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Gary Secondino's Weblog
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Tuesday, April 30, 2002
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In the United States, two federal laws provide a powerful shield for ISPs that follow the rules.
Thanks to two federal laws, the CDA and the DMCA, American ISPs have a Teflon coating. Responsible ISPs who meet the provisions of these two laws can repel lawsuits based upon claims of copyright infringement, defamation or related claims.
 12:03:42 PM Google It! comment
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Saturday, April 27, 2002
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The Bush administration is lukewarm on a plan to embed copy-protection technology in software and consumer electronics.
Hollings' Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act is the entertainment industry's boldest attempt yet to compel the computer industry to adopt software and hardware standards aimed at reducing illicit copying. It requires that "any hardware or software" that could be used to copy digital content include anti-piracy technologies.
more by Declan McCullagh
Wired
8:22:13 AM Google It! comment
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Sen. Fritz Hollings is pushing a bill that supposedly safeguards online privacy -- but actually gives intrusive marketers a green light.
The fact that Hollings is behind this bill should be the first clue about the real agenda it serves. Hollings is also a sponsor of the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act (CBDTPA, formerly known as the SSSCA), a bill that requires all new computers and other digital information devices to come with copy protection software and/or hardware installed on them. It would also outlaw any effort to reverse-engineer or disable any copy-protection format -- a measure that some observers believe will cripple software development -- particularly in the open-source and free-software communities. CBDTPA is ostensibly based on the premise that consumers won't sign up for broadband ISP access until Hollywood puts its content online, and Hollywood won't do that until its sure its intellectual property will be safe. But the bill isn't really about the "promotion" of broadband at all. Hollings is one of the Senate's largest recipients of entertainment industry campaign contributions, and the bill is squarely aimed at protecting that industry's interests.
Salon
8:06:11 AM Google It! comment
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Friday, April 26, 2002
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In the short term, the latest spending hike is one factor helping to pull the nation out of recession. But over the long run, some experts say, most of the spending will be a drag on the economy, heighten the risk of sustained budget deficits and limit the maneuvering room of policymakers when, 10 years from now, the government must help fund the baby boomers' health care and retirement needs.
"We should be very concerned," said John Cogan, a budget expert at the Hoover Institution who advised the Bush campaign. "Clearly, the defense and national security increases are warranted. The failure to offset those increases with reductions should be a source of concern. The wrong thing to do is not confront those choices."
President Bush has regularly warned against the perils of federal spending, declaring last year that "excessive federal spending threatens economic vitality." Although administration officials vow to control spending once the current emergency has passed, many experts believe that will be difficult, if not impossible. Last year's tax cut and the recent recession may result in the first back-to-back years of falling revenue since the late 1950s.
iSay - There goes the Boomers Social Security retirement. Hello, AARP?
10:21:56 AM Google It! comment
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Thursday, April 25, 2002
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"The system wasn't secure at all. People were downloading our software for free. There was a huge hole there," said Sofield, director of development for Superfreaker Studios of New York.
While purveyors of downloadable digital goods who accept PayPal payments are especially vulnerable, PayPal's Web Accept system may hold potential risks for many of its more than 3 million business customers.
Wired
5:24:54 PM Google It! comment
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Epson's new Stylus Photo 2200 is, as you might guess from the name, a new printer especially designed for photo use. It uses seven-color, pigment-based, archival UltraChrome inks, and can print images at faster speeds with a larger color gamut than the previous generation.
The Stylus Photo 2200 offers a resolution of up to 2880 x 1440 dpi using ultra small four-picoliter droplets, which produce an equivalent dot size to a two-picoliter dye-based droplet. It has a large printable area up to 13 by 44 inches. Eliminating left and right margins, the printer also features 4, 8.3, and 13 inche edge-to-edge borderless printing on roll paper.
The UltraChrome ink has faster printing and drying times so the Stylus Photo 2200 can print an 8x10 photo on glossy paper in four minutes. That's three times faster than the Epson Stylus Photo 2000P. What's more, its prints can last up to 80 years on Epson Watercolor Paper and black and white prints lasting up to 100 years on various fine art papers.
iSay - I love to hear about the new advances but always wonder about the science these people use to determine the longevity claims. How do they do that?
4:53:53 PM Google It! comment
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There is nothing here that knowledge and experimentation couldn't do better. I'll make you a deal, I will show you how to do whatever their plug in does, you pay me half of the plug in cost. You own the knowledge forever.
3:53:01 PM Google It! comment
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Now recall the best photo print you've ever seen, and imagine it at 13 by 19 inches, filling your field of vision. Something happens to the impact of a photo when it's that big. Its emotional overtones are disproportionately magnified in ways that photo galleries have capitalized on for years. A candid of a smiling 2-year-old becomes an unforgettable essay on captured innocence. A stand of trees against a dark pre-storm sky delivers a palpable chill. It's like the difference between seeing an Imax movie and watching TV.
