Slashdot Mirror

mmoncur wrote in another life:
I think he really took it down just before the interview, and it was full of Dancing Jesus GIFs.

Well, If you goto the web.archive.org mirror of the site you'll be able to see that it's been the same for the past few years.

It amazes me that so many allegedly "educated" people have fallen so quickly and so hard for a fraudulent fabrication of such laughable proportions. The very idea that some pimply faced teenager, showing himself in planned, well-crafted and contrary to popular belief posts -- with the pro-Microsoft side facing us all the time -- is ludicrous. Furthermore, it is an insult to common sense and a damnable affront to intellectual honesty and integrity. That people actually believe it is evidence that the Slashdot has wrested the last vestiges of control of our productive IT workforce from decent, God-fearing Project Managers (as if any further evidence was needed! CowboyNeal? God Almighty!)

Documentaries such as Mr. T's 'Be Somebody or Be Somebody's Fool' have accurately portrayed the elaborate, proxy-masked network of computers that Slashdot editors have used to create the falsified posts of supposed 'Trolls'. Equipped with technology developed by VA Systems, Inc., these computers have the ability to fabricate trollish posts from 20 router hops away. That's right, neighbors .. the next time you're out in the bedroom 'exercising your Second Amendment rights' (heh heh), the Slashdot editors will see it! These computers are sensitive enough to tell the difference between a spalling error and a duplicate article! And when they detect you with a critical remark about their editing, their computers cross-reference the IP address to figure out your name, and then an enormous database housed at VA Systems is updated with information about your karma.

Of course, this all works fine during the workday, but what about at home? Even the Slashdot editors can't control the rotation of the Earth to prevent you from going home after work (only Hemos was able to ask for that particular favor!) That's where the "Troll" comes in. Powered by Red Hat Linux, the "Troll" is nothing more than an enormous perl script, emitting trillions of nonsensical posts. Piloted by key members of Slashdot, the "Troll Post" is strategically posted across various stories, pointing out the spelling errors and racism of the editors themselves!

Yes, I know this probably sounds paranoid and preposterous, but consider this. Despite what the revisionist historians tell you, there is no mention of the "Troll" anywhere in literature or man pages -- anywhere -- before 1997. That is when "troll.pl" was initially launched. When CmdrTaco Rob Malda, at the meeting at his friend's house, proclaimed "Kathleen Fent, will you marry me?", he may as well have said "I love anime!" The subsequent faking of a "Troll Post" on Slashdot was the first step in a long history of page widening, crapflooding and all-around erosion of our weblogging community by editors on this website. No longer can we hide from Slashdot editors. Period.

This is the 29th year of Moller vaporware. I have a 1974 brochure for Moller's "Discojet", which was supposed to be for sale Real Soon Now. This was a saucer-shaped flyer with eight Wankel engines. The brochure mentions prototypes going back to 1967. So he's been at this for 36 years now. Unsuccessfully.

Not for lack of money, either; substantial funds have gone into this project.

Small thrust-only flyers have been built. Several from the 1950s are at the Hiller Museum in Redwood City, CA, and they actually flew. They have the famous Hiller Flying Platform. Such vehicles are inherently unstable and hard to fly, but not impossible to build. The stability problem ought to be solveable today - many modern military aircraft are stable only because a control system is constantly struggling to keep them stable. But an unstable VTOL is the worst case - aerodynamic control surfaces are ineffective at low speeds, adjusting engine thrust has too much lag, engine gimbals add weight, and thrust deflector plates waste power. The Harrier fighter, after 30 years, remains the only succesful pure-thrust VTOL.

Well...I don't recall it going for days with no stories, but check out the wayback machine as there are some older front pages from slashdot there that kinda point at what I am talking about. There were not as many stories back then...and sure, one could argue that it's because the site has grown...but the number of good stories is seldom any higher. Now we get alot more Anime/Manga crap and really bad politics. Granted - I am pretty cool with this community sticking it to the RIAA/MPAA/DMCA and a few other acronyms, but I think they seriously need to get a clue on some of the other political articles (Slashdot logic often goes like this: If you agree with my politics, you are intelligent and cultured. If not, you are a moron.)...some of the writing is just plain rediculous and inflammatory. The writing was never great...I know...but I didn't recall it sinking to the levels it has been on occasion, in recent memory. Oh well...at least in the end Katz got outted as a kook for once and for all...I never did hear exactly what happened there, but not too long after the Junis incident, he kinda vanished.

