At the price point of these devices anyway, an extra 512MB of ram is not really going to make or break a sale and it'd do a heck of a lot for battery life for playing video. If you can cache an entire movie into RAM (the HDD can read it in like 20 seconds) you are not particularly at a disadvantage. Spinning the drive up initially is the real battery killer; keeping it spinning is easier. I'd imagine that the total power used by the hard drive over the course of watching movie for an hour vs listening to music for an hour is about the same.
I don't have any particular problems with the GPL3 except that it is very very different from the GPL as it currently exists. (I don't have problems with it per se... I personally think it's a little bit too "viral" but that is anothe debate entirely. Software authors have the right to specify whatever terms they want for software they write.) GPLv3 removes a lot of freedoms granted to licensees under GPLv2 and as such the specific wording of a piece fo software licensed under the GPL could easily be misconstrued. What if, for instance, the software simply claims to be licensed "Under the terms of the GNU GPL"? Which version is it supposed to reference? From a legal standpoint either party could argue that it might be licensed under the terms of ANY existant version of the GPL license!
The two licenses are so dissimilar in fact that I think that the forthcoming GPL license should have a new name and/or abbreviation. The GPL as it stands has furthered a specific idea and revisions to it have always served the purpose of clarification. The GPLv3 license is quite wildly different in purpose than any GPL license before it and as such should be renamed appropriately. Microsoft might call it the RGPL as in "Restricted GPL License" while Stallman might prefer "SOPFEEGPL" as in "Stallman's own personal Fuck Everyone Else GPL"
I should interject here that I have been *specifically* licensing my software under GPLv2 for many years now. I don't want some freakshow whom I cannot control being able to change the terms by which my code may be used. I am happy to contribute to many other projects (including the Linux kernel) which are specifically GPLv2, but I will rot in hell the day I license something under the bastard abomination that is the GPLv3 license.
It's a little different to provide a device capable of violating copyright and making a device that actively facilitates and encourages it. I am not siding with TiVo here or trying to make the claim that a broadcaster has any right to control what I can do with the signal they send me, but I can see one valid argument for this technology.
The problem is that customers will too often waive certain rights or agree to ridiculous limitations in order to purchase something (especially at a reduced price). If a customer purches or downloads a PPV program or a song or whatever under a contract that they cannot archive or duplicate it (ie the customer waives all their normal fair use/first sale rights upon purchase).. If you do it through a TiVo and TiVo is aware of the restriction and specifically provides you the means to save it off to VCR even though they know you are bound by your contract not to do that... that certainly puts TiVo into an akward position. In a similar fashon, you still have no right of first sale when you purchase a track from iTunes because you waive it in the agreement.
If people would as a whole steadfastly refuse to sign contracts that remove their rights and freedoms none of this would even be an issue.
Every VCR I have ever seen does implement macrovision.. at least in a way it does because although it would be technically possible (and really quite easy) to build a VCR that has an AGC circuit that is impervious to Macrovision-type protections, no VCR maker has stepped forward and done it (at least that I know about)
You can have your privacy, but when your house burns down and takes your neighbor's homes with it and they find this... you are going to be in a world of hurt with your insurance companies and probably the police. You can do a lot of stuff in your own home that's not legal for various reasons. Regardless of whether or not the idea has merit or is valid or even could be done safely, wiring a UPS into the breaker box is most assuredly against electric code and in the event of an inspection or investigation wouldn't even come close to being a violation that is plausibly deniable.
Of course there are a whole bunch of technical reasons you can't just feed the UPS power through the breaker box easily either, but I'm assuming that most of those will be addressed in other comments egging this guy on.
While your point is well taken and I generally agree with you, I personally run into big problems using Maildirs and the filesystem as my email storage medium.
Of course I have nearly 1,000,000 e-mails in my IMAP store and over 100,000 in a couple of mailboxes. While the filesystem does generally provide a good means of storing these, I have had to muck a lot with the filesystem itself to get low ovehead and decent performance. It's currently running on Reiser v4, which ironically almost as close to a relational database as you can get in a free linux filesystem right now. Trying to index or search these messages is still a huge pain in the ass though and downloading headers/checking for new mail, etc. takes unnecessarily long due to the way the imap daemon works with the files (and can't just look it up in an index or something)
This mirrors what's happening where I live. I actually work in what is called the "IBM Building" although several companies including the one I work for occupy more office space individually than IBM does now.
Yeah! Fuck those people for donating to help Katrina! What could possibly be worse than having a rivalry with other sites as to how much they could help hurricane victims! How dare they.
I think your sarcasm is very misplaced. Nowhere did I belittle anyone for trying to help. I did critisize SA's users for berating and belittling other fundraising efforts -- which they DID do. Nobody was having any kind of competition to see whose site could raise more money!
