Do you go to a video rental center? Do you rent DVDs? Read up on this, the differences from Divx are very large. There is no central place which controls if you can play your DVD or not, you don't have to get permission from them to do anything. If you still have it wrapped, there is no company which can go out of business and render your discs unreadable. I really don't understand why so many people are automatically against it.
Alot of people don't seem to believe that consumers will get anything out of this. As long as the packaging is cheap, a company can get you a limited use DVD for the $3 you'd pay to Blockbuster, you can choose your period of time whenever you want (it doesn't start to die until you open it), and you can throw it away when you're done... No late fees. Plus, there's nothing here which is going to restrict people's fair use rights any more than the DMCA or CSS already do.
People have been mentioning that the publishers want to screw the consumer with this. I'd bet more on screwing Blockbuster, yet another really huge company. And as long as I'm getting something more convenient out of my dollar, eat your heart out Blockbuster.
While I doubt anyone is going to catch him on it, what the author describes doing here is a DMCA violation. The DMCA only refers to "effective" access control mechanisms... As has already been demonstrated, some pretty awful and flawed systems have been able to be called effective (*ahem* CSS). If, however, you are able to bypass the protection accidentally as the author did is there any doubt that the technology isn't effective? Sure this doesn't clear anyone for copyright violations, but it would certainly seem to clear the way for folks making a player application to end up scott free.
A less important issue is that they're never going to be able to effectivly copy-protect CDs... The cat is way out of the bag, and as long as they maintain interoperablilty with older CD players, there is going to be a way to go around it. People should be more watching the up and coming SACD (Super Audio CD format) which actually has a few hundred titles out, as well as a bunch of players. It uses a digital encoding called DSD (Direct Stream Digital) which is quite different from PCM. I head a demonstration of these puppies lined up against a normal CD player at this years Audio Engineering Society convention... It was incredible. They claim to have strong copy-protection built into the standard, but I have not been able to find details yet. With the squabling which has been going on with DVD audio, and the fact that many of the hardware manufacturers have not backed it, it stands to be the replacement for today's Red Book CD.
Somewhat related debate at CMU today between Touretzky and Shamos, who testified on opposite sides of the MPAA vs Reimerdes court cases. A CS department page on the debate is up, and it is in progress right now to a packed auditorium. Both of these men are Carnegie Mellon professors, and the debate has been punctuated by slides such as "this slide is illegal" and "you are one click away from destroying the motion picture industry...
Click here to continue"
As one of the folks who just lost my job at the NJ site, I can say that noone as of yet has come in to do any mass hirings. We've been figuring out unemployment amounts and other fun stuff instead.
ARES is telling you to check out arrl's web site who is in fact calling for operators. They are saying that they are mainly looking for people who have places to stay in the area because they don't have any way to put you up yet. (At least as of Wed night/Thursday morning we were out of cots, but it sounds like more have arrived). I'm getting ready to head back in in a few hours. If you are from out of the area, check out that arrl link above for more info.
I spent much of yesterday and last nigtht as a RACES operator in NYC. They are looking for many more amateurs than they currently have for both the Red Cross and the Salvation Army. Ideal equipment for helping either organization: a dual-band mobile with a mag-mount antenna and a power supply. That said, there are definatly places where they can use H/Ts. The repeater they use is good enough that I was able to hit it with a 5W H/T with a rubber duck from WTC plaza last night.
If you want to help by doing more than just participating in local ARES and RACES nets, you can actually show up to help. As of last night, the place to go was 150 Amsterdam Ave (corner of Amsterdam and 66th St. What you should really do though is check into the 147.000 (-, PL 136.5) repeater on your way into the city or the 444.050 (pl 114.8) repeater. These are controlled nets at the moment, so communicate with net control. You do not need to be currently affiliated with ARES or RACES to help. Over the next few days as the fervor dies down, operators will be needed more and more for the shelters which will be continuing to be open, as well as the support operations in the hot zone.
The area is truly a scary sight (These photos were taken last night by me.) and no matter where you are volunteering for them, you are supposed to participate in a debrief which includes psychological counseling if necessary.
If you are not a licensed ham, the Red Cross can still use your help, they desperatly need volunteers to man the shelters expecially nurses, doctors, and mental health professionals, but volunteers with no special training as well.
What are you talking about? Windows is no less than the *third* OS out the door. HP-UX has been out on Itanum for several months, and Linux works just fine as well (I am currently logged into one of each).