In fairness, todays stories actually weren't too bad, which is why I am actually surfing slashdot today...but like I said...IMHO (and I don't think I am alone), I think the overall quality of slashdot has really slid alot. They've tried to appeal to alot broader of an audience (hey...it pays $. Maybe Malda is due for a new BMW by now...the lease is probably up on his last one.), and it's kinda alienated alot of geeks on some level.

Eh...I am just ranting. Pay no attention...it's all just MHO.

Don't forget the (defunct) Dave Cutler Fan Club . :-)

''Oh wait, they want it on disk? Do they want it in Word or PDF format? :) ''

jpegs baby with .60 quality. then the doj will submit the logs to distributed proofing to get them in ascii format.

Is Microsoft actually dumb enough to write memo after memo about something they now have admitted is their biggest threat and allow all of these memos to leak so the opposition can read them?

It isn't dumb to analyse your competition, nor to plan responses to news about your competitors successes. Microsoft's problem is that it is a very large, and very distributed organisation, and at least some of its employees are disaffected. So it's inevitable that any widely distributed memo will leak. Microsoft, obviously, know this too by now, so it has to be assumed that this memo was written in the expectation that it would leak.

I was never sure about the first Halloween memo. The more that are "discovered" the more I wonder if these are truly from M$ (they must be released by our old friend, Mr. Source, or Reliable to those that know him well).

Microsoft acknowledged that the first Halloween Memo was genuine.

This latest memo says nothing more than you would expect any sensible company to be saying at this time. ESR is right, of course, to point out that it shows Microsoft is on the defensive. You would expect a well run company to be, at this moment when so many major and influential customers are publicly looking at the competition. I agree with other posters that on this occasion ESR's annotations look shrill and are not, in my opinion, likely to sway unbiased readers in our favour.

More people need to actually help things by proofreading at: Distributed Proofreading.

Distributed Proofreading actually contributes to the public domain. Show the politicians that it's important by giving them a thriving public domain that they will want to supply with new works.

(I was disappointed with the "AI" game itself. They started out creating an interesting world, but ended up just making fans solve puzzles.)

There was recently a slashdot article about Distributed Proofreaders in support of Project Gutenburg. Volunteers proofread one page at a time from public domain books which have been scanned and OCRed.

The nice thing about these two is that you can spend as much or as little time as you would like. Have an hour a month? Thats fine. Want to spend 16 hours a day? You can. If you want to do less later or you just want to try it out, that is no problem.

(although I recognize that the OSI definition typically includes most of the same freedoms that are found with Free Software)

Read the OSI's Open Source Definition or, better yet, the original Open Source Definition Version 1.0, published in 1998, when the Open Source Initiative was founded.

Then, after you read the Open Source Definition 1.0, read The Debian Free Software Guidelines.

Now, keep in mind, that The Debian Project was officially founded in 1993. The creation of Debian was sponsored by the Free Software Foundation's GNU Project, before the Software in the Public Interest organization was formed. Debian is the only GNU/Linux distribution, which correctly use the operating system name "GNU/Linux," while all other GNU/Linux distributions refuse to give any due credit to The GNU Project, for some reason.

Now you should have some idea why "the OSI definition typically includes most of the same freedoms that are found with Free Software."

And you should probably also have idea why so many people get so angry when most of the world is talking about Eric Raymond and Linus Torvalds as the only heroes in the community -- Eric Raymond, who started the Open Source Movement and OSI in 1998 (never minding Richard Stallman who started the Free Software Movement and FSF in 1985), and Linus Torvalds, who wrote the whole operating system in 1991 (never minding, again, Richard Stallman, who started The GNU Project in 1983). See this recent farce, as an example on what I am talking about.

The facts are, that Linus Torvalds took an 8 years old operating system project, which only lacked the finished kernel, wrote a kernel and published the whole operating system (GNU system plus his own kernel) as "Linux." In my opinion, this operating system should be called simply "GNU," however Richard Stallman and the FSF wish to give both projects equal credit (for not equal work, mind you) calling the whole operating system "GNU/Linux." Still, most of the people call it just "Linux," refusing to mention GNU at all, for reasons which are beyond me. The same strange attitude we can observe with "Open Source Software" and The Open Source Initiative vs. "Free Software" and The Free Software Foundation.

