (http://www.alienware.com) is still offering XP as an option on new systems. They see the writing on the wall, I imagine, given their target audience.
I run WGA, but then I use my Windows machine for games, and my Ubuntu server for everything else. It's definitely a specific-use machine, and as such, the only MS product on it is OEM-installed XP Pro. So... unless there's something about WGA that I'm missing with that limited setup, it's fine for /me/. YMMV.
I find it funny that people who are wary of online banking (not necessarily the OP here) seem to have no problem handing their credit card to the waitor and letting them walk out of sight with it. Much less expertise needed to steal that one!
I have a Sharp Zaurus C-3100, and it's a sweet little machine. Sure it doesn't have a full size keyboard or screen, but it really does everything this thing says it does, including the instant on and off. Plus I just attach a folding USB keyboard if I want, though I find the built-in keyboard is very easy and fast to thumb through. Batterylife is extreme, too. Normal PDA-like usage, I don't plug it in for recharge for at least 2 weeks.
Alas, they stopped making the Zaurus recently, even in Japan. Didn't Palm notice the fate of the Zaurus, or did they really think making a laptop-sized Zaurus would fare better in the market?
Agreed. What I noticed is that the MMORPGs offer a whole lot of different experiences and fun things to do, but with roleplay, a character concept does not include all of them. I found myself playing two games: one in which I kept to a character concept and background, and another where I went off and killed stuff and did things that would make absolutely no sense if they were part of a story. So in effect, one could easily get that from a single-player game, if that's the draw for them.
:)
Maybe it's an issue of lack of flexibility in the right places. I come from text MU*s for roleplay. I didn't need to find a mob that dropped a certain armor with the look that fit my mental idea; I wrote it in prose. That's kind of the flexibility I mean.
Of course, I usually play both games, each for their strengths.
Yep, I have a Deck (the red one) and /love/ it. The keys are a joy to type on, and I was at normal typing speed with it right from minute one. The letters on the keys glow so you can see them in the dark, and, thusly, they don't wear off the keys with heavy use.
Love it. Would be hard pressed to replace my Deck even if I wanted to speed 4 figures for the Optimus. Would highly recommend for a realistic keyb.
I don't know about widespread or anything, but I know on the Sony Star Wars Galaxies MMORPG (which I don't play anymore), I stopped taking advantage of the player bounties because, as a female player and character, I was harranged with some pretty foul and offensive language by my targets (we're not talking the b**** word, but the c*** word, which was hardly necessary). I'm not easily offended, but it's hardly Star Wars RP to use any of the insults, and hardly in the spirit of play to do so.
In general, maybe people forget there's real humans on the other side, and do things they wouldn't dream of doing to people face to face. Not just in name calling and whatnot, but in general, the "that toon is controlled by a person and not the game" doesn't occur to a lot of people. *shrug*
I didn't read the responses to this AC's post, but I have to say something for and against the reasoning.
1) The American public cannot tell the media what to report. If the local paper isn't covering something enough, one cannot phone up the editor and tell him to do more stories on ____. Just not how it works here, and I don't think it works that way in other countries. Adversely...
2) The American media reports on what it's reader base wants to read. Independent studies of media bias by watchdog organizations (sorry, not at home and can't cite their websites, alas) have shown that political media bias is related to the existing political bias in their circulation areas. So indeed, papers pay attention when their subscriptions slip because people read something else that is reporting what they want to know about, and this is how one affects news.
So really, in a way, AC is right. It's not making news because the media doesn't think their subscribers are interested, for whatever reason (usually polls).
The answer: If one has access to the Internet, you can read about just about anything without being forced to read at the whims of your majority around where you live. It just takes effort, something people in general are loathe to do for their reasons. As someone who actually reads Gonzales hearings transcripts... I guess the latest scandel is more interesting reading for most.
I'm not sure how that helps people whose numbers don't work and who are using a fresh install of GAIM (me!). But I'm sure they won't speak to one of "those clients". ;)
A coworker familiar with the manufacture of jet engines mentioned there's a requirement for car manufacturers (and Prat-Whitney engines) to provide parts for their products for at least seven years. So far I've only found a mention that "both US and foreign car makers are only required by law to provide replacement parts for something like seven years ( http://www.scca.com/garage/forum/forum_posts.asp?T ID=5003&get=last )" and a lot of mention of Lemon Laws in various states.
_ (business)
:P
I also came across this about "planned obsolecence" that may be interesting in this discussion, as applies to Windows and dropping support for XP to force upgrades: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence
I wonder how long it will be before Microsoft is put in the same catagory as Ford Motor and Lockheed Martin for supplier of vital and expensive products.
I used to work for one of those hosting companies back in the mid-90s. Porn sites were, indeed, big business; about 30% of the servers in the machine room were some porn company or another. They were big clients, until sales noticed they tended to get a big machine and run as long as they could before they were turned off for non-payment. Then the porn site moved to the next hosting company, and so on. It was big money, too, through paying for links to other sites, i.e., everytime a pop-up in the pornado blinked up, someone got closer to paying cash for their new Porche.
;)
On the other hand, I believe porn drove the big bandwidth push back then, just as the gaming industry pushes hardware advances. Who needed broadband-level bandwidth in 1997 for web-browsing, anyway?
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,120292-page,1/ar ticle.html
From article: "Texas Instruments, a major manufacturer of RFID chips, confirmed that a properly designed cover could block the RFID signal.
'Stitching a metal web into the cover creates a Faraday cage,' says V.C. Kumar, manager for emerging markets at TI. 'It kills the RFID signal.'"
