After running Linux for over six years, I decided to install FreeBSD on my second hard disk to play with it. I've got plenty of Linux and general Unix experience, but there are still some fairly OS-specific issues that are nice to have documentation for, if only to get pointers. Like, "how do I use VESA modes in console" or "how do I optimize my UDMA drive performance".
Normally, for this sort of information in Linux, I'd look on Google and find a raft of links to mailing list archives, HOWTOs, message board posts, etc. But try this with FreeBSD and the noise level becomes unbearable. Even if you specify that an answer must contain the term "FreeBSD", the odds are that most or all of the replies you get will be linux-centric.
I did wind up finding what I was looking for, but it took awhile. I imagine that for a total newbie this would be a lot more frustrating.
Anyway, the point of this is that Documentation is Good, and that books like this can only help FreeBSD in the face of the overwhelming mindshare that Linux enjoys.
Why do they have to make their "hacker" sound like some kind of autistic retard? The visual picture their descriptions conjure up is of this guy rocking back and forth in his chair as he watches the kernel compile, repeating the GCC output under his breath as it scrolls by and exclaiming "256,981. Yeah definitely. 256,981 lines" when it's all done.
(That, and what are these examples supposed to be about? I know plenty of people who use 2.4 -- I ran the 2.3.X series pretty much for its entire duration and never had the problems they describe. Or maybe I just read the documentation.) But I digress.
Also, their idea of "the hacker ethic" sounds more like "the slacker ethic". Considering that hackers tend to work 80 hour weeks -- and not just because the threat of layoffs looms near -- I find that a bit insulting. Their assertion that "it's my life" has replaced "time is money" etc is largely missing the mark. Yes, a lot of people burned out during the dot-com boom and are no longer willing to live in their cubicles. And that's as it should be, no one should be willing to meet unreasonable demands on their time.
But the fact remains that a lot of conscienscious, dedicated hackers continnue to work a lot more than the standard 40-hour work week, whether it's actually necessary or not. If they're not really working on a company project, they're developing open source on the side, or learning Perl, or teaching themselves how device drivers work, or whatever. And the reason hackers are willing to spend this much time on what is ostensibly their career, is that they find the work interesting and stimulating. The rest of the world finds this amazing because they've settled for a career that doesn't bring them fulfillment. Tough. Do what you love, or do something else.
There's an option in Netscape to specifically turn off Javascript support for mail and news - under the Preferences->Advanced tab.
I've been using that as long as I can remember, mainly to prevent Usenet spam posts from launching browser windows and such. I guess now there's an even better reason for it.
Of course, for mail I use pine and tkrat in console and X respectively, so I dont really care much about this.
So I don't know if I buy your analysis of Dracula. Perhaps the vampire was the embodiment of the dangerous *male* sexuality, rather than the awakening of the dangerous female sexuality
You really don't seem to have read the book carefully, if at all. The theme of the "fallen woman", who are bitten by Dracula and become sexually awakened, is a recurring one throughout the novel. And to the main protagonist (Harker), it is virtually an obsession. None of the male characters in the book are bitten by Dracula; none of them are transformed by events in the way that the women are when they become Dracula's prey. The female characters are the ones who are transformed from paragons of virtue to wanton wenches, and it is they who are destroyed -- not by Dracula himself, but by the Victorian men who are horrified by their transformation.
It is true that both men and women were sexually repressed by Victorian society. But as in all such repressive societies, the burden of repression fell mainly on women; when a transgression occurred, even though two people are necessarily involved, it was usually the woman who suffered for it. And Dracula the novel does a pretty good job of following that double standard.
Film scholars have long pointed out the sexual premonitions and suggestions in the vampire myth, the warnings about sex and sexual liberation. Vampires are mostly portrayed as powerful men who steal past locked doors and barred windows to ravish helpless and beautiful women asleep in nightgowns in their beds. The Victorians were terrified of venereal disease in much the same way we fear AIDS.
Ah, Jon. So verbose, yet so factually incorrect.
The Victorians may have been terrified of venereal disease, but that's hardly the message in Bram Stoker's Dracula.
In Victorian England, female sexuality was considered extremely taboo. The notion was that women were there only to be desired and conquered, never to be sexual beings in their own right. There were all kinds of terrible medical and psychological horrors inflicted on girls who displayed sexual interest in any way.
No, the real terror that Dracula represents is the awakening of female sexuality. The women in Dracula's castle grab Harker and basically ravish him; he views them as intolerable monsters when in today's world most men wouldn't see much of a problem with the situation. And poor Mina is bitten and turns into a raging sexual predator, so of course the men have to destroy her. And likewise, Harker's great fear is not really that Dracula will kill Lucy, but that Lucy actually wants to go with Dracula now that she's seen what she is capable of being. The vampire's bite is just a metaphor for the awakening of sexuality, the vampire himself just an embodiment of the demon of sexuality which must be curtailed and destroyed.