Why is that so important? For a good example, see the "Linux" definition from this recent Sony Press Release from December 18, 2002:

"Linux: a Unix compatible open source operating system created in 1991 by Linus Torvalds, then a graduate student at the University of Helsinki."

Now I think it should be obvious for everyone. Keep in mind that I am talking about Sony here. This is the misinformation, which most of the people outside the community will take as truth. And when anyone will start to wonder why this software was started in the first place, she will go to Linus Torvalds and OSI's explainations, because she will not even know about the GNU and The Free Software Philosophy.

I think that the "Open Source Linux OS" vs. "Free Software GNU/Linux OS" schism is very harmful to the community at large, because the people outside of the hacker subculture have not only no idea who in fact has done which work, but they also have no idea why, which is much more important.

The real reason is freedom, but when people think that they use a "Linux OS," which was written by Linus Torvalds as an "open source software," which was invented by Eric Raymond, then they will never know that it is all about freedom at all. So, they are happy with proprietary device drivers, the very same thing which made Richard Stallman start The GNU Project in the first place.

This post will probably get moderated down, as most of Slashdot users unfortunately represent the let's-never-mention-GNU attitude of the young Internet community today. Of course, at the same time, some other post will get moderated up as +5 Funny, because it says GNU/this GNU/that -- yes, very funny indeed, especially after repeating this idiotic joke million times a week, not even stopping to think why it is important to talk about freedom, as the main motivation behind The GNU Project and the Free Software Movement at large...

Sad. Very sad.

An important part of network design is understanding what traffic is going to "nearby" locations, and designing things so most traffic stays local and doesn't use expensive or scarce facilities - things like putting big hulking routers in San Francisco and San Jose so traffic between Silicon Valley companies stays in the South Bay and Multimedia Gulch companies stays in the City without needing to use too much bandwidth around the Bay, much less sending copies of all of it on three-part-carbon forms to NSA's Fort Meade, Ashcroft's J. Edgar Hoover building, and Dick Cheney's stockbroker before delivering it.

That doesn't mean that there weren't rumors from reputable sources a few years ago about active wiretaps on MAE-West sending extra copies of some packets to somebody else, or that the Russian renamed-KGB's 1998ish SORM (another URL) project didn't try to force Russian ISPs to build a full-sized wiretap feed to them (at the ISPs' expense, of course) or that there aren't Eurocrats trying to do the same thing in their countries today. And then there's the whole Echelon Wiretapping System. But it's still impractical for them to force ISPs to deliver everything everybody's reading or emailing, though I'll be happy to send them copies of most of my spam if they'd like.

On the other hand, the publicly-accessible parts of the web aren't all that big. The Wayback Machine has a copy of all of it, with reasonable samples going back a long time, and Google and the other search engines crawl it periodically, and AllTheWeb.com presumably claims to have All The Web.

The Roomba is dumb, but at $200, it's cost-effective.

Uh, hold on a sec, I've got to go write a business plan and call some friends of mine at Google.

No joke. Give me a call if you get anything started.

I seriously doubt in 10 years if most weblogs entries from today will still be around in any form.

You may be right. I would hope that more companies become active in archival projects, ala the Wayback Machine, but if they can't make any money on it for 50 years, it'll be tough. Perhaps the job should be done by history book publishers who are reasonably certain that they will be around in 50 years... or at least know they'll be able to sell it to whoever replaces them.

So get back on the phone to Google, tell them we know who's footing the bill. =)

Do you think most people don't want to back-up their blogs? I tend to think that people won't just abandon their diaries, and that they must have considered the difference in terms of longevity between weblogging and traditional diaries. Perhaps it should be people saving backup CDROMs in their paper correspondence and photo boxes.

Now I could totally see someone not having proper backups in place in case of total hard-drive failure, or their hosting company going out of business without advance notice. These folks (myself included ;) will probably have to be burned once before they start taking backups seriously. But everyone else will probably want to keep their blog around in some form or another for posterity.

To blogging software developers: solve our problems! Incorporate easy backup and flat-text export utilities into your software, and encourage your users to make periodic backups.

To bloggers: think about how interesting every random scrap of information you think of will be in the future. Your trip to the mall, what you told Jeanette the other day, the economies of trading webcam pictures to lonely geeks for goodies from Amazon, everything. So back it up! Use blogging software with a backup feature, and keep a record that you can look at in 40 years, and show to your kids (depending on what your kids are into ; )

P2P networks have no legitimate uses at all that cannot be (better!) carried out with another tool.

