Never been one to let the carrier drop

So, the DMCA is winning, and 2600 just rolled over and played dead.

I can understand their point – of course they don’t have a prayer, none of us have a prayer against the powers that be in a land where justice is for sale to the highest bidder – but I’m still saddened.

Next up, pallidium. The consumers apparently accepted XP, so I suspect they’ll accept Pallidium too. And motherboards that won’t run linux..

It would appear that we’re too scared of everything from terrorism to economic collapse to care that we’re losing our freedom.

Well, said freedom was mostly illusion anyway. But we’re losing even the illusion, and we don’t, for the most part, care.

Sad, very sad.

Why can’t we turn off the TV?

Been watching lots of movies lately.. in fact, in the past four days, I have watched:

*) Men In Black
*) Scooby Doo
*) What’s the worst that could happen?
*) Smiling fish and goat on fire

Actually, the first two were rather comic – two movies in a row with talking dogs, even. I was actually the most impressed by Scooby Doo. I don’t know what it is with the movie remakes of 70s television shows, but this has to be one of the better examples of the genre..

I did, however, find myself more than mildly incensed by the 4 minutes (approximately) of full motion video advertisements taht preceded the movie.

In other thoughts..

You know, the christian church is what you get when you make god in man’s image.

Saw the great patriotic happenings at Gasworks park with P. – truly brilliant fireworks. And, being someone with a criminal record for fireworks posession [and someone who helped put togeather a fireworks show twice]

On a side note – what I want to do with the mpeg library..

is make it a library.

I know, mp3.com tried that. The music companies went nuts. But we could do something that mp3.com couldn’t do.

We could hold the physical assets.

If you have the physical CD, do you have the right to play it to ‘one’ person, for the cost of providing that service? (i.e. operating as a non profit corperation)

This opens up another interesting hole for you to slip through – because you don’t have to be *one* nonprofit. If only 1/1000th of the napster crowd are dedicated enough to set up a independant library service, you suddenly have a LOT of nonprofit orginizations to squash.

But the software has to be bulletproof.

——————————————-

In the meantime, I seem to be repeating myself. I suppose this is what happens with senility – I’ll stop having new ideas shortly, and then I’ll just repeat the two dozen or so old ones I’ve had over and over in subtily different ways for the rest of eternity..

A survey of the computers in my house, for your amusement:

1) P4, 512M RAM, 120G disk, win2k/RH 7.3, ‘main dev machine’
2) Celeron 433, 64M RAM, 8G disk, NT 4.0, ‘NT test machine’
3) Celeron 433, 64M RAM, 8G disk, Win98, not mine.. P.’s machine
4) P-III, 192M RAM, 132G RAID-5, RH 6.1, file server
5) Celeron 433, 128M RAM, 2x20G disk, RH 6.2, firewall/web server
6) P-III laptop, 128M RAM, RH6.2/Win98, my typical travelling machine
7) G3 laptop, 128M RAM, OS 9, mac testing machine
8) K6-733, 40G disk, 128M RAM, Win98, 36″ SVGA display – TV replacement
9) 2xP-III, 128G RAID, 256M RAM, win2k, ‘music machine’
10) P-I, 64M RAM, win98, touchscreen/AVR programming station
11) p-I, 32M RAM, laptop, rh 6.2, car software dev and whatnot
12) Amiga 2k, 12M RAM, nostalgia purposes
13) Amiga 4k, 32M RAM, nostalgia purposes
14) P-III, 128M RAM, win98, game machine
15) Sparc 5, not currently in service
16) DEC Alpha LX164, not currently in service
17) DEC Multias, 2, not currently in service

This is getting a touch excessive. Even I have to admit that. 17 (!) computers, 15 of which have ethernet jacks.

Okay, so I find myself, though jcurious [I really should learn what the link format for people’s journals is] running into the journals of a whole lot people that I know.

This has good sides and bad sides. The good side is that I get to catch up, at least somewhat, on their lives. The bad side is that I get to find out what they made and make of my reactions to them and vice versa.

And, as usual, they think I suck. 😉

I should probably come to terms with sucking sooner or later.. the problem is that inwardly, deep down, I don’t want to suck. I still have some teenage compulsion to be ‘cool’ – long after there’s any hope of coolness, and long after I should have come to terms with the fact that there’s really not much point to being cool anyway..

I should just go about my business, try to survive and keep myself entertained. Maybe kill off a few more brain cells in some creative ways..

I don’t know.

Oh, and to friends of mine, please sign up for a account at qm.sheer.us, I’ll be locking it down soon and then you won’t be able to. 😉

On other related annoyance note, my second set of 30Gbyte maxtors seems to have gone the way of my first set – i.e. two of the drives have gone tits-up. Now this is getting sad and pathetic. When a set of warantee replacement drives does the same thing the original drives did – i.e. 2 out of the four drives fail – that’s just.. hrm.. pathetic? Sad? I wasn’t even pushing them that hard.

I’ll call maxtor warantee support and see what (if anything) they have to say. My option at this point is to either stop using maxtor altogeather, or get a replacement set of drives that is *not* from the 30Gbyte line.