By the way, what's a "sexual premonition" ?
Oh well. Vampires are neat because they dress in black, turn into bats, defy social conventions, and live forever. Throw in some heaving bosoms and ripped bodices and it doesn't matter what the movie is really trying to say, people will go see it because it's (huh huh) cool.
Where to begin. This whole aritcle is just a bunch of idiotic fluff, probably written just to generate a few more hits on Thechweb's completely irrelevant site. Let's see a couple of gems:
"We need a full-time leader and a nonprofit organization that can be funded by IBM, Compaq, and Dell and the [Linux] distributors," said Hal Davison, owner and president of Davison Consulting, Sarasota, Fla.
Let's see, http://www.davison.com. Oops, wrong company, thats some web design outfit in maryland. Surely then there's http://www.davisonconsulting.com? Hmm. Nope, no such site. Nothing against this poor guy personally, I've read some of his posts on some mailing lists and I'm sure he's done a fine job being a consultant. But he hardly qualifies as a headline-grabbing clairvoyant worthy of pulling the industry's needle off the proverbial record with his opinions.
Here, I can play that game too:
Phil DeBecker, of DeBecker Consulting, owner and president of DeBecker Consulting, says "We are really concerned about the sources that TechWeb uses. When we can't locate any actual company owned by a quoted source, that source's status as industry spokesperson is placed into serious doubt."
Oh, and then there's
"I don't believe open source works well for commercial companies because they can't control schedules," said Michael Cusumano, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management who sits on the board of solution provider NetNumina Solutions. "Software companies try to have regular development cycles. That's how you build a rhythm for a company."
Umm yeah. Because we all know that companies that operate on schedules and release products on time, like Apple Computer, IBM Corporation, and Microsoft, just to name a few, release far superior products that completely meet the needs of their target markets and are met with rave reviews by everyone who tries them.
Oh my god, they're right! We have to stop this open source insanity NOW! We absolutely must give control of these open source products back where it belongs, in the hands of the companies whose products are so good, so infallible, so well managed... that they prompted the creation of open source alternatives in the first place!
It's how you play the game. Hughes deserves props for doing this the right way - by outsmarting the pirates. Unlike some other industries who combat piracy by buying laws that take away everyone's freedoms just to protect themselves, or force everyone to sell crippled hardware so that their precious media can't be used in a way they don't approve of, these guys stayed with an existing technology and made it work in the face of rampant piracy. My hat's off.
I've long wanted a computer in which the processor / motherboard / memory were as easily removed and replaced as a hard drive, this sounds quite close to that ideal.
Also sounds like quite an expensive solution to an already-solved problem. There are a number of manufacturers of passive-backplane systems that provide just that level of convenience. Basically, the passive backplane consists of a long board with something like 6 PCI and 6 ISA slots. This backplane installs in the case in the same position as a traditional motherboard. The CPU/RAM/Chipset "motherboard" is actually just a big PCI card that does bus mastering, and all your other peripherals sit in the slots. You can even get split backplanes, where more than one "motherboard" can coexist in the same case.
Nice thing about this design is that if any card fails, including the "motherboard", you yank it out and replace it - the backplane itself is so simple it basically never fails. And ventilation is usually better, since all your hot components are in the middle of the case rather than on the bottom or side -- a lot of these cases have a row of big 120mm fans across the entire front, so everything is well ventilated.
Most of the ones you'll see out there are fairly large (a little bigger than an old-style AT case), but I've even seen and used passive-backplane minitowers. The nice thing about these is that the form factor allows for a lot more room for slots in the case and therefore more peripherals.
My wife and I are at the point in our lives where we're starting to think seriously about having children. And we're the sort who, while we read a lot, do tend to watch a fair amount of television (not mindlessly mind you, and not more than a couple of hours a day -- Iron Chef, Junkyard Wars, X-Files, Farscape, Voyager, Sunday morning cartoons, stuff on Discovery/A&E, the news, etc).
The point is, we don't want to raise kids who are glued to the set all day. So we've been planning to wean ourselves off television, set time limits, etc, so that when we do have children we won't reflexively turn on the tube. But now it seems that the MPAA is kindly helping me to make that transition a lot easier. I no longer feel any desire to buy a big bad TV with HDTV and 1024 lines of resolution and such, just to pay $60 per month for channels chock-full of commercials whose content I can't timeshift or record at one set and watch on another. On the practical side, it's just much more inconvenient than TV is currently ; on the moral side, I don't want to be made to feel like I can't be trusted with the valuable "content" that these media companies are kindly providing me out of the goodness of their heart.