How's that? The Internet Archive has terabytes of information that they want people to download for free. They have a big bandwidth bill so they want to use p2p networks to help scale. Is this not a legitimate use or is there a better way to do this?

This would apply to any number of uses, from Debian ISOs to public access television shows.

Even commercial enterprises could realize benefits, Transmission Films is funding development of Overnet so that they can distribute high quality DRM'd movies. 'member the Victoria's Secret webcast? Or the BMW car commercials? Not everyone can afford to pay Akamai.

I can think of two notable exceptions to the mantra that they only use being made of p2p is for pirating. Furthurnet is a p2p network which grew out of the tape trading community which takes copyright and the artists wishes very seriously.

The other example Transmission Films is distributing high quality movies protected by DRM via Overnet.

The Internet Archive has terabytes of share friendly information, they are evalutating several p2p platforms for helping to keep their bandwidth bills down. I've downloaded Redhat ISO's from edonkey, when they first come out the primary distro point and mirrors are swamped for at least a week.

while not soundboard, many audience recordings are really close. many tapers spend $5000-6000 dollars in equipment and acheive pristine copies of the concerts. access to the shows has become even easier thanks to an amalgamation between archive.org and etree.org, we now have the etree.org audio archive.

these files are distributed in the lossless SHN format so each copy will sound the same no matter which generation of the disc you have.

Mike

while not soundboard, many audience recordings are really close. many tapers spend $5000-6000 dollars in equipment and acheive pristine copies of the concerts. access to the shows has become even easier thanks to an amalgamation between archive.org and etree.org, we now have the etree.org audio archive.

these files are distributed in the lossless SHN format so each copy will sound the same no matter which generation of the disc you have.

Mike

So let's say someone does pull down a page. Chances are rather high that I will still find it on Google. Chances are higher still if I look at Archive.org.

Removing information from public view is not as easy as it may seem. The real question is what will court think of that. Will they consider it to be a best effort undertaken, or will they issue orders to compromise the archive?

This phenomenon is best illustrated by old Geocities pages that still have their cache versions available via Google.

Leonid

A now defunct company, First Access, did "Vicinity Authentication" in 1998. The product used a proprietary RF/IR card and sensor combination. The card could be worn anywhere and the sensor would hook up to RS-232. It was cryptographically secure and worked well. Several untis were sold to German and Australian companies. Unfortunately, First Access' management didn't know what to do with themselves and the company died a slow painful death.

I thought the intent of his question was pretty obvious. He's noticed that readily-available media offerings aren't generally high-quality, but that there is a fair amount of good stuff floating around that's relatively freely available, and though he isn't sure what's involved yet, he'd like to put his metaphorical money where his proverbial mouth is and try to contribute to this pool of good watchable material.

In other words, "While there seem to be fewer and fewer worthwhile shows in the mainstream media (such as the unnamed show that has been canceled, and I think most slashdotters can guess what the likely quality of its replacement show will be) there seems to be a growing pool of good free material online, and I'd like to contribute. Has anyone here been involved in this? What do I need to know to participate?"

Yes, it IS a very general question, which contains a lot of smaller questions within it, but this is Slashdot, not rec.arts.video.online.bandwidth-questions or some similarly specific tech support forum. I think what the poster was hoping for is some discussion of all of the aspects so that he'll be able to formulate more specific questions and take them to more focussed forums. Besides - general or not, someone interested in improving the quality of available entertainment ought to be encouraged regardless of how much they already know about the subject, not told to go away until they already know most of what they need to do...

(I didn't at all get any sense that he wanted to continue the cancelled show, just that the cancelling of what he considered to be a good show was an indicator of the decline of "mainstream media" quality, which I think most of us can sympathise with.)

So, yes, all of the above, and more. Seems a perfectly valid and potentially informative topic for discussion here. A few of us occasionally read the more general "ask slashdot" discussions for general education ourselves...

So...to contribute what little I can:

Firstly, decent writing and acting (even for animation - hey, somebody has to do the voices) is the key to watchable material. This is probably already obvious to the person asking the question (as well as everyone else here) but it should be said.

As to the "internet distribution" portion of the question, one might contact the The Internet Archive and the folks at Creative Commons about hosting and licensing, if one's willing to release the material freely.