I'm no expert on the things, so defer to others on if the presentation addresses this suggested solution or not.
Believe maybe these days, people have also forgotten that just because it's on the internet, doesn't mean it's true. Press releases and even blogs now seem to have the same "authority" as paper printed newspapers, when people who actually check the facts know better. Fact checking takes more effort than most people want to do, ergo, the majority of people who read RIAA's weird claims will believe they are true.
For some reason, this tactic smells suspiciously like the same odds-are-someone-will-believe tactic that spammers and Nigerian scams use.
Anyone remember taking their Halloween candy to the local hospital to have it X-rayed for free, because moms were sure evil people were putting razor blades in apples and poisoning candy? I mean, I don't think America has changed all that much when it comes to projecting imagination to the point of irrational paranoia, and from a little research, it seems that persistant urban legend started and survived without much to prove it.
Wikipedia Entry (YMMV): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoned_candy_scare
Maybe we just have more media outlets with nothing better to write about these days.
I'd also like to see more factual discussion of why people are scared of this. I know that in Washington DC, the Metro system linked their rechargable Metro cards to real names and other personal information (to be used if you ever lost it and wanted to get the money on it back). Having a private company, which has less regulations about what can and can't be done with private information than the federal government, be able to track your movement around on their system didn't raise any howls at the time, and in the past *eight years* it's been in place there. So what?
I fail to see how the average law-abiding citizen's rights are threatened by an ID card that could potentially tell the federal government information about activities that violate no law. If you're worried that any illegal activities might be exposed by these cards, well...
There isn't this kind of outcry about passports and international travel, and that information is collected by people who don't have your best interests at heart. And you know, I bet a week of dumpster diving your trash would tell someone a lot more potentially harmful things about your habits than an ID card would, just as handing your credit card to the waitor is much less secure and easier to take advantage of than low-grade encryption on a shopping website.
There needs to be a little better perspective here. Irrational fear and recreational paranoia are not good.
I've had a SL account for little over a year now, and know a few people who are making in the four and five figures a year profit from it (mostly land). My impression is that unless you're actually doing a scam, it's very time consuming to make a lot of money. People join thinking that just because it's a game, and it has a real money output if they make enough in-game, it must be less work and time than it would be to make money in the real world. I'm seeing that that just isn't true. Most of the big earners I know end up spending huge amounts of time tending their business, so it's far from get-rich-quick.
Me, I keep out of the earning part of the game. Like any entertainment, you should spend only what you think the entertainment is worth. The whole idea of it becoming so important because of earnings seems... I got a full time job already!
The "most people" assumption seems to ignore the corporations and government entities running XP/2000 right now, who *will* have to budget a lot of money, plus the deployment, to meet the hardware requirements of Vista. True, the average home user will just get it bundled with their next PC purchase, but that's not all of the demographic, nor, I'm guessing, the money.
The large scale users will simply wait until they upgrade hardware in a few years. That may give those organizations the time to test all their own apps and custom stuff for usability in Vista. That would be another hidden cost; paying to have those apps redone in whatever way to work with Vista.
XP for another five years+, in that case. It seems like a lot of money to spend on a multimedia machine that office workers don't need.
There's actually a fairly big culture along with Jedi Creed. Another main one is Force Academy. While you can call it fiction, the ideas are taken seriously by a lot of people. A tree is a tree, but if you come up with a religion while sitting under it, it's immortal. It's all the people and ideas, using what they see and what it prompts them to think. I'm not surprised that it takes on the trappings of a religion.
It's always seemed to me, with this hate item and gun and game violence that they're missing the point. Items don't cause hate, people do. It would be a far better thing to -teach people- why it's bad, what to do, so coming into contact with items are handled in a sane and civilized way. This kind of bassackwards idea that games/guns/hate_items kill people just covers up the fact that people aren't being taught the sane way of dealing with it, and a fraction of them act on it.
It takes an educated mind to entertain a notion without accepting it. Banning's just a lazy copout to a deeper problem.
Pym
I asked someone in the know about this and he says that there's a clause in the law that says if you claim the data is pre-publication, it's covered under first amendment rights and they can -copy- it but not take it all away. Basically, since we all publish stuff on the web, it's very plausible.
:) Hope this helps folks if it happens to them.
Oh, and call a lawyer, he says.
Great article, Jon, liked reading it. I do plan on voting this year and have been bringing it to the attention, at least of people around me to do so. One of the frequent responses I get to questions about voting for Nader is "I don't want to vote for him, he doesn't have a chance at winning." So, from this, do people vote to be on the winning side or do they vote what they feel is right?
I don't know of this is a usual battle between external influences and internal drive, or maybe people view it as a social contest. Maybe these are the people who support their local football team only when they're winning. It seems like a support founded on insecurity to me.
pym
What a scary article. It really does show how threatened the music intermediation industry feels by the digital age; I didn't get the feeling that Sony was really interested in merging with traffic, just fiddling with the road signs.
What they and other of their sort needs to understand is that there -is- still a future that will make them money, just not within the old business model. The day media went digital, they should have felt the clock ticking on the old dogma. They currently make their money by mediation of music. That is going away. I'd really like to see some other proposals on business models that take into account that information can't be contained as easily as it used to be.
I'm all for testing limits, someone out there has to do it (whether you have a lot of money or just a workspace in your garage), but one question comes to mind about the push for more devices running Linux in the home, etc.
Is the shortage of UNIX-savvy folks still a problem, and if so, is the gap between demand and supply of UNIX people widening with all these new applications? Growth market for us UNIX weenies, but if the plumber has to be a sysadmin in the future, are we going to run out of plumbers?