I refuse to spend money on hardware that is deliberately crippled just so that I'm forced to watch these shows when and how someone else says I have to. At least with books -- paper books, thank you very much -- I can start reading in the living room and finish in the bedroom without asking the publisher's permission.
There are a lot of posts talking about how artwork could tempt pedophiles, and make them more apt to go out and commit real crimes against children. That may or may not be the case, but I think there are a lot of images out there of real children that are a lot more disturbingly pedophilic than any artwork I've ever come across.
One example: children's beauty pageants. I don't like those things, so I don't go out of my way to find images from them and so I'm not speaking from a lot of experience, but... Am I the only person who finds all those pictures of JonBenet Ramsey wearing lipstick, big teased hair, high heels, and short dresses incredibly disgusting? Doesn't that sort of objectification and sexualization of a SIX YEAR OLD girl show that there's something fundamentally unbalanced at work here?
Just a thought, so that before people start going after cartoons they might think about what sort of images real parents are creating with their real children.
One big problem with all of the posts on this subject so far: everyone is assuming that the material prohibited by this law will in fact be child porn. That it will involve what are unmistakeably intended to be children, performing obscene acts.
The real problem is that such a law leaves interpretation of what constitutes a "crime" up to law enforcement. What if someone likes drawing Anime-style characters engaging in sex? What about the "furry" fans, who like anthropomorphised animals? Anime characters, with their big eyes etc, and typical cartoon characters, are not always easy to tell from children, especially to the uninitiated.
Will we have a rash of arrests -- even if they don't lead to prosecutions -- of perfectly lawful artists creating perfecly legal works, simply because someone thinks their characters look too young? Will we drive all sorts of artists underground, or keep them from publishing anything at all, out of fear that they might get hauled into court and labeled as a CHILD PORNOGRAPHER and publicly humiliated?
This is another case of creating an extreme law to prohibit an extreme act, which has a chilling effect on freedoms far out of proportion to the small (and debatable) amount of good that it does.
Keep the government out of my bedroom, out of my doctor's office, and off of my drawing board!
...is not what stuff like EVAS and Enlightenment and Gnome and KDE are at all about. When your machine requires more resources to make pretty screenshots than it does to do anything actually useful, you're heading down the wrong path.
Fortunately, the brilliant thing about open source is that you're not stuck running this bloatware because someone says you have to. You can happily install the bits and pieces you want and make your desktop anything you like (or just run console and not have one at all).
One of the best bits of the article talks about how building a new power plant in California is about as easy as getting venture capital for an e-business in 2001. This is true. And it's a large part of the problem.
Everybody complains that power is too expensive, yet nobody ever wants a power plant "in their back yard". This goes ten-fold for nuclear plants, which, really, would be a lot better solution than the current natural gas ones that are generating most of the power out west.
A 75GB hard disk would only hold around 30 minutes of the video, according to company officials, making the trading of HD content over the Internet impossible..
Wow, these guys are pretty pessimistic on the evolution of technology... 300GB hard disks are a couple of years away at best, and their "impossible to crack" encryption scheme is a cozy but totally unsupported assertion. There's no reason to think this scheme won't eventually be cracked, at which point it won't be all that hard to DivX the content of a tape into a smaller, easily-transmitted.AVI file.
Beyond that, this is a stupid step backwards, and one that clearly puts the interests of consumers dead last. DVD, with all its warts, allows you to play videos on laptops, PCs, and small, easily-portable players; tapes are much more vulnerable to damage and the players are much bulkier and break down more often.
Nice try, but this isn't going to fly in the consumer arena.
As a lot of posters have pointed out, this is standard legalese boilerplate for a TOS. It looks a lot like the one for @Home or for any of the big telco DSL providers (SNET, Verizon, BA, PacBell, etc).
I find it interesting that most of those others try to ban multiple computers using the connection at one time. SNET in particular (I used to have their service) goes as far as to say that they don't mind you having their DSL modem hooked into a home LAN, so long as you only use the internet from one PC on that LAN at one time. They are, of course, happy to provide additional IPs for an additional fee...
Anyway, this particular TOS doesn't address that. Apparently they do offer additional IP's, but they don't forbid things like DSL routers or IP Masquerade.
So basically they're doing what all the other big ISPs are doing. Which is why I'm with a small one.
First, it was Linux has no device driver support. Then it was Linux has no applications. Then it was Linux doesn't have any major high-end server applications. Then it was Linux doesn't have a user friendly GUI. Then it was Linux is too hard to install.
Now it seems that Linux is too easy to install, and these guys have to find something else to complain about. So, unlike "the typical desktop OS", the typical Linux distribution comes with basically everything you need to do anything you want to or with your computer. And most distributions' "full install" option installs in under 1GB of space. In an age where PCs ship with a minimum of 10gb of hard disk space, that's hardly an issue. And they don't even force you to install all of those tools that this guy finds so confusing and superfluous. Much like Windows, they give you the choice of two or three standard installs or a custom one where you pick and choose your own packages. Gosh, I never heard anyone complain about how confusing it was to pick and choose between Media Player and Personal Web Server and...