At this point I'll also throw in a nod to one of my "pet causes" - Ogg Theora which, if they get a bit more visible on the development of it (likely to happen in March, when the format freeze is supposedly scheduled, though the second Alpha release is due Real Soon Now. At the moment, though, development appears to be a "Monty Only" project that shows up as infrequent "chunks" of updates in CVS when official releases come out. At least news is starting to show up on the mailing list...) will supply a very nice no-license-hassle format for distribution.

Transforming the recordings to a wide variety of internet-ready formats can be done with MPlayer/MEncoder in combination with a few other tools (ffmpeg, mjpegtools, the aforementioned Ogg Theora), not to mention using mjpegtools' encoders to convert video dumped from MPlayer to VCD or SVCD format for viewing on standalone players.

Someone else will have to comment on technical issues of camera and recording media types most suitable for generating internet-ready material. In MY opinion, if one handles the rest of the matter well, it's probably possible to produce perfectly adequate "good amateur quality" internet videos with ordinary off-the-shelf video cameras and a halfway-decent digitizing card. Last time I attempted video capture it was from a VHS tape, with a BT878-based card and "streamer" from Xawtv to store as a relatively high quality mjpeg/pcm quicktime file [to allow > 2GB files] then dumped to mjpegtools to generate SVCDs.

Any other topics in this broad discussion I've missed?...

"Once the voice recognition technology is in place"

That's what these guys thought they could do just by throwing money at it. Until they went under and were bought...

Oh the power of google and the wayback machine combined!

Polifka's webpage for the Windhexe

I thought a lot of ATM's used OS/2. I wonder what OS they'll eventually migrate those to -- QNX perhaps?

It's sad to see OS/2 die - I had hopes that BeOS was going to be "everything OS/2 could have been, but wasn't." Too bad it died too :( It's interesting to just sit back and wonder what the computing world would be like now (and what type of operating system we'd be running today) if IBM would have actually marketed OS/2 effectively.

Well, either original intent OR the text is what's important, and neither imply an absolutist reading of the amendement.

Don't put words in my mouth. I never posted that an absolutist reading of the amendment was in order.

If we ignore intent, the amendement could easily be read as saying that the state can authorize some memebers of the national guard to carry some weapons, as the feds think is appropriate.

It can also be easily read as stating that an individual right ("the people" and not the several states) to keep and bear arms exists.

You may feel

I don't "feel" on this issue, I think it.

there is a personal right to own big full auto firearms without any restrictions, but there is no constitutional right to that in the text, nor in case law.

The text is actually quite clear. To wit: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." The several states are not mentioned at all. The "people" are quite clearly the repository of the protected and guaranteed right.

And seriously, even in SE DC, how many cases a year are there of non-criminal civilians successfully defending themselves by firing a weapon? I'm sure it happens every now and then, but not often.

See Lott's quite comprehensive work in this area. He was originally an anti-gun researcher, by the way.

If you want an example of an ACTUAL tyrant, there really aren't any in any modern democratic societies - Nixon was about the closest we can as to a president trying to subvert democratic mechanisms, and he certainly wasn't a tyrant per se.

My point exactly. A little "free speech hyperbole" on your part about Nixon, I guess.

The correlation between free speech and democracy is massive.

I never disputed this.

The correlation between gun laws and democracy verges on non-existant.

My prior post posited that the protection of an individual gun right as a counter-balance to the power of the state was something of a best available solution to a difficult problem covered this to some degree. I think that the right to keep and bear arms is helpful in checking the power of a state seeking tyrranical power. It is not perfect, but it doesn't hurt.

There are lots of democracies with lax gun laws, and lots of democracies with very stringent ones.

How many of the latter would exist but for the most-important example of the former?

Doesn't seem to change politics very much, but it certainly does the gun homicide rate.

But the overall homicide rate and the overall violent crime rate are much more complicated things than simply "guns present" or "guns not present". This is true for demographics within and without the United States.

It sounds like you're making the circular argument of "we need guns to keep the government from taking our guns away" which is more common than it is coherant.

No. I am making the "we need guns as a last, best hope against a tyrannical government which seeks to take away all our freedoms" argument. Again, don't put words into my mouth.

You also seem to think I'm saying you can't have guns.

