I love a piece of abandonware for use while programming. I don't like the bloat and confusion of normal IDE, so I started using notepad and gcc. I hated that notepad was so basic it was hard to code with, so I found this tiny, fast, programming aware version of notepad. It can do important tasks such as line numbering, syntax highlighting, and indentation fixing.
http://student.acu.edu/~jhg03a/jfe.exe
The big companies know that trying to protect their content is extremely difficult to impossible. They have several significant factors to deal with including not stepping on the user's rights (Sony rootkit anyone?), compatibility across a wide market of hardware with limited to no ability to change (I'm thinking CSS and now AACS), and allowing physical control of the medium (people believe that if they can hold it, they own it, and can do what they want with it).
As I see it the point of encryption isn't really protect the content against everyone, just the average joe. A DRM system isn't really useless until the easy to use tools are available to defeat it. There will always be an elite group out to break the encryption and given enough time and access to an unchanging medium, they will succeed every time. So if this small group is able to constantly rip content and share it, they will never be any match for the millions who can do the same with a one click wizard. In addition, sharing of some content is slowing down due to the immense size of data (Are you really willing to wait 2 months for an HD-DVD iso?).
I'm just waiting for the day that content companies start to A. Start taking advantage of the p2p bandwagon and adapt or B. Stop selling content, and start leasing it instead. Of course option B is broken too until we trust the magic black box beaming the content directly into our brains, due to analog recoding.
I'm a constant listener to [not going to shameless plug].net. It's a small radio station out of Denton, TX using shoutcast to get it's music out there. The group that runs the station caters to a small clientel of about 150 internationally at any moment anime/jrock/jpop listeners. Also they take great strides to make sure all the music they play is correctly licenced and plays accoring to US law. Unfortunatly there is also a significant number of pirate stations who do not take the proper steps to legalize their music.
If [not going to shameless plug].net were to participate in the silence, all it would do is push the listeners to other pirated stations (promoting what the RIAA wants to stop). Instead, they added one more ad that talks about the effort today.
If the laws do change and start gouging the stations [not going to shameless plug].net is going to be forced to shutdown. The station can barely keep up it's $375 a month costs licencing costs now, even with donations, premier service, and advertisements.
My university was plagued by unrelieability in several of its web services. After we made the transition there has been significantly reduced downtime for endusers http://www.acu.edu/news/2007/070410_google_launch. html. One of the more beneficial changes for us was that students don't have their email expire after they graduate.
There are only a few drawbacks to the switch I've seen sofar. Migrating from one email server to another is not always easy. For us, it involved basically doing multiple pop3 fetches to move old email. The other drawback I've noticed is, while google may boast higher reliability, there is still one crucial piece that may have problems from time to time, Single Sign On (SSO). Google has to be able to cooperate with your SSO server sucessfully to syncronize properly.
The most interesting side effect I've noticed is that professors nolonger have any reason not to accept the odf and ods file formats, thanks to Google Docs&Spreadsheets. Definate boost for open file formats.
If they want you to install illegal software against your wishes:
1. Get documentation of your attempts to convince them otherwise
2. Get more documentation of them instructing you to install illegal software
3. Document how, when, and against your wishes you followed their instructions
4a. I'm sure there are lots of legal organizations that would like to give them a royal depantsing for trying to use illegal software, you might consider calling them.
4b. If you just can't bring yourself to blow the whistle, keep the documentation safe in secret (It may turn out handy later).
Overall I would think you must consider that a company wanting you to install illegal software is probably also going to be a company to wipe their hands of the situation and point the finger at you when the feds come knocking.
You might also suggest that your documentation is highly tied to the police. If you got fired, a manila envelope might find its way to the right person's desk.;)
I'm confused why they reviewed beryl on a distribution that doesn't inherently support it. I would have suggested using Sabayon Linux. The live dvd itself supports AIGLX and XGL running beryl with almost no configuration, and is easily installed.
I really don't think that government can effectively tax virtual money. Remember that these games are not just in the USA, but in almost every country in the world. I don't believe that the US gov't can really tell a 14 year old Chinese student to pay them money because he spent 50 yen on WoW gold.
Assume that the US does figure out a way to tax the US based online purchase shops for items. All this will do is force people to use the one country that doesn't enforce the same tax program as the USA.