Yes, distribution installers could be made even more braindead-friendly than they are today. But then no doubt these ZDNet people will complain that there aren't enough options.
Port scanning a system is directly analogous to trying the locks on someones home. It is not free speech, it's a violation of property rights.
No, that stupid tired analogy is not even close to correct. Port scanning allows you to discover what services a machine is running. It doesn't test the security of those services, it merely detects their presence. The "trying the locks" analogy would work if the scanner, having discovered that a service is running, then tried a combination of usernames and passwords to actually gain access to the system. But this guy did no such thing.
As for the particulars in this case... This person was hired to secure his client's network. A reasonable part of that duty is to see what machines are connected to the network and see what services they are running to assess potential vulnerabilities. It's completely clear that this person did not have any hostile intent in doing this, and on the other hand he would have been seriously remiss in his duties had he NOT assessed the network for potential security breaches.
How long will it take AOL-TimeWarner to buy a Digital Millennium Advertising Revenue Protection Act to make filtering proxies illegal. After all, by using filtering proxies we're getting all this content without paying for it, denying hard working Shockwave artists of their hard-earned money...
This article pretty much gets the facts right. Unfortunately, it really doesn't matter. The Big Media companies don't want to hear this. They want people to believe that piracy is absolutely rampant on the Internet, that they're losing billions in sales of CDs and DVDs, that record stores are going out of business because of MP3 trading. Because if they can successfully make that case, they can get legislation passed -- like the DMCA -- that gives them more and more control over content and distribution on the internet.
Companies like Bertelsmann and Warner and the rest of the MPAA/RIAA crowd want to turn the internet into yet another passive, advertisement-filled medium. They don't want people - users, consumers, eyeballs - to decide what to send across the net and what is available for viewing or hearing. They want to decide that for you, and make you have to pay for all of it.
And the best way they can do that is to demonize the freedom of the internet, to show that really the consumer is better off if they run everything. So they don't want to believe that Gnutella doesn't work very well, and that Napster isn't hurting sales.
This is phenomenon happens with every new technology, especially computer-related ones. You have an initial wave of faddishness and starry eyed optimism, full of promises and hype. It's especially helpful if people think they can make money off it. Then, inevitably, the dreams don't pan out and you wind up with a big downturn, with everyone spelling gloom and doom and spouting that it'll never work, it's peaked, no one is interested, etc. Basically sour grapes because not as much money was made as was predicted. Then, again inevitably, people cool off and return to the original idea with newly realistic expectations, and a happy middle ground is reached wherein the technology lives up to its potential and delivers what it should.
It happened with video games, it happened with satellite TVs, it happened with personal computers (more than once that one), and it's happening now with the web. The Web is overhyped and overmarketed. Home users on 56K are tired of the crappy surfing experience, and businesses are discovering that having a Web presence isn't that trivial to do and doesn't rake in the dough they thought it would. So the big boom is over, but the Internet isn't going away. After the dust has settled and people's expectations become more realistic, the Internet will fade into the background -- it will become a ubiquitous part of everyday life, like the telephone, cable TV, and everything else we take for granted now but was initially hyped as the Next Great Thing.
Back in 1993-1994 at the University of South Alabama, we used uCOS. You can see more about it here. It's a very small RTOS kernel -- small enough and well enough documented that you can actually master the whole thing in a short while. It (or at least the version available back then) isn't a world-class OS, but it's excellent for a hands-on introduction to the internals of IPC, scheduling, etc.
Linux is an excellent learning tool as well, and some of us at USA used it in projects in later courses, but its very complete feature set, size and complexity, and not-always-clear documentation makes it a bit challenging for novices. Sometimes smaller is better...
This company (fandom.com) exists because its corporate backers think they can make money. But with the attitude towards even big, well known, highly visible dot-companies being what it is today, I wouldn't bet a whole lot on fandom.com's survival.
And with their attitude -- homogenizing fansites for profit -- and their actions, they deserve to go under.
Using an The Sixth Day as a benchmark of the American social consciousness of genetic engineering is like using Total Recall as a springboard for discussion of the exploration of Mars. These films use their theme - loss of memory, cloning, spies, whatever - as a McGuffin, a simple prop to get the character from one firefight to the next, to threaten and then rescue the girl, knock over a few fruitstands, and then watch the sunrise at the end, battered but victorious. There never will be consequences or revelations in these films, because actually thinking about the topic at hand would get in the way of the violence and flippant remarks.
Slashdot Mirror
This isn't a troll, I promise!