You never said that. Again, you are putting words into my mouth. Knock it off. My understanding of your position is that you think that the government can take away guns from people through the implementation of a licensing regime. I think that will keep unpopular groups of people from having guns. In the past, these groups have included blacks and aboriginal americans. I expect that politically unpopular and unpowerful groups will continue to be vicitimized under a licensing scheme if human nature holds true.

You can have guns

Gee, thanks Poppy.

(well, if you're honestly that willing to shoot police offiers, than no, YOU can't have guns,

I am absolutely willing to kill agents of a tyrannical government. The founding fathers weren't a bunch of namby-pamby Ghandis. They were willing to kill and be killed to defend those unalienable (natural) rights that every man is born with and which can never be rightfully taken away from him by government. I am deadly serious about what I wrote.

but others who aren't willing to murder for politics can.

I guess you would have been in favor of disarming the patriots at Lexington. They were obviously just gun wackos.

But I assume that was a little free speech hyperbole on your part).

No hyperbole, pal. If the government tries to round up guns and I have nowhere left to go and if the US government has turned into a police state, I will seek "to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness..." Make no mistake about it. If the time comes, I will die before I live as a slave, and I will take out as many would-be slavemasters as possible before I go.

I am saying there is a valid state interest in making sure those who carry guns outside of shooting ranges know what they're doing in some basic capacity.

That works under the rational basis test, but it doesn't under the compelling interest test. When fundamental individual rights are at issue, look to the latter rather than the former. There is probably a compelling state interest in keeping violent felons from owning firearms and people under PFAs from owning firearms, but I don't see a compelling state interest in instituting prior restraints on completly innocent people which would prevent them from firearms.

As far as your earlier comments go about case law, take a close look at the Miller case sometime. It is the great grand-daddy of gun cases. Read the facts and also read some history about the representation of Mr. Miller prior to coming to a conclusion about the merits of the case. While it is good law, it is just about as good as Plessy v. Ferguson was prior to 1954. The clock is ticking on Miller.

Don't ask me, ask Laurence Tribe, whose credentials are much better than mine. Admittedly, he does not go as far as I do, but the garbage about the Second Amendment being only a state right is being swept away before an avalanche of serious legal analysis. It is simply a matter of time, and I predict that in the next five to ten years, the Supremes will eviscerate Miller.

I do not think that all gun/weapons control laws are going to be unconstitutional, just as not all limits on speech are First Amendment violations, but the gun control advocates' "militia" chestnut is a walking corpse. Just as an FYI, there is an excellent Second Amendment website (containing almost all the major law review articles on the Second Amendment, from every perspective) located here. It makes excellent reading if you have any serious interest in the issue. The only problem is that it goes on hiatus from time to time. I can't find a google cache for it, so right now, the best way to check it out is on the Wayback Machine.

gf.

As has been noted elsewhere, the affiliate bot ignores robots.txt. Disallowing ia_archiver will have the effect of removing the site from the wayback machine (http://www.archive.org/), which may not be what you want to do.

It seems that the original site, http://www.domesdaybook.co.uk/index.html, is either being slashdotted, or is no longer up.

A mirror can be found here.

Honey, I'm gorgeous.

Slightly off topic, but I thought this might be a good place to mention TextNes, the text mode Nintendo emulator.

Site seems to have disappeared, but is available from web.archive.org

File is still available from Zophar.

Try this with some old roms like Super Mario Bros!

Kewl...Yes, I certainly enjoyed the origonal Hired Guns for the Amiga...Interestingly enough I thought that if this game were done right, it would be an extremely kewl concept for a realtime multi-player 3D game...As a small footnote, an incomplete and extremely buggy AGA version was actually available through "alternate channels"...

To add to what you mentioned about the "3D" (PC) version ... as far as I can tell, the last company that had anything to do with the rights to Hired Guns (3D) was VR-1 (Jaleco) ... now largely an X-Box developer (how ironic). In 2000, they released this 2:50 minute movie at E3 and even had a "sneak peak" page on their main site. There were a few stories in magazines and on websites that discussed the unique gameplay...but now, the only mention of it on the company's web site seems to be in an "about us" page...

Just out of curiosity, did you come from the Amiga before your work on Hired Guns (your nick would suggest so) or were you strictly PC???

The coolest movie-to-Lego-model that I've seen is this Millennium Falcon (had to use Internet Wayback Machine as the original site's pictures are down).

Because we already have everything we need out in the open:

NUFORC has many reports of high strangeness and high quality.