I don't know what vendors who sell HP-UX based software are doing right now, but Debian GNU/Linux has ported a very large number of packages to IA-64 and is planning on releasing it at some point not to far from now. (you can install it from Testing and Unstable already).
Major developers know what's out there, it's only you who is in the dark.
(may or may not be the opinions of my employer, I don't speak for them)
You have to be kidding right? First, Bruce Perens said that all modifications to GPL'd code were going to be released, even when they could have not done so (by using binary modules). And second, do you really think that with Bruce Perens guiding HPs open source work, that even internally people could get away with it? I think you're seriously underestimating HPs commitment to open source.
If you are using bleeding edge kernels with the Alan Cox patches, this has already been taken care of for you, close to a month ago now. The problem is a funky encapsulation that they are using.
Unless ebay plans on hooking up a Carnivore to everyone trading through them, they have no way of possibly preventing this. The article pretty much says as much.
I'll be honest, I've actually purchased something where another seller contacted me after I'd lost another auction on a similar auction. The only way I'd even consider turing someone into Ebay for something like that is if they tried to screw me. The other silly thing is, they really haven't changed the rules, those have always been the rules.
Does this mean that Andrej and Kosak really got their PhD's or did people just get sick of it? I'm really going to miss Ayn Rand. Just a plea before f2k closes it's doors for good... Can you GPL your software on the way out? Show us all how ya did it;-)?
Did anyone look closely at the way they did their count? There are quite a few flaws in their methodology but this was the most glaring. If you look at their counts, they looked at how many unique IP's they had per month. They then added those up to get yearly totals. I hate to tell you, but 4 unique IP's + 4 unique IP's is very often 4 and not 8.
If you're porting UNIX tools to the mac though, expecially OS X as it is right now, you are already pandering to power users.
I think you may also may be misjudging mac users. I don't think it is an issue of interfaces being pretty, as much as being good. You give an example of mkiso and cdrecord as applications which don't have any front end. I'm assuming you have heard of xcdroast? It's been around for quite a while. It may not be quite as pretty as many mac apps, but it allows a level of power that the oversimplified Mac GUIs currently tend to lack.
Yup... Just that they did get right some of the things coming, just bad details... That said, the big deal they made about the cube, with no cube in site, isn't good...
The HTML coverage is great... It certainly helps the reputation of MacInsider considering the slamming they've been getting by the online community lately.
More importantly though, does anyone have photographic coverage? It'd be nice to see something better than Insiders pilfered 3d mockups.
It's behind because you are way to used to online media. PCMagazine and their kin have a deadline for an issue several *months* before it is published. Paper is a much slower, and drawn out process.
Read up before you post... I just got done reading the specs for the iPAQ and was very surprised. Compaq has all of the memory locations, interrupts, and info on what all of the chips inside are to be able to at least get a good deal of systems level programming working with this... Even cooler though, is if you look at where on the internet handhelds.org is... Traceroute:
14 189.ATM11-0-0.BR1.PAO1.ALTER.NET (146.188.148.105) 89.412 ms 83.671 ms 88.646 ms
15 paix-gw1.pa-x.dec.com (198.32.176.241) 85.998 ms 85.690 ms 86.407 ms 16 core-gw1.pa-x.dec.com (204.123.1.1) 83.715 ms 83.005 ms 89.361 ms 17 h0.handhelds.org (204.123.13.90) 84.044 ms 84.175 ms 83.859 ms
That's right folks, compaq isn't just giving out buttloads of specs, they're also hosting the site putting linux on this little thing. Reading further it talks about how they have quite a few people researching this sort of thing for them.
Now that Compaq, IBM, and SGI seem to be making a big effort to get Linux on whole new types of machines (Compaq: handhelds, IBM: mainframes, SGI: supercomputers) the only real issue is going to be taking advantage of these corporations' help as much as possible.
Sigh... Seems like Linux, Solaris, and NT are going to be all that's left for non-desktop boxen RSN. It'll be interesting to see what happens if Linux is able to do something similar on the desktop and get corporate designers working on a better UI.
According to The Big Bang theory, there would have to be some sort of a limit on how far away from a central point things in the universe can be. If the current guess of around 15 billion years old is correct, we might actually see the end of these "furthest" stories in our lifetime at the current rate of things. It will be interesting to see if the universe really has an "edge" as this article suggests.