After running Linux for over six years, I decided to install FreeBSD on my second hard disk to play with it. I've got plenty of Linux and general Unix experience, but there are still some fairly OS-specific issues that are nice to have documentation for, if only to get pointers. Like, "how do I use VESA modes in console" or "how do I optimize my UDMA drive performance".
Normally, for this sort of information in Linux, I'd look on Google and find a raft of links to mailing list archives, HOWTOs, message board posts, etc. But try this with FreeBSD and the noise level becomes unbearable. Even if you specify that an answer must contain the term "FreeBSD", the odds are that most or all of the replies you get will be linux-centric.
I did wind up finding what I was looking for, but it took awhile. I imagine that for a total newbie this would be a lot more frustrating.
Anyway, the point of this is that Documentation is Good, and that books like this can only help FreeBSD in the face of the overwhelming mindshare that Linux enjoys.
How many kids in schools and libraries are going to miss out on this story because of porn filters blocking on the word "Eros".
Why do they have to make their "hacker" sound like some kind of autistic retard? The visual picture their descriptions conjure up is of this guy rocking back and forth in his chair as he watches the kernel compile, repeating the GCC output under his breath as it scrolls by and exclaiming "256,981. Yeah definitely. 256,981 lines" when it's all done.
(That, and what are these examples supposed to be about? I know plenty of people who use 2.4 -- I ran the 2.3.X series pretty much for its entire duration and never had the problems they describe. Or maybe I just read the documentation.) But I digress.
Also, their idea of "the hacker ethic" sounds more like "the slacker ethic". Considering that hackers tend to work 80 hour weeks -- and not just because the threat of layoffs looms near -- I find that a bit insulting. Their assertion that "it's my life" has replaced "time is money" etc is largely missing the mark. Yes, a lot of people burned out during the dot-com boom and are no longer willing to live in their cubicles. And that's as it should be, no one should be willing to meet unreasonable demands on their time.
But the fact remains that a lot of conscienscious, dedicated hackers continnue to work a lot more than the standard 40-hour work week, whether it's actually necessary or not. If they're not really working on a company project, they're developing open source on the side, or learning Perl, or teaching themselves how device drivers work, or whatever. And the reason hackers are willing to spend this much time on what is ostensibly their career, is that they find the work interesting and stimulating. The rest of the world finds this amazing because they've settled for a career that doesn't bring them fulfillment. Tough. Do what you love, or do something else.
There's an option in Netscape to specifically turn off Javascript support for mail and news - under the Preferences->Advanced tab.
I've been using that as long as I can remember, mainly to prevent Usenet spam posts from launching browser windows and such. I guess now there's an even better reason for it.
Of course, for mail I use pine and tkrat in console and X respectively, so I dont really care much about this.
So I don't know if I buy your analysis of Dracula. Perhaps the vampire was the embodiment of the dangerous *male* sexuality, rather than the awakening of the dangerous female sexuality
You really don't seem to have read the book carefully, if at all. The theme of the "fallen woman", who are bitten by Dracula and become sexually awakened, is a recurring one throughout the novel. And to the main protagonist (Harker), it is virtually an obsession. None of the male characters in the book are bitten by Dracula; none of them are transformed by events in the way that the women are when they become Dracula's prey. The female characters are the ones who are transformed from paragons of virtue to wanton wenches, and it is they who are destroyed -- not by Dracula himself, but by the Victorian men who are horrified by their transformation.
It is true that both men and women were sexually repressed by Victorian society. But as in all such repressive societies, the burden of repression fell mainly on women; when a transgression occurred, even though two people are necessarily involved, it was usually the woman who suffered for it. And Dracula the novel does a pretty good job of following that double standard.
er.
:% s/lucy/mina/w
Film scholars have long pointed out the sexual premonitions and suggestions in the vampire myth, the warnings about sex and sexual liberation. Vampires are mostly portrayed as powerful men who steal past locked doors and barred windows to ravish helpless and beautiful women asleep in nightgowns in their beds. The Victorians were terrified of venereal disease in much the same way we fear AIDS.
Ah, Jon. So verbose, yet so factually incorrect.
The Victorians may have been terrified of venereal disease, but that's hardly the message in Bram Stoker's Dracula.
In Victorian England, female sexuality was considered extremely taboo. The notion was that women were there only to be desired and conquered, never to be sexual beings in their own right. There were all kinds of terrible medical and psychological horrors inflicted on girls who displayed sexual interest in any way.
No, the real terror that Dracula represents is the awakening of female sexuality. The women in Dracula's castle grab Harker and basically ravish him; he views them as intolerable monsters when in today's world most men wouldn't see much of a problem with the situation. And poor Mina is bitten and turns into a raging sexual predator, so of course the men have to destroy her. And likewise, Harker's great fear is not really that Dracula will kill Lucy, but that Lucy actually wants to go with Dracula now that she's seen what she is capable of being. The vampire's bite is just a metaphor for the awakening of sexuality, the vampire himself just an embodiment of the demon of sexuality which must be curtailed and destroyed.