NYTimes
4:28:31 AM Google It! comment
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Wednesday, April 24, 2002
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Four months after announcing plans to combine their massive cable operations, executives of AT&T Broadband and Comcast faced a grilling on Capitol Hill regarding how the mega-merger will affect cable industry competition.
In a U.S. Senate subcommittee hearing Tuesday, legislators considered placing conditions on the consummation of the proposed multibillion-dollar marriage in areas ranging from television programming to broadband service to cable set-top boxes.
iSay - Without an even playing field you'll never have successful competition. These companies need to compete on service, quality, and price for their customers. AT&T has an unfair advantage by continued ownership of the infrastructure, cables, poles, switches, etc. Unless the delivery system is a separate business company from the content and ISP company the consumer is going to lose.
Wired
9:58:41 AM Google It! comment
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Northern Alliance general Abdul Rashid Dostum and his troops were working in conjunction with a Green Beret unit to liberate Mazar-e-Sharif when Pelton arrived on the scene. His story of that endeavor ran in National Geographic Adventure magazine and provided a firsthand glimpse of the war and the soldiers fighting it. In fact, Pelton had the kind of access that seems to have eluded many other reporters covering the conflict; his up-close and personal portrayal of a Special Forces unit in both moments of reflection and acts of bravery harks back to the days when journalists were actually among the fighting troops, not relegated to the briefing room at base camp.
Salon
9:25:57 AM Google It! comment
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A 1960s-era recording artist says he can't get Sony to pay royalties, so his psychedelic pop might as well be free.
Salon
8:29:37 AM Google It! comment
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Tuesday, April 23, 2002
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By Dan Neel
With emphasis on storage management software, Linux-based storage virtualization, and the open storage architectures proposed by the SNIA (Storage Networking Industry Association), IBM on Tuesday outlined its enterprise storage roadmap.
Guided by its recently appointed general manager of storage software Michael Zisman, a former president of Lotus, IBM's new plan of action has finally brought Big Blue up to speed with enterprise storage players such as EMC and Hitachi Data Systems, according to industry experts.
"We're impressed at the rate of change that Zisman has been able to bring to IBM's storage organization," said Tony Prigmore, a senior analyst with the Enterprise Storage Group in Milford, Mass. "This new plan will no longer give IBM sales representatives the excuse to tell a customers that [IBM] doesn't have a certain storage technology."
IBM laid out its enterprise storage strategy as a three-prong plan heavy with software. Similar to competitors EMC and Hitachi, IBM's aim is to migrate its primary storage revenue stream to software while "reducing its dependency on lower-margin hardware," Prigmore said.
Linux-based virtualization, IBM's Storage Tank file system, and storage network designs based on mixed-vendor interoperability guidelines set forth by the SNIA represent the three areas of innovation that IBM will pursue along its enterprise storage roadmap.
Still a hot topic in the storage market, virtualization efforts from IBM will improve users' ability to manage multiple pools of storage as a single, virtual storage disk. IBM's commitment to Linux will drive its efforts in storage virtualization as many of the storage appliances that foster virtualization are Linux-based, Prigmore said.
Big Blue's Storage Tank file system will also fuel IBM's progress along its enterprise storage roadmap, company representatives said. Storage Tank is IBM's upcoming storage file system for mixed-vendor hardware and software environments.
Both Storage Tank and IBM's storage virtualization technology will arrive in 2003, according to IBM.
Following many of the interoperability guidelines currently being set forth by SNIA will also be part of IBM's enterprise storage strategy going forward. SNIA is a storage industry group with a membership ledger that includes nearly every major and minor storage player in the industry.
Zisman said IBM embraces SNIA's belief that storage management must include technology that improves both block-level and file-level data transfers.
"Our strategy says that we are going to build capabilities at the block level, we're going to build capabilities at the file level, and in both cases we are going to move intelligence into the network from the devices attached to the network and we're going to make those device manageable in a multivendor way using industry standards that can be managed by our own [software] managers or other [software] managers such as AutoIS from EMC," Zisman said.
Until the late arrival of IBM's Shark storage server in mid-1999, Big Blue was not generally regarded as an enterprise storage player in a market that was quickly moving away from mainframe-style direct-attached storage to networked storage such as SANs (storage area networks).
Now, after two years of what Prigmore called "playing catch-up," IBM is positioned to go head-to-head against the biggest giants in the storage valley as its enterprise storage roadmap unfolds, Prigmore said.
"Now IBM is going to able to have discussions with the customers which are much more complete discussions regarding storage management, higher functionality options, and the integration of things like replication to backup," Prigmore said.