UFOSkeptic a must read for all "science types", written by Dr. Bernard Haisch.

Science Logic and the UFO debate. Once you read this, you will have no doubts left.

And finally, all the arguments of the skeptics were completely demolised single handedly by a man called Brian Zeiler on USENET circa 1996. Essential reading, if you have the patience.

Essentially, the arguments about this subject are over. The interesting discussion is centered around what is to be done about this problem... if anything.

It's more likely based on encoding things into the audio that you can't hear. Sort of like "encrypting" data into an image; steganography You could reduce the quality such that the watermark is no longer detectable, but what use is that? You'd get a crappy music file that you could trade freely with your friends, but they wouldn't want it. (Calling Dr. Felton! ;-) )

Also, as the reviewer chose the Liquid Audio site, I thought that would mean that they would provide the tracks in LiquidAudio format, but it's WMA? When I try to listen to or buy a track on their site, it seems to suggest that the tracks are in LiquidAudio format.

For general downloading or purchasing music online, I personally would avoid Liquid altogether. WMA/Real are acceptable as a last resort. MP3s are better than either WMA, Liquid, or Real. OGG would be the best of the lossy formats. However, couldn't they at least provide SHN or FLAC files? The SHN files I've downloaded from Archive.org[Etree] and recompressed into FLACs generally get about 2:1 compression. That's not bad considering they are lossless, "CD-quality." Please note that my mini-review of the formats is NOT based on quality. I've checked out the OGG listening test at vorbis.com and could hear no difference in the files. My preferences are mostly based on ease-of-use. MP3, OGG, FLAC and SHN are easier to use from my current computer to any other computers I may have in the future.

Maybe the general populace doesn't care enough about the quality of music on their PCs. So far, they've been able to get it all for free. However, when they start to be able to pay a bit for a downloadable song, they will (hopefully) demand more of their online music store. (e.g. They'll demand that it be like their brick and mortar music store, but online).

And, where are the liner notes? Lossy music, crappy software, no artwork?! Uhh.. Some of my parents' old vinyl records have really neat artwork on them. It's as though, as production costs have decreased, so has the product quality.

Not that I think the music that these companies churn out is always that great, but there are certainly lots of intelligent people working behind the scenes that know how to market a product well. Where are they?

Here's what I mean WRT the marketing: I know people here love to make fun of Microsoft (what would a Slashdot story be, without Microsoft?) but, honestly, if you can find it, watch the "Ray of Light" commercial for WinXP where people jump and jump and eventually take off and are flying around. It's horribly hokey and easy to make fun of, but they really make you WANT Windows XP. Not that I think: "Ohh, if I had Windows XP, I'd fly!" but they make you think that it's actually going to give you the freedom that you always thought it would. Please read the word "think" with emphasis ;-).

- A Source Forge Project under the name the name Freedows -- not much activity :(
- a ZDNet article dated Dec 31, 2000.
- From the WayBack Machine here are website snapshots dated April 18, 1998 and March 8, 2001.

Also from the WayBack machine, for www.allos.org:
- website snapshots from Dec 6, 1998 and Sept 22, 2001

Hmm, the reported archive dates don't correlate with the actual page dates. Curious. But it serves the purpose anyway.

- A Source Forge Project under the name the name Freedows -- not much activity :(
- a ZDNet article dated Dec 31, 2000.
- From the WayBack Machine here are website snapshots dated April 18, 1998 and March 8, 2001.

Also from the WayBack machine, for www.allos.org:
- website snapshots from Dec 6, 1998 and Sept 22, 2001

Hmm, the reported archive dates don't correlate with the actual page dates. Curious. But it serves the purpose anyway.

- A Source Forge Project under the name the name Freedows -- not much activity :(
- a ZDNet article dated Dec 31, 2000.
- From the WayBack Machine here are website snapshots dated April 18, 1998 and March 8, 2001.

Also from the WayBack machine, for www.allos.org:
- website snapshots from Dec 6, 1998 and Sept 22, 2001

Hmm, the reported archive dates don't correlate with the actual page dates. Curious. But it serves the purpose anyway.

- A Source Forge Project under the name the name Freedows -- not much activity :(
- a ZDNet article dated Dec 31, 2000.
- From the WayBack Machine here are website snapshots dated April 18, 1998 and March 8, 2001.