I don't disagree with the principles of the article. The transfer of real money to virtual money is an untapped tax revenue. I just don't think it can be done as it is a unanimous international decision. I'm more interested in seeing how effectively one can launder money (all mob style) through virtual currency trading.
Sorry Mr. Taxman, go farm your gold somewhere else.
I'm a personal fan of the linksys wrt54g bug that let you load your own firmware. Not only did this send the sales for this model through the roof, it also got several books published on how to hack the thing to bits. Eventually linksys caught on and got greedy around version 4 when they started cheaping out on the hardware and closing the firmware bugs. Now they market the version 3 as the WRT54GL (linux edition) for $20 more.
*currently using an overclocked wrt54g v3 with extra fans and a 2GB sd card for storage running openwrt*
What if this "cracker" was just a clever ploy by the HD-DVD industry? If people are able to rip (protect) their own property, wouldn't this just encourage more people to buy HD-DVD over blue-ray? It would be an interesting effect to see HD-DVD sales to skyrocket over blue-ray just because people felt they could do with their property what they want.
Could this just be a huge MPAA case study to see how big a marketing element drm-free media is?
I believe in the philosophy that the intellegence of a group is inversly proportional to the number of people multiplied by amount of communication (or sometimes the lack thereof).
So I just noticed that the "Master Code" is equal to the password for the Air Shield.
On a lesser note, I need to remember to change my luggage combination now.
Is anyone else seeing a similarity between the patent treadmil and nuclear war? If a company is to survive, they mist patent grab as much as possible, thus blocking innovation. And since everyone is doing it, it compounds the problem. The only viable solution is for total patent disarmement to open up research, trade, and commerce of items.
I read this and thought what are these people thinking.
TALC - How does this concept not get ripped to shreds when a script could be used to sway the "danger sign" values. Even better, why not have the bad neighborhoods spoof the "danger rating". Doesn't this kind of rating (assuming it is implemented) just lead to web neighborhood profiling? I forsee that somekind of legislature would try and get rid of these so called "bad [internet] neighborhoods" or even better throw money at them to help make them better. A much better solution to this problem is to create a successful user awareness program that would teach users how to recognize these "bad neighborhoods" (I've done that very thing when I taught 6th grade computers).
Virtual Network Design - It isn't a bad idea, but poorly implemented. How often does the common Joe Smith need to type DNS entries and TCP/IP addresses, other than when they are http://www..com? When my parents were trying to set up a home network the hardware manufacturers provide excellent, easy to use documentation and tools. The better solution would be design a common, graphical interfacing for all hardware connections (which could extend beyond networking possibly and show users what cords go where and why).
Bonfire - What if what students are doing is wrong? It sounds alot to me like somebody created a dynamic box linked to an properly updated FAQ page. Do you really want to try and show a user how I perform common tasks (the most complicated and customized method is best for me)? If you really want to show off data mining skills try teaching users how much data can be collected about them by using publicly availible information. I've had extremely good responses at my college by simply doing research and learning what I could about a total stranger on campus then using them as an example in a data privacy lecture (be sure to tell them you are not a stalker, but somebody else could be).
People with this much education don't have to compete in a silly competition for $50k a year! Tech jobs are plentiful and a PhD will put these people making much more a year than this.
This whole thing sounds alot like a technology version of American Inventor.
Didn't Disney try this scheme once before and had it totally flop.
If I remember correctly, the major problems were that 1.Few wanted to buy the single use DVD's 2.People were cracking them for unlimited use (therefore defeating the purpose) 3. Environmentalists went up in a storm over the fact that we were willing to be so wasteful with a substance that isn't exactly Earth Friendly.
I work for several non-profit organizations in Texas and Tennessee. The main one I work with Healing Hands International Inc. which will accept most all computers to be reconfigured and sent to third world countries to be used by missionaries to train locals for future growth in the technological field and service industries. While I know not every organization is like this one, check your local area non-profit groups to see if they would like to accept them as a donation (or tax writeoff:) )
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I love a piece of abandonware for use while programming. I don't like the bloat and confusion of normal IDE, so I started using notepad and gcc. I hated that notepad was so basic it was hard to code with, so I found this tiny, fast, programming aware version of notepad. It can do important tasks such as line numbering, syntax highlighting, and indentation fixing. http://student.acu.edu/~jhg03a/jfe.exe
The big companies know that trying to protect their content is extremely difficult to impossible. They have several significant factors to deal with including not stepping on the user's rights (Sony rootkit anyone?), compatibility across a wide market of hardware with limited to no ability to change (I'm thinking CSS and now AACS), and allowing physical control of the medium (people believe that if they can hold it, they own it, and can do what they want with it).