I also critisized SA users for sabotoging their own fund by filing complaints through paypal since they think that sort of thing is funny. This is par for the course for SA's userbase. They remind me a lot of roadies who follow ICP around. I am sorry that they ruined it and I'm sorry that so many people's sincerity was hurt by them. I only hope that after Paypal refunds everyone's money, those people send it right back to charity some way, but again, I suspect that many will not bother, and it's even more unfortunate that much of this money will not make it to a charity.
And you were insightful enough to point out Lowtax's obvious failings. He got upset at being shut down automatically, when he should have known that it would be a horrible idea to offer to give out shirts to people. And then he had the the audacity to not ship them immediately.
Well, according to the complaints sent to paypal by his users, yes, this is exactly what was wrong; he did not ship their free stuff immediately. I did not say Lowtax was doing anything wrong; his users did -- to paypal. After Paypal received enough complaints, they automatically shut the account down. Lowtax attacked paypal instead of saying "WTF are you idiots doing?" to his userbase and explaining things to paypal. A side note here is that in order to make this kind of complaint, you must have sent the fund at least $10 as a paypal payment for "Merchandise - Non Auction" and provided a shipping address, then returned to paypal and opened a complaint against the seller and a request for the money to be retuned. At this point the seller must provide paypal a proof that he shipped the item you ordered -- which in this case was really nothing but a promise to try to send out "some free merchandise when possible". So, it's not a particularly easy process to do, but many of the people who gave to the fund nonetheless did do all of this!
Clearly, by taking the high road and refusing to simply donate the money to such a shady organization as the international red cross, paypal brings themselves into the right.
As I clearly said, the problem was that Lowtax accepted $30,000 for relief that was to be donated to the Red Cross and then decided that it would be OK to give it to the United Way instad. That is not only unacceptable, it's reprehensable. If I send money to be donated to the Red Cross and suddenly my donation went somewhere else -- yeah I'd be upset about it. It wasn't right for him to have made that decision. When I posted the previous comment, giving the money to the UW was his operating plan. Fortunately, Lowtax has backpedeled on it due to users complaining.
Fucking troll.
You, sir, are a complete idiot. Welcome to my killfile.
It's the classic pick two of the three items on this wishlist and you've got yourself a deal! Seriously. You can get a set of 5.1 speakers from woot for 20 bucks every now and then [inexpensive, 5.1]; you can go out and buy a pair of moderately good all-in-one speakers for 150 bucks or so [decent, inexpensive], or you can put down 1000-2000 bucks for a 5.1 setup that doesn't totally suck rocks [decent, 5.1]
Even a $2000 setup won't be rock-your-socks-off-awesome (and not that the sheer cost of a speaker or amplifier necessarily makes it better) but you can still do OK with a 1-2k budget for amplifier(s) and speakers/sub for this type of setup.
Looks like I was right. Lowtax completely went on a tyraid about it and as a result PayPal didn't want to work with him. The CSR even asked him why he would put up a whole article about how paypal sucks on the front page of his site and then expect them to help him. Paypal does suck in a lot of cases; Lowtax is correct in this case; Paypal ought to held to the same standards as banks and other financial institutions, etc. but as of right now they aren't a bank and when they have $30K of your money, you don't kick them in the balls and expect them to do everything you say.
What's worse is that the first reason the account was shut down is because of his own idiotic users. He had the users submit payments for merchandise in order to get a shipping address to send them free stuff. While this is a good idea for a fundraiser, his users started sending demands for proof of shipping via paypal (probably thinking how funny it would be to do that sort of thing) and hosed the whole damn thing.
You know these same SA users even went around to other forums who were running donation drives and insulted their efforts claiming that the "SomethingAwful donation drive is going to [crush your drive]" and the like. Great fucking job, guys.
What is EVEN worse is that people gave money to SA to be donated to the Red Cross, then when it seemed that PayPal was willing to send the money into their United Way fund, Lowtax immediately jumped at the chance to misappropriate $30,000 of other peoples' money. Another fucking brilliant move.
Now I am applauding PayPal for their decision and their willingness to refund the money. I can only hope that the donors will immediately spin it back out to a charity or relief organization through a proper avenue, but honestly I suspect that many will not.
While I do know that in many cases (and probably this one too) Paypal likes to be quite draconian, in this case I have to wonder if they didn't actually have a legitimate case against this particular account. After all, a friend of mine is also running a PayPal drive and has accepted far MORE money (Over $35,000) into it than the SA account and has had no problems whatsoever with paypal. Of course not only does he publish the records of the donation money going to charity at the maximum rate that he can extract the money from the paypal account ($3,000/day), he has also filed large amounts of paperwork with both the charities and with paypal to stay above board with all of this. The last time that he did a donation drive, paypal even reimbursed 100% of the transaction and CC fees to him.
Unfortunately, paypal makes this kind of a payment avenue and "tip jar" type donation system so easy for people to set up that most forget that there are a lot of complicated requirements when you start accepting and spending large amounts of money like this for the purposes of charitable donation. There are tax implications surrounding the money and requirements surrounding the donations for the donor, for the intermediary, for paypal, and for the charity. If you don't abide by them properly you're going to get shut down.