By the way, what's a "sexual premonition" ?
Oh well. Vampires are neat because they dress in black, turn into bats, defy social conventions, and live forever. Throw in some heaving bosoms and ripped bodices and it doesn't matter what the movie is really trying to say, people will go see it because it's (huh huh) cool.
Where to begin. This whole aritcle is just a bunch of idiotic fluff, probably written just to generate a few more hits on Thechweb's completely irrelevant site. Let's see a couple of gems:
"We need a full-time leader and a nonprofit organization that can be funded by IBM, Compaq, and Dell and the [Linux] distributors," said Hal Davison, owner and president of Davison Consulting, Sarasota, Fla.
Let's see, http://www.davison.com. Oops, wrong company, thats some web design outfit in maryland. Surely then there's http://www.davisonconsulting.com? Hmm. Nope, no such site. Nothing against this poor guy personally, I've read some of his posts on some mailing lists and I'm sure he's done a fine job being a consultant. But he hardly qualifies as a headline-grabbing clairvoyant worthy of pulling the industry's needle off the proverbial record with his opinions.
Here, I can play that game too:
Phil DeBecker, of DeBecker Consulting, owner and president of DeBecker Consulting, says "We are really concerned about the sources that TechWeb uses. When we can't locate any actual company owned by a quoted source, that source's status as industry spokesperson is placed into serious doubt."
Oh, and then there's
"I don't believe open source works well for commercial companies because they can't control schedules," said Michael Cusumano, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management who sits on the board of solution provider NetNumina Solutions. "Software companies try to have regular development cycles. That's how you build a rhythm for a company."
Umm yeah. Because we all know that companies that operate on schedules and release products on time, like Apple Computer, IBM Corporation, and Microsoft, just to name a few, release far superior products that completely meet the needs of their target markets and are met with rave reviews by everyone who tries them.
Oh my god, they're right! We have to stop this open source insanity NOW! We absolutely must give control of these open source products back where it belongs, in the hands of the companies whose products are so good, so infallible, so well managed... that they prompted the creation of open source alternatives in the first place!
It's how you play the game. Hughes deserves props for doing this the right way - by outsmarting the pirates. Unlike some other industries who combat piracy by buying laws that take away everyone's freedoms just to protect themselves, or force everyone to sell crippled hardware so that their precious media can't be used in a way they don't approve of, these guys stayed with an existing technology and made it work in the face of rampant piracy. My hat's off.
I've long wanted a computer in which the processor / motherboard / memory were as easily removed and replaced as a hard drive, this sounds quite close to that ideal.
Also sounds like quite an expensive solution to an already-solved problem. There are a number of manufacturers of passive-backplane systems that provide just that level of convenience. Basically, the passive backplane consists of a long board with something like 6 PCI and 6 ISA slots. This backplane installs in the case in the same position as a traditional motherboard. The CPU/RAM/Chipset "motherboard" is actually just a big PCI card that does bus mastering, and all your other peripherals sit in the slots. You can even get split backplanes, where more than one "motherboard" can coexist in the same case.
Nice thing about this design is that if any card fails, including the "motherboard", you yank it out and replace it - the backplane itself is so simple it basically never fails. And ventilation is usually better, since all your hot components are in the middle of the case rather than on the bottom or side -- a lot of these cases have a row of big 120mm fans across the entire front, so everything is well ventilated.
Most of the ones you'll see out there are fairly large (a little bigger than an old-style AT case), but I've even seen and used passive-backplane minitowers. The nice thing about these is that the form factor allows for a lot more room for slots in the case and therefore more peripherals.
My wife and I are at the point in our lives where we're starting to think seriously about having children. And we're the sort who, while we read a lot, do tend to watch a fair amount of television (not mindlessly mind you, and not more than a couple of hours a day -- Iron Chef, Junkyard Wars, X-Files, Farscape, Voyager, Sunday morning cartoons, stuff on Discovery/A&E, the news, etc).
The point is, we don't want to raise kids who are glued to the set all day. So we've been planning to wean ourselves off television, set time limits, etc, so that when we do have children we won't reflexively turn on the tube. But now it seems that the MPAA is kindly helping me to make that transition a lot easier. I no longer feel any desire to buy a big bad TV with HDTV and 1024 lines of resolution and such, just to pay $60 per month for channels chock-full of commercials whose content I can't timeshift or record at one set and watch on another. On the practical side, it's just much more inconvenient than TV is currently ; on the moral side, I don't want to be made to feel like I can't be trusted with the valuable "content" that these media companies are kindly providing me out of the goodness of their heart.