"Our message is very simple and very crisp, and we are working hard to educate our troops, not only the sales organization but the marketing and development organization," Zisman said. "We've gone through a long process of distilling this strategy down, and I think we now have it down to the point where it's pretty simple."
from InfoWorld
10:29:39 AM Google It! comment
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"Our environment is under siege," Mr. Gore, the former vice president, said in an Earth Day speech here to 400 students at Vanderbilt University. "The Bush administration has chosen to serve the special interests instead of the public interests and subsidize the obsolete failed approaches of the past instead of the exciting new solutions of the future. Instead of ensuring that our water is clean to drink, they thought that maybe there wasn't enough arsenic in the drinking water."
He criticized the Clear Skies initiative that Mr. Bush was promoting today in the Adirondacks, saying that it "actually allows more toxic mercury, nitrogen oxide and sulfur pollution than if we enforced the laws on the books today."
2:15:28 AM Google It! comment
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Earth Day arrived in the mountains of upstate New York with temperatures in the 30's and a wet, heavy snow. To mark the day, Mr. Bush told a friendly audience that Clear Skies would help clean the air and reduce acid rain, one of the single biggest environmental concerns in the Adirondacks.
"With Clear Skies legislation, America will do more to reduce power plant emissions than ever before in our nation's history," Mr. Bush told an applauding crowd at the Whiteface Mountain Lodge.
2:13:41 AM Google It! comment
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Monday, April 22, 2002
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In answer to a comment on the BBEdit-Talk list about the desire for using BBEdit to create AppleScripts, among many other replies, Charlie Garrison noted, "But for those who just want to use BBEdit for writing simple scripts and then compile them (& are using OSX), there is a unix command line tool to do just that... osacompile - compile OSA scripts." (OSA Is Open Scripting Architecture.)
This seemed like an interesting exercise and I began to try and create a script that would take the text of a BBEdit window, compile it in AppleScript and save it to a compiled script. Little did I know that it would lead to a much more interesting exercise.
7:26:49 PM Google It! comment
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Google didn't completely not-document the daterange: syntax. They just put it in their API documentation and not on their Web site. But it works just fine from the Web-based interface. On the other hand you can do some fun stuff with it using the Google API too.
6:25:25 PM Google It! comment
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Sunday, April 21, 2002
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The quake, centered 15 miles southwest of Plattsburgh, N.Y., left cracks in foundations and chimneys throughout the region, said Ray Thatcher, director of emergency services for Essex County.
William Ott, a seismologist at Weston Observatory at Boston College, said the quake had a magnitude of 5.1, and at least two aftershocks were reported.
He called the earthquake ''moderate.'' A typical magnitude 5.1 earthquake would cause cracked plaster, broken windows and minor structural damage around the epicenter, he said.
iSay - I felt and heard the quake at 6:52 AM Saturday morning. Sitting at my desk it felt as if something was pushing on my butt and lower back. The sound was a deep low rumble that moved quickly away from my position.
New England Weekly Felt Earthquake Probability
Weston Observatory
Boston College Department of Geology and Geophysics
- Earthquake Hazards in the Northeast Map
- Recent New England Earthquake List
- etc.
US Geological Survey's National Earthquake Information Center
Google, Boston Earthquake
12:33:44 PM Google It! comment
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Saturday, April 20, 2002
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iSay - I nailed this one when writing "High-Speed Costs, Prices May Fall"
Looking to close the high-speed Internet access gap, EchoStar Communications (NASDAQ:DISH) and EarthLink (NASDAQ:ALNK) announced Friday a partnership deal to package satellite and digital subscriber line (DSL) ISP services.
The Colorado-based EchoStar, which is awaiting regulatory clearance on a merger with Hughes Electronics (DirecTV), said the EarthLink alliance would provide a "competitively priced satellite television/Internet access package."
4:21:15 AM Google It! comment
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Friday, April 19, 2002
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The high-speed data-transfer capabilities of UWB systems have spurred a group of inventors and entrepreneurs to promote this short-range technology as a nearly ideal way to handle the burgeoning flow of wireless information among networks of portable (battery-powered) electronic devices. These stand-alone networks could include personal digital assistants, digital cameras and camcorders, audio/video players, cell phones, laptop computers and other mobile electronic gear. To exchange the large digital files needed to support increasingly sophisticated broadband applications, these devices require high-bandwidth wireless communications links.
At present, it appears that semiconductor-based UWB transceivers will be able to provide very high data transmission speeds--100 to 500 Mbps across distances of five to 10 meters. These high bit rates will give rise to applications that are impossible using today's wireless standards. What is more, engineers expect these UWB units to be cheaper, smaller and less power-hungry than today's narrowband radio devices.