I'm sure they are sincere, but the way SA operates kind of makes you think that they could easily have brought this on themselves -- going nuts about the Paypal freeze probably isn't the best thing to do to get it resolved either, but it's typical SA style. I hope for the sake of all the donors and the charities involved that at least for once the SA people act maturely in this dispute or else all that money will be sitting there for weeks while the SA forums go crazy with the typical threats of retaliation and the normal fare while nothing happens.
Amen! And my pc still wont suspend or hibernate with bluetooth enabled!??! And you can't download an updated bluetooth driver?!?
The one advantage of bluetooth on windows albeit with the severely bloated widcomm stack is that it offers a boatload of profiles and services compared to the mac side. On windows you can use the computer as a bluetooth headset or DUN target.. Try as I might I have never figured out how to use my powerbook as a speakerphone, which would be a killer app for me.
Yes, I remember having DVD drives that couldn't read CD's at all or drives that only read real 'pressed' CD's and not recordable. As I said, this drive will probably be the exception instead of the norm, and since it's marketed to professional dvd authoring companies etc and not at consumers anyway, it won't really matter. I would imagine they just built the drive using their existing dual laser components and the CD-tuned lasers got the shaft to get the product out to market. Consumer drives will probably employ the same method but use a single laser for both DVD's and CD's, the same as most non high-end DVD recorders do now.
I moved an old 486/33 server once back in the day while it was in the middle of the OS install... We had started in one building in the room we thought we were getting, but we ended up getting a room on the entire opposite side of campus. Since installing a linux distro in this day was not exactly a speedy process, we decided to go ahead and move it while it worked. Three of us carried it.. One fellow on the CPU, one on the UPS, and one on the monitor -- we decided that if we were going to move a running computer, UPS alarms blazing it would be pointless for people to see us doing it without the screen powered up and scrolling mounds of text. We decided to hand carry it also as we though rolling it on a dolly might harm the running hard drive due to vibration.
Actually, the first pioneer BluRay drive to hit the market BDR-1000 has absolutely no support for CD-R or even reading CD's, though it reads and writes every DVD recordable format. While this probably will not be the norm for BluRay or HD-DVD drives, it's certainly not out of the question to imagine a day when your computer can't read a CD-ROM.
I don't complain about them because AOL or MSN's services don't feign 'openness' or customer choice and freedom to attract users. Google can sit around and make proprietary junk all day long for all I care, but spewing BS about how open free and good it all is -- that is garbage!
It's nice that they have chosen to use jabber, and I bet their bottom line is eventually going to benefit from not having to maintain a wide breadth of clients or worry about constructing their own protocol from scratch -- but you know AOL could switch to XMPP too and it wouldn't make their service any better. See, the protocol is not the thing, it's the implementation of the sstandard, and the XMPP standard includes s2s message transports which Google has FAILED to implement, thereby completely negating all of the openness and accessibility of the system they claim. If they are sincere about their desire to interoperate with people, then they need to step up and either do it or make some kind of guarantee they are, otherwise people like me are going to continue to complain whenever someone asks about Google talk or there is an open discussion about google talk.
In general IM via Jabber is a permissions based system. You can grant very fine grain permissions using the standards set forth in XMPP. It's pretty easy to discard messages from anyone not on your jabber roster, and this can be done taken care of server side to cut down on the traffic. With an IM application, you are in the unique position that making this the default behavior will not cause problems for people.
Their 'federation' concept is completely bogus too. I really don't expect them to let my small 22 person jabber server 'federate' with them, and why should I jump through hoops to support Google talk users?
What's worse about it is that although jabber supports transports, I really doubt that anyone is going to bother to write a jabber-to-jabber transport to support Google Talk -- because anyone who would be capable of authoring such a transport is likely to be incredibly peeved about the lack of proper s2s support.
I would like an HD disc format for the simple reason that I want a decent, and cheap format to store and exchange the things I shoot and produce with my HD camcorder. I could care less about buying movies in HD (Thouth if I had a player I certaily would buy them.) Even though there are a few HD recording formats that actually are available to consumers right now (DVHS, WVHS, HDV) they are either special purpose, expensive, or may not be a good future-proof-for-the-next-12-months choice.
A lot of people make the same argument as the parent post -- that nobody will buy HD discs because there aren't that many people with HDTV's, but you see, the thought process for consumers is completely the other way around. People are not buying HDTV's because there's very little to watch on them. The introduction of an HD disc-based format and players and the sudden influx of HD content at or about the same price as the DVD content will drive the uptake of HDTV's. For some stupid reason the manufacturers have tried to force the market to do the opposite and buy the HDTV's first.