S.

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/rja14/

here you will find, among other things:

*) Description of a possible hardware implimentation designed to make the DMCA enforcable

*) Description of a possible attack to reverse engineer memory maps of microcontrollers, among other things.

You ever have that experience where you can’t remember what you dreamed but you know it was disturbing?

My dreams keep getting odder and odder. Last night’s involved my family, a library which was also a thrift shop, a shortwave radio that had a faceplate that bragged it was ‘Made In Arkansas’ [ri-ight.. Arkansas, china?] – old tube style radio, but looked new and had a date of 2001.. and it had me flying [and crash-landing when I realized that I couldn’t fly..]

And the whole thing to the kind of sardonic-happy music you might find in a fair.. well, okay, so it varied a lot..

And my family etc left me there all night.

means nothing, one can always hope.

The mk3 boards have a fatal flaw which will neccesitate another turn – I wasn’t paying enough attention to the isolation/ground plane. Ah, well, inattention will get you every time. I think I’ll wait until my bank account recovers a little before doing the second turn – it’ll give me time to write the software.

I’m sooo sick of evparts’s web site. But we’re supposed to be bringing it live today, which will hopefully reduce the work load on it a little bit. I mean, these are turning into the clients from hell [and after I gave them a drasticly lower price than I usually give, too]. They give me data in different formats every time, they feel the need to take advantage of the new web site to resort and renumber everything, and they keep bugging me about the look&feel, which I told them I don’t do but i feel obliged to do anyway.

Hopefully they’ll pay me to do some stuff I actually _want_ to do soon. Don’t hold your breath.

In the meantime…

I don’t know. I shouldn’t write journal entries just after getting up – I’m not exactly in the best of moods when I wake up anyway.

Going to see big spoon this afternoon, that’ll be good at least.

1) Going to defcon involves more planning than most major programming projects.
2) You’ve ever corrected a bug in a open-source product _and submitted the fix_.
3) You’ve ever _added a feature_ to a open source product.
4) You know what a given RRGGBB hex code would look like
5) You know why EIDE/UDMA66 cables have twice as many wires.
6) You know assembly, for any processor
7) I could go on… and on.. and on…

this is a interesting bit of reading.

Amazon is now using their database, collected from us for free no doubt, to advertise products.

I suppose this was inevitable. Ethics seem to eventually have to go out the window, no matter what business you’re in.

I had a little fun playing with internet music encoding [getting ready to hook up Radio Alchymy]. You can now listen to random songs selected from off of sheer’s hard drive at sheer radio, and skip songs you can’t stand with this link. Whee!

You have to wonder about the country that brought us pizza, spagetti, the catholic church, and organized crime. Most especially you have to wonder what connections there are between the last two.

It’s been a interesting week. one of my consulting customers who was supposed to be up last week had what was supposed to be their dedicated PC go completely out to lunch, which rather much threw a monkey wrench in the works. Luckily, I’m putting another colo up for a friend of mine, so we can just host things there for a bit. STill, messy.

The mk3 boards are here! I’m so excited.. see this for a really big picture of them. Aren’t they pretty?

I seem to find myself fighting with a friend of mine.. he wants me to wax, polish, clean up, etc my EV for a auto show.. and I might be slightly interested, except for the following two reasons why not:

1) I’ve got a ten month long backlog of ‘things to do’, and no time to do them in.. I’m already short enough on time, without having to detail my car.
2) It’s supposed to be a customs -n- rods type of show, and my car is a generic li’l import.. these are not people who are impressed by technology, or they wouldn’t be going to a show for ’50s rods. So, okay, fine, it’s cool that people are into them, but I doubt if said people are going to be into my car

Now, I realize that I am not the neatest person on earth – in fact, I may be closer to the ‘messiest person on earth’ side of the spectrum [anyone remember PigPen?]. Which is why I’m not the type of person you send to the car shows, unless you’re going to a technology/geeky sort of show. This does not, pardon my observation, sound like a technology/geeky sort of show, so I think I’m going to pass.

In other issues.. went to a few clubs on saturday night [woohoo, sheer actually left the house] and had a good time.. actually, it was strange. Went to two places.. though it was really more like three, because went to the first place, listened to the music, it was bloody awful.. no beat matching, a clueless DJ trying to mesh salsa with techno.. then the second place [The last supper club, cute name, methinks] which was a bit better.. kind o’ fratty and the people damn near ripping off each other’s clothes were a bit distracting.. but at least the DJ knew his stuff and was mixing ’em up with the greatest of skill and ease. Then went to the first place again, had to pay $5 readmittance, and found that the music was suddenly extremely well mixed, sounded good, and in general a good time was being had by all.

I’ve formed a Sheer Maxum, which I’m not sure I understnad but seems to apply. If the DJ isn’t using vinyl or a computer, he/she’s not a DJ. CD players, even the oh-so-high-tech ones, just don’t seem to cut it – at least, I’ve never heard a good DJ using one.

On still other notes, the work continues to come in.. I may have to raise my rates..