I refuse to spend money on hardware that is deliberately crippled just so that I'm forced to watch these shows when and how someone else says I have to. At least with books -- paper books, thank you very much -- I can start reading in the living room and finish in the bedroom without asking the publisher's permission.
There are a lot of posts talking about how artwork could tempt pedophiles, and make them more apt to go out and commit real crimes against children. That may or may not be the case, but I think there are a lot of images out there of real children that are a lot more disturbingly pedophilic than any artwork I've ever come across.
One example: children's beauty pageants. I don't like those things, so I don't go out of my way to find images from them and so I'm not speaking from a lot of experience, but... Am I the only person who finds all those pictures of JonBenet Ramsey wearing lipstick, big teased hair, high heels, and short dresses incredibly disgusting? Doesn't that sort of objectification and sexualization of a SIX YEAR OLD girl show that there's something fundamentally unbalanced at work here?
Just a thought, so that before people start going after cartoons they might think about what sort of images real parents are creating with their real children.
One big problem with all of the posts on this subject so far: everyone is assuming that the material prohibited by this law will in fact be child porn. That it will involve what are unmistakeably intended to be children, performing obscene acts.
The real problem is that such a law leaves interpretation of what constitutes a "crime" up to law enforcement. What if someone likes drawing Anime-style characters engaging in sex? What about the "furry" fans, who like anthropomorphised animals? Anime characters, with their big eyes etc, and typical cartoon characters, are not always easy to tell from children, especially to the uninitiated.
Will we have a rash of arrests -- even if they don't lead to prosecutions -- of perfectly lawful artists creating perfecly legal works, simply because someone thinks their characters look too young? Will we drive all sorts of artists underground, or keep them from publishing anything at all, out of fear that they might get hauled into court and labeled as a CHILD PORNOGRAPHER and publicly humiliated?
This is another case of creating an extreme law to prohibit an extreme act, which has a chilling effect on freedoms far out of proportion to the small (and debatable) amount of good that it does.
Keep the government out of my bedroom, out of my doctor's office, and off of my drawing board!
...is not what stuff like EVAS and Enlightenment and Gnome and KDE are at all about. When your machine requires more resources to make pretty screenshots than it does to do anything actually useful, you're heading down the wrong path.
Fortunately, the brilliant thing about open source is that you're not stuck running this bloatware because someone says you have to. You can happily install the bits and pieces you want and make your desktop anything you like (or just run console and not have one at all).
One of the best bits of the article talks about how building a new power plant in California is about as easy as getting venture capital for an e-business in 2001. This is true. And it's a large part of the problem.
Everybody complains that power is too expensive, yet nobody ever wants a power plant "in their back yard". This goes ten-fold for nuclear plants, which, really, would be a lot better solution than the current natural gas ones that are generating most of the power out west.
A 75GB hard disk would only hold around 30 minutes of the video, according to company officials, making the trading of HD content over the Internet impossible..
.AVI file.
Wow, these guys are pretty pessimistic on the evolution of technology... 300GB hard disks are a couple of years away at best, and their "impossible to crack" encryption scheme is a cozy but totally unsupported assertion. There's no reason to think this scheme won't eventually be cracked, at which point it won't be all that hard to DivX the content of a tape into a smaller, easily-transmitted
Beyond that, this is a stupid step backwards, and one that clearly puts the interests of consumers dead last. DVD, with all its warts, allows you to play videos on laptops, PCs, and small, easily-portable players; tapes are much more vulnerable to damage and the players are much bulkier and break down more often.
Nice try, but this isn't going to fly in the consumer arena.
As a lot of posters have pointed out, this is standard legalese boilerplate for a TOS. It looks a lot like the one for @Home or for any of the big telco DSL providers (SNET, Verizon, BA, PacBell, etc).
I find it interesting that most of those others try to ban multiple computers using the connection at one time. SNET in particular (I used to have their service) goes as far as to say that they don't mind you having their DSL modem hooked into a home LAN, so long as you only use the internet from one PC on that LAN at one time. They are, of course, happy to provide additional IPs for an additional fee...
Anyway, this particular TOS doesn't address that. Apparently they do offer additional IP's, but they don't forbid things like DSL routers or IP Masquerade.
So basically they're doing what all the other big ISPs are doing. Which is why I'm with a small one.
First, it was Linux has no device driver support. Then it was Linux has no applications. Then it was Linux doesn't have any major high-end server applications. Then it was Linux doesn't have a user friendly GUI. Then it was Linux is too hard to install.
Now it seems that Linux is too easy to install, and these guys have to find something else to complain about. So, unlike "the typical desktop OS", the typical Linux distribution comes with basically everything you need to do anything you want to or with your computer. And most distributions' "full install" option installs in under 1GB of space. In an age where PCs ship with a minimum of 10gb of hard disk space, that's hardly an issue. And they don't even force you to install all of those tools that this guy finds so confusing and superfluous. Much like Windows, they give you the choice of two or three standard installs or a custom one where you pick and choose your own packages. Gosh, I never heard anyone complain about how confusing it was to pick and choose between Media Player and Personal Web Server and...