A more appropriate comparison might be to look at the way that consumers have progressed through their equipment as the recording formats have changed in the past. When DVD was introduced, the picture quality was really (and arugably still isn't) above high-end VHS, so it certainly did not drive people to purchase better television sets... yet people DID! Many people were driven to purchase 16:9 TV's to better enjoy the widescreen formats that DVD offered, and many purchased larger TV's to have a more cinema-like experience at home as the price of discs was reduced. Likewise, before the introduction of DVD, multichannel audio in the home was almost nonexistant. Some people had sprung for 'surround sound' setups offering Dolby ProLogic, but they were few and far between and the actual experience was somewhat lackluster... But look at how DVD's drove the adoption of 5.1 audio setups -- even though a really superior stereo setup will probably sound better to a listener than a cheap 5.1 setup, people are buying them up as fast as they can make them. Car manufacturers are even advertising 5.1 audio for backseat DVD systems. Seriously -- 5.1 audio in the car?!? Although when the car is parked inside in a garage, it's arguably one of the best spaces to use a multichannel audio setup, you can't hear the difference over the road noise!
For what it's worth, the resolution of the video on UMD is supposed to be 720x480, the same as with a DVD, and even with the bitrate necessary to squeeze the video onto a 1.2GB disc, the use of H.263 means it should theoretically be almost equivalent to the quality of the same movie on DVD.
All of this is pretty much speculation, though. I don't know if anyone has tried or succeeded at extracting a UMD movie and verifying this, and until there is some device that will let you play a UMD movie on a television all we can do is speculate and relay what has been told to us as users.
Good thinking, but shortsighted. See, the beauty part of IM (and jabber in particular) is that it is generally uses permission based authorization. IE if you are not on my IM roster then you cannot send me a message. Due to the general shortage of similar nicknames and the like, people generally exchange IM identities out of band anyway, and unlike email, IM services like AIM and Jabber are not *typically* used for one-off communications (instead, web-based chat applets and email fill this void)
Thus it would make perfect sense for google to open up the service for messaging but only allow authorized contacts to send or receive messages into or out of the google talk system. As I said before, Jabber has a simple but effective permissions system to make this perfectly feasable. You can (and must) authorize someone to be able to send messages to you and see your presence. Granted, spammers could rely on people accepting authorization requests in order to spam them, but so long as email and other easier methods of spamming exist, this will probably be ineffective for them to pursue.
The summary here is that Google has alternatives to closing their IM service. They already have entiere divisions of their company devoted to stopping esoteric methods of spamming their various services (search, ads, email, usenet archive, etc.) that it wouldn't really be a big deal for them to fight IM spam as well.
Cellphone companies are finally realizing that they have to support sending SMS and MMS to anyone no matter what carrier they use; IM services need to do the same. Until they do, I'll stick with running my own jabber server.
Do what? Produce HD resolution footage or an HD-DVD? I made one last weekend. You can make a pretty good stab at it on an iMac with a $2000 camera (Sony HDR-HC1) and $1200 of software (Final Cut Studio). That is less than $5K of equipment. Granted, it's not going to rival a professional setup, but it is high definition and you can do some really amazing work with a budget setup. If you want it to look like film, there are some really affordable and amazing plugins for motion-compensated deinterlacing and dropping the frame rate.
If you are talking about digitally editing film on a budget, then no, any work with film is generally beyond the budget of a garage filmmaker. Unless you want to shoot on 8mm or 16mm (and I know some people do) then the film alone is going to cost more than the above setup.
This posting barely qualifies as rumor. At best, it's part of some kind of viral strategy from Skype to generate interest. Google has no need to buy Skype. Other than a fairly large and loyal userbase and some interesting peer-to-peer technology, Skype would have very little of interest for Google. Plus, Skype completely goes against the philosophy that Google details on their own webpages promoting Google talk. Skype doesn't use anything close to an open standard and the only reason they can stay in business is that their call-in/call-out services (the only thing they make money on) is monopolized by their lack of interoperability.
That being said, Google talk has a long way to go before it lives up to Google's own marketing. It's nice that it's jabber-based, but it's missing the key feature of the entire jabber system -- message routing and transparency. Jabber is designed from the ground up to be a MESSAGE ROUTING protocol much like email. I find it very ironic that Google goes on and on about how great and open and interoperable using jabber is, when I can't send a message from my *existing jabber acccount* to a Google talk user. What's worse is that they have some sort of ridiculous process of 'Federation' cooked up to make the links. This is sort of like if they were to make Gmail a service that could only exchange messages between Gmail users (and select other mailservers they choose to 'Federate' with.)
You seem to know an awful lot about film production not to know that digital effects done at 2K or 4K are still much higher resolutions than the top end of hdtv -- ie 1080p at 1920x1080. And even still, reworking them in a higher resolution would not necessarily be the huge challenge you suggest it is. Film is already edited digitally using lower resolution stand-in footage to proof before it's rendered out in full glory. Increasing the resolution might require recapturing the frames (at higher resolution) and rerendering the color, effects, etc, but this process, though time consuming, is largely automated by software and hardware.
Slashdot Mirror
MS has fought so hard for DRM and copy control and now they are pissed because someone else's is biting them in the ass. Suckers!