As I see it the point of encryption isn't really protect the content against everyone, just the average joe. A DRM system isn't really useless until the easy to use tools are available to defeat it. There will always be an elite group out to break the encryption and given enough time and access to an unchanging medium, they will succeed every time. So if this small group is able to constantly rip content and share it, they will never be any match for the millions who can do the same with a one click wizard. In addition, sharing of some content is slowing down due to the immense size of data (Are you really willing to wait 2 months for an HD-DVD iso?).
I'm just waiting for the day that content companies start to A. Start taking advantage of the p2p bandwagon and adapt or B. Stop selling content, and start leasing it instead. Of course option B is broken too until we trust the magic black box beaming the content directly into our brains, due to analog recoding.
Yes, if your station is properly licenced those costs will skyrocket. If you arn't licenced then shame on you.
I'm a constant listener to [not going to shameless plug].net. It's a small radio station out of Denton, TX using shoutcast to get it's music out there. The group that runs the station caters to a small clientel of about 150 internationally at any moment anime/jrock/jpop listeners. Also they take great strides to make sure all the music they play is correctly licenced and plays accoring to US law. Unfortunatly there is also a significant number of pirate stations who do not take the proper steps to legalize their music.
If [not going to shameless plug].net were to participate in the silence, all it would do is push the listeners to other pirated stations (promoting what the RIAA wants to stop). Instead, they added one more ad that talks about the effort today.
If the laws do change and start gouging the stations [not going to shameless plug].net is going to be forced to shutdown. The station can barely keep up it's $375 a month costs licencing costs now, even with donations, premier service, and advertisements.
The new google partner program doesn't just benefit corperations. There is a very tempting for educational institutions aswell http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/admins/edu_be nefits.html with benefits such as being free.
. html. One of the more beneficial changes for us was that students don't have their email expire after they graduate.
My university was plagued by unrelieability in several of its web services. After we made the transition there has been significantly reduced downtime for endusers http://www.acu.edu/news/2007/070410_google_launch
There are only a few drawbacks to the switch I've seen sofar. Migrating from one email server to another is not always easy. For us, it involved basically doing multiple pop3 fetches to move old email. The other drawback I've noticed is, while google may boast higher reliability, there is still one crucial piece that may have problems from time to time, Single Sign On (SSO). Google has to be able to cooperate with your SSO server sucessfully to syncronize properly.
The most interesting side effect I've noticed is that professors nolonger have any reason not to accept the odf and ods file formats, thanks to Google Docs&Spreadsheets. Definate boost for open file formats.
If they want you to install illegal software against your wishes:
;)
1. Get documentation of your attempts to convince them otherwise
2. Get more documentation of them instructing you to install illegal software
3. Document how, when, and against your wishes you followed their instructions
4a. I'm sure there are lots of legal organizations that would like to give them a royal depantsing for trying to use illegal software, you might consider calling them.
4b. If you just can't bring yourself to blow the whistle, keep the documentation safe in secret (It may turn out handy later).
Overall I would think you must consider that a company wanting you to install illegal software is probably also going to be a company to wipe their hands of the situation and point the finger at you when the feds come knocking.
You might also suggest that your documentation is highly tied to the police. If you got fired, a manila envelope might find its way to the right person's desk.
Just think what would happen if the legal teams for SCO and the RIAA joined forces.
I'm confused why they reviewed beryl on a distribution that doesn't inherently support it. I would have suggested using Sabayon Linux. The live dvd itself supports AIGLX and XGL running beryl with almost no configuration, and is easily installed.
So much for moving my internet radio station to Canada on May 15.
I really don't think that government can effectively tax virtual money. Remember that these games are not just in the USA, but in almost every country in the world. I don't believe that the US gov't can really tell a 14 year old Chinese student to pay them money because he spent 50 yen on WoW gold. Assume that the US does figure out a way to tax the US based online purchase shops for items. All this will do is force people to use the one country that doesn't enforce the same tax program as the USA. I don't disagree with the principles of the article. The transfer of real money to virtual money is an untapped tax revenue. I just don't think it can be done as it is a unanimous international decision. I'm more interested in seeing how effectively one can launder money (all mob style) through virtual currency trading. Sorry Mr. Taxman, go farm your gold somewhere else.