Also from the WayBack machine, for www.allos.org:
- website snapshots from Dec 6, 1998 and Sept 22, 2001

Hmm, the reported archive dates don't correlate with the actual page dates. Curious. But it serves the purpose anyway.

- A Source Forge Project under the name the name Freedows -- not much activity :(
- a ZDNet article dated Dec 31, 2000.
- From the WayBack Machine here are website snapshots dated April 18, 1998 and March 8, 2001.

Also from the WayBack machine, for www.allos.org:
- website snapshots from Dec 6, 1998 and Sept 22, 2001

Hmm, the reported archive dates don't correlate with the actual page dates. Curious. But it serves the purpose anyway.

If you decide to subscribe to a company that claims to use the "Ransom model" then be sure to get something signed that the random terms will remain the same. A popular "economic experiment" hiest under the "ransom model" was conducted by Gravel State/Transgaming. He claimed that "once 20,000 subscribers are signed up, TransGaming will release all its current code under the Wine license." Then as he got more subscribers, the terms started changing. First, instead of all the code, he stated that under contract with companies like Macrovision that some of TransGaming's code would never be release under the Wine license (unlike the original license policy which refered to "all of this code"). Then around the time that Wine switched licenses, Gravel State decided to remove all references to any ransom model/"economic experiment" from the TransGaming web site despite the fact that the previous TG license policy did not specify any specific license for Wine, just that the code would be released "under the Wine license." It seemed like such a vaguely worded license policy would allow for Wine to change licenses and the license policy would still be in effect. When I contacted Gravel State about the situation he made it clear that TG would not be honoring it's social contract even if the number of subscribers reached 20,000 and that subscribers who where mislead into getting multi-month subscriptions by the claims of the previous license policy are still locked into the full subscription period. Anotherwords, the customer is still responsible for paying even if the ransom model is dropped complettely!

There plenty of other liars, cheats and theives like Gravel State out there! If you do not have a signed contract then consider the terms of ransom to be an unreachable moving target!

archive.org is a proxy avoidance system(warning: link not work-safe).

For those who don't want to type it in, real links:

archive.org
Everything2.com

From the Whois database
evisa.com : Record created on 27-Aug-1997
e-visa.com: Created on Wed, Apr 22, 1998

evisa.com had been registered just under a year when VISA registered their domain for eVisa (as a product)

A quick search of the US PTO database reveals that VISA did not register their trademark for eVisa and e-Visa until "August 19, 1999".

Though interestingly a search of the wayback machine shows an incarnation of the evisa website from oct 12 1999 (after the eVisa trademark was filed) as a webdesign and e-commerce company, with later additional web directory content. The wayback machine does not have any Visa (as an entry stamp) information as of Sep 25 2001 (its last entry for evisa.com)

Well, it seems as if the wayback machine has indeed created a paradox. A simple lookup of 127.0.0.1 gives some fairly interesting results.

The most interesting of these is the one from October 19th 2000. See for yourself!

Well, it seems as if the wayback machine has indeed created a paradox. A simple lookup of 127.0.0.1 gives some fairly interesting results.

The most interesting of these is the one from October 19th 2000. See for yourself!

Oh Contraire

The first *working* link from http://archive.org
October 11th 1997

Notice how it says The Archive will provide historians, researchers, scholars, and others access to this vast collection of data (reaching ten terabytes), and ensure the longevity of this information.

Oh how the times have changed.
BTW: Considering the importance of the archive, be gentle! Slashdoting archive.org == bad!

http://web.archive.org/web/19971221012817/http://s lashdot.org/

With quality website snapshots like this, I can see how it will be a great resource for future historians!

And I'm the first to mention this here so far? You should all be modded down -1 for naiveté.

Hm. And yet the WayBack Machine has the Project Censored page here, and even the AlterNet story linked therein. Ah, but yes, it must be a conspiracy by the Big Eye In The Pyramid -- someone call Hagbard Celine. Fnord.

-1, Delusional.

And I'm the first to mention this here so far? You should all be modded down -1 for naiveté.

Hm. And yet the WayBack Machine has the Project Censored page here, and even the AlterNet story linked therein. Ah, but yes, it must be a conspiracy by the Big Eye In The Pyramid -- someone call Hagbard Celine. Fnord.

-1, Delusional.

That's Project Gutenberg's Distributed Proofreading effort (much more fun than that *other* DP).

Hehe, that's what the Wayback Machine is for!

Feed magazine interview, back from the grave...