This type of turntable has been around for a while now... The one thing that they all seem to have in common, is that to get any sort of reasonable sound out of them, you have to keep a vaccum cleaner riding ahead of the cartridge. One of the great things a needle has always done, is to push any lightweight crud out of the groove, anything you miss with the cleaner you will hear. You might be able to fix this with a DSP, but considering that there is no AD conversion in the current system, this would also not seem to be a great idea.
I saw a review of these once that summed it up like this, if you've kept your LP's in a cleanroom all of their life, and never used anything but a laser on them, they might be in good enough condition... Then again, they still might not.
I was there this morning, so I have some idea of what it is:-) To learn quite a bit about the history, and whatnot, you can go to the Official Site of the Punxsutawney Groundhog Club. These are the guys who pretty much control the show. The actual site of the event is Gobbler's Knob, an area a little bit out of town. At sunrise, Punxsutawney Phil (the groundhog) is pulled out of his enclosure, and then asked by the club if he sees his shadow... As far as the legend behind this, if they claim he saw his shadow, it means 6 more weeks of winter, otherwise there will be an early spring.
One of the best things I heard this morning, was a fairly large group of college students chanting "Feed Phil Beer!", "Feed Phil Beer!".
Don't get me wrong, it's one of the oddest things I've ever seen, but it is quite unique.
Slashdot Mirror
Sigh, all better... Traffic on high-bandwidth mirror. It's incredible that a link in a comment can do that at 5:30am EST.
Dammit Charlie! Yes, you did /. me...
If you believe this, take a look at it however, FatBrain links from previous reviews have the exact same referer ID. But this doesn't bother me.
adam
I worked for aD back in 2000. Both the VC funding and Allen should be for 2000 not 2001, it's just a typo.
Alot of people don't seem to believe that consumers will get anything out of this. As long as the packaging is cheap, a company can get you a limited use DVD for the $3 you'd pay to Blockbuster, you can choose your period of time whenever you want (it doesn't start to die until you open it), and you can throw it away when you're done... No late fees. Plus, there's nothing here which is going to restrict people's fair use rights any more than the DMCA or CSS already do.
People have been mentioning that the publishers want to screw the consumer with this. I'd bet more on screwing Blockbuster, yet another really huge company. And as long as I'm getting something more convenient out of my dollar, eat your heart out Blockbuster.
While I doubt anyone is going to catch him on it, what the author describes doing here is a DMCA violation. The DMCA only refers to "effective" access control mechanisms... As has already been demonstrated, some pretty awful and flawed systems have been able to be called effective (*ahem* CSS). If, however, you are able to bypass the protection accidentally as the author did is there any doubt that the technology isn't effective? Sure this doesn't clear anyone for copyright violations, but it would certainly seem to clear the way for folks making a player application to end up scott free.
A less important issue is that they're never going to be able to effectivly copy-protect CDs... The cat is way out of the bag, and as long as they maintain interoperablilty with older CD players, there is going to be a way to go around it. People should be more watching the up and coming SACD (Super Audio CD format) which actually has a few hundred titles out, as well as a bunch of players. It uses a digital encoding called DSD (Direct Stream Digital) which is quite different from PCM. I head a demonstration of these puppies lined up against a normal CD player at this years Audio Engineering Society convention... It was incredible. They claim to have strong copy-protection built into the standard, but I have not been able to find details yet. With the squabling which has been going on with DVD audio, and the fact that many of the hardware manufacturers have not backed it, it stands to be the replacement for today's Red Book CD.
adam
Somewhat related debate at CMU today between Touretzky and Shamos, who testified on opposite sides of the MPAA vs Reimerdes court cases. A CS department page on the debate is up, and it is in progress right now to a packed auditorium. Both of these men are Carnegie Mellon professors, and the debate has been punctuated by slides such as "this slide is illegal" and "you are one click away from destroying the motion picture industry...
Click here to continue"
As one of the folks who just lost my job at the NJ site, I can say that noone as of yet has come in to do any mass hirings. We've been figuring out unemployment amounts and other fun stuff instead.
adam
73,
Adam Pennington KB1ELI
If you want to help by doing more than just participating in local ARES and RACES nets, you can actually show up to help. As of last night, the place to go was 150 Amsterdam Ave (corner of Amsterdam and 66th St. What you should really do though is check into the 147.000 (-, PL 136.5) repeater on your way into the city or the 444.050 (pl 114.8) repeater. These are controlled nets at the moment, so communicate with net control. You do not need to be currently affiliated with ARES or RACES to help. Over the next few days as the fervor dies down, operators will be needed more and more for the shelters which will be continuing to be open, as well as the support operations in the hot zone.