I'm a personal fan of the linksys wrt54g bug that let you load your own firmware. Not only did this send the sales for this model through the roof, it also got several books published on how to hack the thing to bits. Eventually linksys caught on and got greedy around version 4 when they started cheaping out on the hardware and closing the firmware bugs. Now they market the version 3 as the WRT54GL (linux edition) for $20 more.
*currently using an overclocked wrt54g v3 with extra fans and a 2GB sd card for storage running openwrt*
Was the email also asking to help a nigerian prince get surplus oil out of the country?
What if this "cracker" was just a clever ploy by the HD-DVD industry? If people are able to rip (protect) their own property, wouldn't this just encourage more people to buy HD-DVD over blue-ray? It would be an interesting effect to see HD-DVD sales to skyrocket over blue-ray just because people felt they could do with their property what they want. Could this just be a huge MPAA case study to see how big a marketing element drm-free media is?
I don't know about you, but I want the H-bomb shirt to walk around in an airport or police station.
http://www.unitednuclear.com/tees.htm
I believe in the philosophy that the intellegence of a group is inversly proportional to the number of people multiplied by amount of communication (or sometimes the lack thereof).
So I just noticed that the "Master Code" is equal to the password for the Air Shield. On a lesser note, I need to remember to change my luggage combination now.
I wonder how long someone would keep working if their pink slip got caught by the company spam filter....
Is anyone else seeing a similarity between the patent treadmil and nuclear war? If a company is to survive, they mist patent grab as much as possible, thus blocking innovation. And since everyone is doing it, it compounds the problem. The only viable solution is for total patent disarmement to open up research, trade, and commerce of items.
I read this and thought what are these people thinking.
TALC - How does this concept not get ripped to shreds when a script could be used to sway the "danger sign" values. Even better, why not have the bad neighborhoods spoof the "danger rating". Doesn't this kind of rating (assuming it is implemented) just lead to web neighborhood profiling? I forsee that somekind of legislature would try and get rid of these so called "bad [internet] neighborhoods" or even better throw money at them to help make them better. A much better solution to this problem is to create a successful user awareness program that would teach users how to recognize these "bad neighborhoods" (I've done that very thing when I taught 6th grade computers).
Virtual Network Design - It isn't a bad idea, but poorly implemented. How often does the common Joe Smith need to type DNS entries and TCP/IP addresses, other than when they are http://www..com? When my parents were trying to set up a home network the hardware manufacturers provide excellent, easy to use documentation and tools. The better solution would be design a common, graphical interfacing for all hardware connections (which could extend beyond networking possibly and show users what cords go where and why).
Bonfire - What if what students are doing is wrong? It sounds alot to me like somebody created a dynamic box linked to an properly updated FAQ page. Do you really want to try and show a user how I perform common tasks (the most complicated and customized method is best for me)? If you really want to show off data mining skills try teaching users how much data can be collected about them by using publicly availible information. I've had extremely good responses at my college by simply doing research and learning what I could about a total stranger on campus then using them as an example in a data privacy lecture (be sure to tell them you are not a stalker, but somebody else could be).
People with this much education don't have to compete in a silly competition for $50k a year! Tech jobs are plentiful and a PhD will put these people making much more a year than this.
This whole thing sounds alot like a technology version of American Inventor.
Didn't Disney try this scheme once before and had it totally flop. If I remember correctly, the major problems were that 1.Few wanted to buy the single use DVD's 2.People were cracking them for unlimited use (therefore defeating the purpose) 3. Environmentalists went up in a storm over the fact that we were willing to be so wasteful with a substance that isn't exactly Earth Friendly.
Finally I have something to pay the Nigerian royalty with so I can help them get crude oil out of their country.
I work for several non-profit organizations in Texas and Tennessee. The main one I work with Healing Hands International Inc. which will accept most all computers to be reconfigured and sent to third world countries to be used by missionaries to train locals for future growth in the technological field and service industries. While I know not every organization is like this one, check your local area non-profit groups to see if they would like to accept them as a donation (or tax writeoff :) )