Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Technology Stocks : Disk Drive Sector Discussion Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Yogi - Paul who wrote (8343)	5/12/2000 1:32:00 PM
From: appro	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 9256

OT Yogi, you've outdone yourself and undone me with LOL at your reference to >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Pyrrhonism. Early Pyrrhonism, represented by the teachings of Pyrrho of Elis and his student Timon, is noted as much for the life style or "agoge" of its two champions as for their specific teachings. Pyrrho is presented by Diogenes Laertius as a skeptic who is oblivious to all external objects and is saved from danger only by friends who steer him clear of "carts, precipices, dogs or what not." Philip Hallie challenges this portrayal and suggests instead that early Pyrrhonism is a eudemonean philosophy in the same class with Stoicism and Epicureanism. Pyrrho's intention was to recommend tranquility of mind by avoiding fanaticism concerning matters that cannot be proved. Although Timon's character was less tranquil than his teacher's, Hallie argues that he too was eudemonean by "being content to find happiness amongst the phenomena, and to laugh and rail at those who dared go beyond them." (Sextus Empiricus, 1985, p. 17). <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< I hesitate to add this really off-topic link educause.edu on how university CIOs have been trying to get their arms around the napster phenomena, but you gave me a great segue. Scanning through their thoughts I found these interesting outtakes: "Universities that have engineered a blocking solution usually at the router level have entered into a gorilla warfare with students? a warfare that the university is neither prepared to engage in nor are they functionally able to sustain over time. Facts to support this are as follows: Many universities that have blocked Napster have seen a dramatic "take back" approach; they have gained back massive amounts of bandwidth on the very day that they blocked the Napster site. I urge you to watch the bandwidth usage meter over the next three weeks as the students (much like an army of ants whose home has been destroyed) band together to re-build connections to alternative sites that provide MP3 files." -------------- "In my darker moments I wonder if the solution to the MP3/Napster problem is for us to build the largest and most efficient cache of MP3 data in the world. After all disk space almost doesn't cost real money any more and much of the Napster problem is the same song being sent over and over again. Of course I soon remember that we'd be helping to deliver mostly illegal data more efficiently and suspect that that might not be the right thing for us to be spending our limited time and money on." ----------------- "We give away a "free good" because we think we SHOULD be providing it in support of our academic mission. Then we're surprised when we find that our clients--whom we select because they're bright and innovative--find interesting and innovative ways of exploiting that technology way beyond our ability to provide it. We have repeatedly set up systems in which we do not establish revenue streams that scale in proportion to use to generate the revenue needed to supply the service. I can point to "free" computer cycles and "free" printer service as two earlier examples in some academic computing services. Imagine if we were at least breaking even--maybe even making a little profit--on every MB of MP3 transferred. We'd still have heartburn over the ethical dilemma of supporting copyright infringement. But we'd at least have the funding to scale up our external Internet connections." --------------------------- "Sometimes it's not obvious what's an "academic purpose." I heard a report at a meeting yesterday that at least one student on campus had used Napster to compile a portfolio used for a project in a music class. Got an "A" for their work. I often hear cries to ban IRC and similar "chat" programs/protocols, yet I also hear from medical students here that they use IRC for serious collaborative study projects with students from other medical schools. In the mid '80s, NNTP was being port-blocked on ARPANET routers because "news isn't used for research." While it's certainly true that most NNTP traffic is sludge, there's also a lot of serious academic work that goes on using it too. I think it's fair to say the same thing about HTTP traffic. You need to be careful not to ban a technology just because a certain use of it (or even most use of it) is "undesirable" material." ---------------------- "Since blocking Napster, our students have switched to I-mesh--the problem continues. As a result of our discussions with students, we in IT have obtained software that will help us track the individuals who are using the most bandwidth with these "MP3 sharing programs." We intend to locate the bandwidth abusers, and warn them that they are disrupting network services for everyone on campus... ...I'm meeting with our student senate on Sunday. Along with some other matters, I expect we'll talk about Napster, etc. Points I hope to make as part of that educational opportunity include: The university pays over $42,000 per year for Internet access. People on the Internet who download music from computers on our campus network pay nothing for our Internet connection. MP3 music sharing programs (like Napster) often use over 50% of our university's Internet capacity--slowing Internet performance for everyone on campus." ============================================= Elsewhere Scott McNeely of Sun Microsystems on cnbc interview yesterday morning likened banning napster to the game of Whack-a-mole. I think this presages an important shift in the way information storage as well as the communication of that information will exist in the Internet cyberspace without restriction. I hope. I applaud the CIO who saw the Emperor has no clothes when he questioned why the same 4MB file has to be sent and stored millions of times to millions of places when it would make more sense if someone (copyright holders, are you listening?) would simply make that one file available to users whenever they need to actually use it. Oh, it all makes my head hurt. : 0) P.S. I saw your head pop up on the Yahoo MXTR board and then disappear just as quickly.