At the price point of these devices anyway, an extra 512MB of ram is not really going to make or break a sale and it'd do a heck of a lot for battery life for playing video. If you can cache an entire movie into RAM (the HDD can read it in like 20 seconds) you are not particularly at a disadvantage. Spinning the drive up initially is the real battery killer; keeping it spinning is easier. I'd imagine that the total power used by the hard drive over the course of watching movie for an hour vs listening to music for an hour is about the same.
I don't have any particular problems with the GPL3 except that it is very very different from the GPL as it currently exists. (I don't have problems with it per se... I personally think it's a little bit too "viral" but that is anothe debate entirely. Software authors have the right to specify whatever terms they want for software they write.) GPLv3 removes a lot of freedoms granted to licensees under GPLv2 and as such the specific wording of a piece fo software licensed under the GPL could easily be misconstrued. What if, for instance, the software simply claims to be licensed "Under the terms of the GNU GPL"? Which version is it supposed to reference? From a legal standpoint either party could argue that it might be licensed under the terms of ANY existant version of the GPL license!
The two licenses are so dissimilar in fact that I think that the forthcoming GPL license should have a new name and/or abbreviation. The GPL as it stands has furthered a specific idea and revisions to it have always served the purpose of clarification. The GPLv3 license is quite wildly different in purpose than any GPL license before it and as such should be renamed appropriately. Microsoft might call it the RGPL as in "Restricted GPL License" while Stallman might prefer "SOPFEEGPL" as in "Stallman's own personal Fuck Everyone Else GPL"
I should interject here that I have been *specifically* licensing my software under GPLv2 for many years now. I don't want some freakshow whom I cannot control being able to change the terms by which my code may be used. I am happy to contribute to many other projects (including the Linux kernel) which are specifically GPLv2, but I will rot in hell the day I license something under the bastard abomination that is the GPLv3 license.
Don't you mean as soon as it could run windows?
It's a little different to provide a device capable of violating copyright and making a device that actively facilitates and encourages it. I am not siding with TiVo here or trying to make the claim that a broadcaster has any right to control what I can do with the signal they send me, but I can see one valid argument for this technology.
... that certainly puts TiVo into an akward position. In a similar fashon, you still have no right of first sale when you purchase a track from iTunes because you waive it in the agreement.
The problem is that customers will too often waive certain rights or agree to ridiculous limitations in order to purchase something (especially at a reduced price). If a customer purches or downloads a PPV program or a song or whatever under a contract that they cannot archive or duplicate it (ie the customer waives all their normal fair use/first sale rights upon purchase).. If you do it through a TiVo and TiVo is aware of the restriction and specifically provides you the means to save it off to VCR even though they know you are bound by your contract not to do that
If people would as a whole steadfastly refuse to sign contracts that remove their rights and freedoms none of this would even be an issue.
Every VCR I have ever seen does implement macrovision.. at least in a way it does because although it would be technically possible (and really quite easy) to build a VCR that has an AGC circuit that is impervious to Macrovision-type protections, no VCR maker has stepped forward and done it (at least that I know about)
You can have your privacy, but when your house burns down and takes your neighbor's homes with it and they find this... you are going to be in a world of hurt with your insurance companies and probably the police. You can do a lot of stuff in your own home that's not legal for various reasons. Regardless of whether or not the idea has merit or is valid or even could be done safely, wiring a UPS into the breaker box is most assuredly against electric code and in the event of an inspection or investigation wouldn't even come close to being a violation that is plausibly deniable.
Of course there are a whole bunch of technical reasons you can't just feed the UPS power through the breaker box easily either, but I'm assuming that most of those will be addressed in other comments egging this guy on.
While your point is well taken and I generally agree with you, I personally run into big problems using Maildirs and the filesystem as my email storage medium.
Of course I have nearly 1,000,000 e-mails in my IMAP store and over 100,000 in a couple of mailboxes. While the filesystem does generally provide a good means of storing these, I have had to muck a lot with the filesystem itself to get low ovehead and decent performance. It's currently running on Reiser v4, which ironically almost as close to a relational database as you can get in a free linux filesystem right now. Trying to index or search these messages is still a huge pain in the ass though and downloading headers/checking for new mail, etc. takes unnecessarily long due to the way the imap daemon works with the files (and can't just look it up in an index or something)
This mirrors what's happening where I live. I actually work in what is called the "IBM Building" although several companies including the one I work for occupy more office space individually than IBM does now.
Yet they still sell mainframes? Go figure.
Yeah! Fuck those people for donating to help Katrina! What could possibly be worse than having a rivalry with other sites as to how much they could help hurricane victims! How dare they.
I think your sarcasm is very misplaced. Nowhere did I belittle anyone for trying to help. I did critisize SA's users for berating and belittling other fundraising efforts -- which they DID do. Nobody was having any kind of competition to see whose site could raise more money!