Yes, distribution installers could be made even more braindead-friendly than they are today. But then no doubt these ZDNet people will complain that there aren't enough options.
Port scanning a system is directly analogous to trying the locks on someones home. It is not free speech, it's a violation of property rights.
No, that stupid tired analogy is not even close to correct. Port scanning allows you to discover what services a machine is running. It doesn't test the security of those services, it merely detects their presence. The "trying the locks" analogy would work if the scanner, having discovered that a service is running, then tried a combination of usernames and passwords to actually gain access to the system. But this guy did no such thing.
As for the particulars in this case... This person was hired to secure his client's network. A reasonable part of that duty is to see what machines are connected to the network and see what services they are running to assess potential vulnerabilities. It's completely clear that this person did not have any hostile intent in doing this, and on the other hand he would have been seriously remiss in his duties had he NOT assessed the network for potential security breaches.
How long will it take AOL-TimeWarner to buy a Digital Millennium Advertising Revenue Protection Act to make filtering proxies illegal. After all, by using filtering proxies we're getting all this content without paying for it, denying hard working Shockwave artists of their hard-earned money...
This article pretty much gets the facts right. Unfortunately, it really doesn't matter. The Big Media companies don't want to hear this. They want people to believe that piracy is absolutely rampant on the Internet, that they're losing billions in sales of CDs and DVDs, that record stores are going out of business because of MP3 trading. Because if they can successfully make that case, they can get legislation passed -- like the DMCA -- that gives them more and more control over content and distribution on the internet.
Companies like Bertelsmann and Warner and the rest of the MPAA/RIAA crowd want to turn the internet into yet another passive, advertisement-filled medium. They don't want people - users, consumers, eyeballs - to decide what to send across the net and what is available for viewing or hearing. They want to decide that for you, and make you have to pay for all of it.
And the best way they can do that is to demonize the freedom of the internet, to show that really the consumer is better off if they run everything. So they don't want to believe that Gnutella doesn't work very well, and that Napster isn't hurting sales.
And they don't want you to believe that either.
This is phenomenon happens with every new technology, especially computer-related ones. You have an initial wave of faddishness and starry eyed optimism, full of promises and hype. It's especially helpful if people think they can make money off it. Then, inevitably, the dreams don't pan out and you wind up with a big downturn, with everyone spelling gloom and doom and spouting that it'll never work, it's peaked, no one is interested, etc. Basically sour grapes because not as much money was made as was predicted. Then, again inevitably, people cool off and return to the original idea with newly realistic expectations, and a happy middle ground is reached wherein the technology lives up to its potential and delivers what it should.
It happened with video games, it happened with satellite TVs, it happened with personal computers (more than once that one), and it's happening now with the web. The Web is overhyped and overmarketed. Home users on 56K are tired of the crappy surfing experience, and businesses are discovering that having a Web presence isn't that trivial to do and doesn't rake in the dough they thought it would. So the big boom is over, but the Internet isn't going away. After the dust has settled and people's expectations become more realistic, the Internet will fade into the background -- it will become a ubiquitous part of everyday life, like the telephone, cable TV, and everything else we take for granted now but was initially hyped as the Next Great Thing.
Back in 1993-1994 at the University of South Alabama, we used uCOS. You can see more about it here. It's a very small RTOS kernel -- small enough and well enough documented that you can actually master the whole thing in a short while. It (or at least the version available back then) isn't a world-class OS, but it's excellent for a hands-on introduction to the internals of IPC, scheduling, etc.
Linux is an excellent learning tool as well, and some of us at USA used it in projects in later courses, but its very complete feature set, size and complexity, and not-always-clear documentation makes it a bit challenging for novices. Sometimes smaller is better...
This company (fandom.com) exists because its corporate backers think they can make money. But with the attitude towards even big, well known, highly visible dot-companies being what it is today, I wouldn't bet a whole lot on fandom.com's survival.
And with their attitude -- homogenizing fansites for profit -- and their actions, they deserve to go under.
Good riddance, won't be missed.
Using an The Sixth Day as a benchmark of the American social consciousness of genetic engineering is like using Total Recall as a springboard for discussion of the exploration of Mars. These films use their theme - loss of memory, cloning, spies, whatever - as a McGuffin, a simple prop to get the character from one firefight to the next, to threaten and then rescue the girl, knock over a few fruitstands, and then watch the sunrise at the end, battered but victorious. There never will be consequences or revelations in these films, because actually thinking about the topic at hand would get in the way of the violence and flippant remarks.