The area is truly a scary sight (These photos were taken last night by me.) and no matter where you are volunteering for them, you are supposed to participate in a debrief which includes psychological counseling if necessary.
If you are not a licensed ham, the Red Cross can still use your help, they desperatly need volunteers to man the shelters expecially nurses, doctors, and mental health professionals, but volunteers with no special training as well.
73,
Adam pennington - KB1ELI
What are you talking about? Windows is no less than the *third* OS out the door. HP-UX has been out on Itanum for several months, and Linux works just fine as well (I am currently logged into one of each).
I don't know what vendors who sell HP-UX based software are doing right now, but Debian GNU/Linux has ported a very large number of packages to IA-64 and is planning on releasing it at some point not to far from now. (you can install it from Testing and Unstable already).
Major developers know what's out there, it's only you who is in the dark.
(may or may not be the opinions of my employer, I don't speak for them)
You have to be kidding right? First, Bruce Perens said that all modifications to GPL'd code were going to be released, even when they could have not done so (by using binary modules). And second, do you really think that with Bruce Perens guiding HPs open source work, that even internally people could get away with it? I think you're seriously underestimating HPs commitment to open source.
If you are using bleeding edge kernels with the Alan Cox patches, this has already been taken care of for you, close to a month ago now. The problem is a funky encapsulation that they are using.
Unless ebay plans on hooking up a Carnivore to everyone trading through them, they have no way of possibly preventing this. The article pretty much says as much.
I'll be honest, I've actually purchased something where another seller contacted me after I'd lost another auction on a similar auction. The only way I'd even consider turing someone into Ebay for something like that is if they tried to screw me. The other silly thing is, they really haven't changed the rules, those have always been the rules.
This is undergrad with 2 person groups... It is usually taken by Juniors and Seniors
adamp@andrew.cmu.edu
Did anyone look closely at the way they did their count? There are quite a few flaws in their methodology but this was the most glaring. If you look at their counts, they looked at how many unique IP's they had per month. They then added those up to get yearly totals. I hate to tell you, but 4 unique IP's + 4 unique IP's is very often 4 and not 8.
I think you may also may be misjudging mac users. I don't think it is an issue of interfaces being pretty, as much as being good. You give an example of mkiso and cdrecord as applications which don't have any front end. I'm assuming you have heard of xcdroast? It's been around for quite a while. It may not be quite as pretty as many mac apps, but it allows a level of power that the oversimplified Mac GUIs currently tend to lack.
Yup... Just that they did get right some of the things coming, just bad details... That said, the big deal they made about the cube, with no cube in site, isn't good...
More importantly though, does anyone have photographic coverage? It'd be nice to see something better than Insiders pilfered 3d mockups.
It's behind because you are way to used to online media. PCMagazine and their kin have a deadline for an issue several *months* before it is published. Paper is a much slower, and drawn out process.
Now that Compaq, IBM, and SGI seem to be making a big effort to get Linux on whole new types of machines (Compaq: handhelds, IBM: mainframes, SGI: supercomputers) the only real issue is going to be taking advantage of these corporations' help as much as possible.
Sigh... Seems like Linux, Solaris, and NT are going to be all that's left for non-desktop boxen RSN. It'll be interesting to see what happens if Linux is able to do something similar on the desktop and get corporate designers working on a better UI.
deathb
adamp
This type of turntable has been around for a while now... The one thing that they all seem to have in common, is that to get any sort of reasonable sound out of them, you have to keep a vaccum cleaner riding ahead of the cartridge. One of the great things a needle has always done, is to push any lightweight crud out of the groove, anything you miss with the cleaner you will hear. You might be able to fix this with a DSP, but considering that there is no AD conversion in the current system, this would also not seem to be a great idea.
I saw a review of these once that summed it up like this, if you've kept your LP's in a cleanroom all of their life, and never used anything but a laser on them, they might be in good enough condition... Then again, they still might not.
One of the best things I heard this morning, was a fairly large group of college students chanting "Feed Phil Beer!", "Feed Phil Beer!".
Don't get me wrong, it's one of the oddest things I've ever seen, but it is quite unique.