I also critisized SA users for sabotoging their own fund by filing complaints through paypal since they think that sort of thing is funny. This is par for the course for SA's userbase. They remind me a lot of roadies who follow ICP around. I am sorry that they ruined it and I'm sorry that so many people's sincerity was hurt by them. I only hope that after Paypal refunds everyone's money, those people send it right back to charity some way, but again, I suspect that many will not bother, and it's even more unfortunate that much of this money will not make it to a charity.
And you were insightful enough to point out Lowtax's obvious failings. He got upset at being shut down automatically, when he should have known that it would be a horrible idea to offer to give out shirts to people. And then he had the the audacity to not ship them immediately.
Well, according to the complaints sent to paypal by his users, yes, this is exactly what was wrong; he did not ship their free stuff immediately. I did not say Lowtax was doing anything wrong; his users did -- to paypal. After Paypal received enough complaints, they automatically shut the account down. Lowtax attacked paypal instead of saying "WTF are you idiots doing?" to his userbase and explaining things to paypal. A side note here is that in order to make this kind of complaint, you must have sent the fund at least $10 as a paypal payment for "Merchandise - Non Auction" and provided a shipping address, then returned to paypal and opened a complaint against the seller and a request for the money to be retuned. At this point the seller must provide paypal a proof that he shipped the item you ordered -- which in this case was really nothing but a promise to try to send out "some free merchandise when possible". So, it's not a particularly easy process to do, but many of the people who gave to the fund nonetheless did do all of this!
Clearly, by taking the high road and refusing to simply donate the money to such a shady organization as the international red cross, paypal brings themselves into the right.
As I clearly said, the problem was that Lowtax accepted $30,000 for relief that was to be donated to the Red Cross and then decided that it would be OK to give it to the United Way instad. That is not only unacceptable, it's reprehensable. If I send money to be donated to the Red Cross and suddenly my donation went somewhere else -- yeah I'd be upset about it. It wasn't right for him to have made that decision. When I posted the previous comment, giving the money to the UW was his operating plan. Fortunately, Lowtax has backpedeled on it due to users complaining.
Fucking troll.
You, sir, are a complete idiot. Welcome to my killfile.
I just want a:
decent,
inexpensive
5 speaker plus woofer setup
It's the classic pick two of the three items on this wishlist and you've got yourself a deal! Seriously. You can get a set of 5.1 speakers from woot for 20 bucks every now and then [inexpensive, 5.1]; you can go out and buy a pair of moderately good all-in-one speakers for 150 bucks or so [decent, inexpensive], or you can put down 1000-2000 bucks for a 5.1 setup that doesn't totally suck rocks [decent, 5.1]
Even a $2000 setup won't be rock-your-socks-off-awesome (and not that the sheer cost of a speaker or amplifier necessarily makes it better) but you can still do OK with a 1-2k budget for amplifier(s) and speakers/sub for this type of setup.
Follow up commentary:
Looks like I was right. Lowtax completely went on a tyraid about it and as a result PayPal didn't want to work with him. The CSR even asked him why he would put up a whole article about how paypal sucks on the front page of his site and then expect them to help him. Paypal does suck in a lot of cases; Lowtax is correct in this case; Paypal ought to held to the same standards as banks and other financial institutions, etc. but as of right now they aren't a bank and when they have $30K of your money, you don't kick them in the balls and expect them to do everything you say.
What's worse is that the first reason the account was shut down is because of his own idiotic users. He had the users submit payments for merchandise in order to get a shipping address to send them free stuff. While this is a good idea for a fundraiser, his users started sending demands for proof of shipping via paypal (probably thinking how funny it would be to do that sort of thing) and hosed the whole damn thing.
You know these same SA users even went around to other forums who were running donation drives and insulted their efforts claiming that the "SomethingAwful donation drive is going to [crush your drive]" and the like. Great fucking job, guys.
What is EVEN worse is that people gave money to SA to be donated to the Red Cross, then when it seemed that PayPal was willing to send the money into their United Way fund, Lowtax immediately jumped at the chance to misappropriate $30,000 of other peoples' money. Another fucking brilliant move.
Now I am applauding PayPal for their decision and their willingness to refund the money. I can only hope that the donors will immediately spin it back out to a charity or relief organization through a proper avenue, but honestly I suspect that many will not.
While I do know that in many cases (and probably this one too) Paypal likes to be quite draconian, in this case I have to wonder if they didn't actually have a legitimate case against this particular account. After all, a friend of mine is also running a PayPal drive and has accepted far MORE money (Over $35,000) into it than the SA account and has had no problems whatsoever with paypal. Of course not only does he publish the records of the donation money going to charity at the maximum rate that he can extract the money from the paypal account ($3,000/day), he has also filed large amounts of paperwork with both the charities and with paypal to stay above board with all of this. The last time that he did a donation drive, paypal even reimbursed 100% of the transaction and CC fees to him.
Unfortunately, paypal makes this kind of a payment avenue and "tip jar" type donation system so easy for people to set up that most forget that there are a lot of complicated requirements when you start accepting and spending large amounts of money like this for the purposes of charitable donation. There are tax implications surrounding the money and requirements surrounding the donations for the donor, for the intermediary, for paypal, and for the charity. If you don't abide by them properly you're going to get shut down.