3:19:50 PM Google It! comment
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"Some scientists consider the ratio of male to female births to be an indicator of a population's health, because male sperm and embryos are more fragile than their female counterparts."
iSay - Some people might interpret these finding as "Women ARE stronger than Men". Nothing like that is the truth. Simply put, industrialized socities where men and women use tobacco and are exposed to other forms of polution are just the leading edge in the self-destructive side of the human race. It's sad, but true.
3:16:58 PM Google It! comment
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Thursday, April 18, 2002
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A return to the roots. I heard a track that reminded me of the Beatles Revolver/Sgt. Pepper era. I knew the song without having heard it before.
5:30:43 PM Google It! comment
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Heard 'em. Liked what I heard. I remembered the name too.
5:25:19 PM Google It! comment
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Music piracy stings album sales
Worldwide sales of albums fell last year for the first time since CDs were introduced into shops in the early 1980s, notably because of a flood of illegal pirate copies.
5:12:13 PM Google It! comment
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I talked with Adam on the phone this morning, and asked how he prepares the music for his weekly radio show. "If the song I'm looking for isn't available through Morpheus, it doesn't get played on the show."  [Scripting News]
5:07:56 PM comment
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E-strings for the future musician.
A new generation of electronic violins and cellos could replace
traditional wood instruments. [BBC News: sci/tech]
5:05:52 PM Google It! comment
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Wednesday, April 17, 2002
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"The Bush administration has concluded that Osama bin Laden was present during the battle for Tora Bora late last year and that failure to commit U.S. ground troops to hunt him was its gravest error in the war against al Qaeda, according to civilian and military officials with first-hand knowledge."
iSay - The elusive Osama? I don't think so. Having him still at large or having the American people THINK Osama is free to strike again serves this administrations purpose to perpetuate and expand the war on terrorisim. Osama on the loose helps elect more Republicans to the house and most importantly helps W get elected President for the first time. I predict there will be Osama sightings and Osama operations conviently timed to US elections.
What do you think?
3:29:08 PM Google It! comment
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I was going to link to a story on Business 2.0 about Blogs but the page design with all the advertising just puked me out of there. You can see if you want, here.
3:14:38 PM Google It! comment
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The Sgt. is going outside to play now that the weather has warmed up. But before he leaves he delivers a few parting shots and pointed comments.
iSay - Surprising from a military man. It's good.
3:06:13 PM Google It! comment
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I have not tested this yet but I remain hopefull that Adobe after years of marginal scripting support in it's flagship product has seen the light and given the world a truly scriptable Photoshop.
10:51:07 AM Google It! comment
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Internet service provider EarthLink Inc. President Michael McQuary speculated that competing technologies would drive the prices down at the wholesale level, resulting in a reduction of the $49.95 mo. price EarthLink charged its customers.
iSay - OK but how do you plan on competing with the telco's like Verizon who offer the same service and price, and from whom you currently lease their lines to deliver your service? Verizon has you by the balls and I don't see that changing. Your position is subordinate unless you can successfully implement an alternate delivery mechanism that rivals DSL performance. The only spot open that I can see this happening is a satellite to wireless network to customer scenario. Quite a real coup, if you can pull it off.
10:15:49 AM Google It! comment
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Tuesday, April 16, 2002
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"Javaidâs brief experience has convinced him that far from an exercise in self-indulgence, Weblogs actually can be used to increase worker efficiency." [Scripting News]
2:25:56 PM Google It! comment
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Color management software released into the world. Do you need color management? Why? Do you understand color management? [MacCentral]
2:21:13 PM Google It! comment
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Monday, April 15, 2002
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Lawrence Lee - Re: Upgrading To Current Version of RU
4/9/2002
The version number is from the Radio UserLand application, if you are fully up to date with the root updates, then unless there's an application change (which is usually documented on the application download page) you won't notice much difference except for the version number.
To upgrade, first, don't try to use the installers since they are only used for new installs. On the Download page there's a link for "If you're upgrading from version 8.0.x", click it and you'll see the most recent application download page (currently 8.0.7). Follow the instructions on the page to install.
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The macro error sorted it self out when I used the separate Post button then the Publish button instead of the single button Post & Publish.
3:31:18 PM Google It! comment
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This page is a wealth of information and a widget for Radio.
11:50:02 AM Google It! comment
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Sunday, April 14, 2002
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Greetings, I'm back with Radio Userland after an extended hiatus. Hmmm, one immediate question is that I see Radio is at version 8.0.5 and I am at 8.0.4b2 after doing all the usual root updates, including restarting Radio. Does this difference matter? If it does what do I need to do to fix it?
Another issue just came up. My first post after the hiatus didn't make it to the home page. An error message said there was a macro error no "file 04". What does that mean?
6:12:01 PM Google It! comment
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