I'm sure they are sincere, but the way SA operates kind of makes you think that they could easily have brought this on themselves -- going nuts about the Paypal freeze probably isn't the best thing to do to get it resolved either, but it's typical SA style. I hope for the sake of all the donors and the charities involved that at least for once the SA people act maturely in this dispute or else all that money will be sitting there for weeks while the SA forums go crazy with the typical threats of retaliation and the normal fare while nothing happens.
Amen! And my pc still wont suspend or hibernate with bluetooth enabled!??! And you can't download an updated bluetooth driver?!?
The one advantage of bluetooth on windows albeit with the severely bloated widcomm stack is that it offers a boatload of profiles and services compared to the mac side. On windows you can use the computer as a bluetooth headset or DUN target.. Try as I might I have never figured out how to use my powerbook as a speakerphone, which would be a killer app for me.
Yes, I remember having DVD drives that couldn't read CD's at all or drives that only read real 'pressed' CD's and not recordable. As I said, this drive will probably be the exception instead of the norm, and since it's marketed to professional dvd authoring companies etc and not at consumers anyway, it won't really matter. I would imagine they just built the drive using their existing dual laser components and the CD-tuned lasers got the shaft to get the product out to market. Consumer drives will probably employ the same method but use a single laser for both DVD's and CD's, the same as most non high-end DVD recorders do now.
I moved an old 486/33 server once back in the day while it was in the middle of the OS install... We had started in one building in the room we thought we were getting, but we ended up getting a room on the entire opposite side of campus. Since installing a linux distro in this day was not exactly a speedy process, we decided to go ahead and move it while it worked. Three of us carried it.. One fellow on the CPU, one on the UPS, and one on the monitor -- we decided that if we were going to move a running computer, UPS alarms blazing it would be pointless for people to see us doing it without the screen powered up and scrolling mounds of text. We decided to hand carry it also as we though rolling it on a dolly might harm the running hard drive due to vibration.
Actually, the first pioneer BluRay drive to hit the market BDR-1000 has absolutely no support for CD-R or even reading CD's, though it reads and writes every DVD recordable format. While this probably will not be the norm for BluRay or HD-DVD drives, it's certainly not out of the question to imagine a day when your computer can't read a CD-ROM.
I don't complain about them because AOL or MSN's services don't feign 'openness' or customer choice and freedom to attract users. Google can sit around and make proprietary junk all day long for all I care, but spewing BS about how open free and good it all is -- that is garbage!
It's nice that they have chosen to use jabber, and I bet their bottom line is eventually going to benefit from not having to maintain a wide breadth of clients or worry about constructing their own protocol from scratch -- but you know AOL could switch to XMPP too and it wouldn't make their service any better. See, the protocol is not the thing, it's the implementation of the sstandard, and the XMPP standard includes s2s message transports which Google has FAILED to implement, thereby completely negating all of the openness and accessibility of the system they claim. If they are sincere about their desire to interoperate with people, then they need to step up and either do it or make some kind of guarantee they are, otherwise people like me are going to continue to complain whenever someone asks about Google talk or there is an open discussion about google talk.
In general IM via Jabber is a permissions based system. You can grant very fine grain permissions using the standards set forth in XMPP. It's pretty easy to discard messages from anyone not on your jabber roster, and this can be done taken care of server side to cut down on the traffic. With an IM application, you are in the unique position that making this the default behavior will not cause problems for people.
Their 'federation' concept is completely bogus too. I really don't expect them to let my small 22 person jabber server 'federate' with them, and why should I jump through hoops to support Google talk users?
What's worse about it is that although jabber supports transports, I really doubt that anyone is going to bother to write a jabber-to-jabber transport to support Google Talk -- because anyone who would be capable of authoring such a transport is likely to be incredibly peeved about the lack of proper s2s support.
I would like an HD disc format for the simple reason that I want a decent, and cheap format to store and exchange the things I shoot and produce with my HD camcorder. I could care less about buying movies in HD (Thouth if I had a player I certaily would buy them.) Even though there are a few HD recording formats that actually are available to consumers right now (DVHS, WVHS, HDV) they are either special purpose, expensive, or may not be a good future-proof-for-the-next-12-months choice.
A lot of people make the same argument as the parent post -- that nobody will buy HD discs because there aren't that many people with HDTV's, but you see, the thought process for consumers is completely the other way around. People are not buying HDTV's because there's very little to watch on them. The introduction of an HD disc-based format and players and the sudden influx of HD content at or about the same price as the DVD content will drive the uptake of HDTV's. For some stupid reason the manufacturers have tried to force the market to do the opposite and buy the HDTV's first.
A more appropriate comparison might be to look at the way that consumers have progressed through their equipment as the recording formats have changed in the past. When DVD was introduced, the picture quality was really (and arugably still isn't) above high-end VHS, so it certainly did not drive people to purchase better television sets... yet people DID! Many people were driven to purchase 16:9 TV's to better enjoy the widescreen formats that DVD offered, and many purchased larger TV's to have a more cinema-like experience at home as the price of discs was reduced. Likewise, before the introduction of DVD, multichannel audio in the home was almost nonexistant. Some people had sprung for 'surround sound' setups offering Dolby ProLogic, but they were few and far between and the actual experience was somewhat lackluster... But look at how DVD's drove the adoption of 5.1 audio setups -- even though a really superior stereo setup will probably sound better to a listener than a cheap 5.1 setup, people are buying them up as fast as they can make them. Car manufacturers are even advertising 5.1 audio for backseat DVD systems. Seriously -- 5.1 audio in the car?!? Although when the car is parked inside in a garage, it's arguably one of the best spaces to use a multichannel audio setup, you can't hear the difference over the road noise!
For what it's worth, the resolution of the video on UMD is supposed to be 720x480, the same as with a DVD, and even with the bitrate necessary to squeeze the video onto a 1.2GB disc, the use of H.263 means it should theoretically be almost equivalent to the quality of the same movie on DVD.
All of this is pretty much speculation, though. I don't know if anyone has tried or succeeded at extracting a UMD movie and verifying this, and until there is some device that will let you play a UMD movie on a television all we can do is speculate and relay what has been told to us as users.
Good thinking, but shortsighted. See, the beauty part of IM (and jabber in particular) is that it is generally uses permission based authorization. IE if you are not on my IM roster then you cannot send me a message. Due to the general shortage of similar nicknames and the like, people generally exchange IM identities out of band anyway, and unlike email, IM services like AIM and Jabber are not *typically* used for one-off communications (instead, web-based chat applets and email fill this void)
Thus it would make perfect sense for google to open up the service for messaging but only allow authorized contacts to send or receive messages into or out of the google talk system. As I said before, Jabber has a simple but effective permissions system to make this perfectly feasable. You can (and must) authorize someone to be able to send messages to you and see your presence. Granted, spammers could rely on people accepting authorization requests in order to spam them, but so long as email and other easier methods of spamming exist, this will probably be ineffective for them to pursue.
The summary here is that Google has alternatives to closing their IM service. They already have entiere divisions of their company devoted to stopping esoteric methods of spamming their various services (search, ads, email, usenet archive, etc.) that it wouldn't really be a big deal for them to fight IM spam as well.
Cellphone companies are finally realizing that they have to support sending SMS and MMS to anyone no matter what carrier they use; IM services need to do the same. Until they do, I'll stick with running my own jabber server.
Do what? Produce HD resolution footage or an HD-DVD? I made one last weekend. You can make a pretty good stab at it on an iMac with a $2000 camera (Sony HDR-HC1) and $1200 of software (Final Cut Studio). That is less than $5K of equipment. Granted, it's not going to rival a professional setup, but it is high definition and you can do some really amazing work with a budget setup. If you want it to look like film, there are some really affordable and amazing plugins for motion-compensated deinterlacing and dropping the frame rate.
If you are talking about digitally editing film on a budget, then no, any work with film is generally beyond the budget of a garage filmmaker. Unless you want to shoot on 8mm or 16mm (and I know some people do) then the film alone is going to cost more than the above setup.
This posting barely qualifies as rumor. At best, it's part of some kind of viral strategy from Skype to generate interest. Google has no need to buy Skype. Other than a fairly large and loyal userbase and some interesting peer-to-peer technology, Skype would have very little of interest for Google. Plus, Skype completely goes against the philosophy that Google details on their own webpages promoting Google talk. Skype doesn't use anything close to an open standard and the only reason they can stay in business is that their call-in/call-out services (the only thing they make money on) is monopolized by their lack of interoperability.
That being said, Google talk has a long way to go before it lives up to Google's own marketing. It's nice that it's jabber-based, but it's missing the key feature of the entire jabber system -- message routing and transparency. Jabber is designed from the ground up to be a MESSAGE ROUTING protocol much like email. I find it very ironic that Google goes on and on about how great and open and interoperable using jabber is, when I can't send a message from my *existing jabber acccount* to a Google talk user. What's worse is that they have some sort of ridiculous process of 'Federation' cooked up to make the links. This is sort of like if they were to make Gmail a service that could only exchange messages between Gmail users (and select other mailservers they choose to 'Federate' with.)
Bad move.
You seem to know an awful lot about film production not to know that digital effects done at 2K or 4K are still much higher resolutions than the top end of hdtv -- ie 1080p at 1920x1080. And even still, reworking them in a higher resolution would not necessarily be the huge challenge you suggest it is. Film is already edited digitally using lower resolution stand-in footage to proof before it's rendered out in full glory. Increasing the resolution might require recapturing the frames (at higher resolution) and rerendering the color, effects, etc, but this process, though time consuming, is largely automated by software and hardware.