Not that the poster is saying that exactly, but he wishes to respect copyright law while having digital music. As such, DRM support is pretty much required. I wonder if this will be the final dividing line?
Those willing to use DRM to have legitimate access to copyrighted material, versus those who oppose DRM in any form, preferring that the users simply remain honest?
(I'll leave out the copyright violators from this one, since they're not going to want DRM, but aren't about to pay for music anyway...)
Re:Took one of those extending blade light sabers.
on
Old Toy Modding?
·
· Score: 1
I want plans.
No, really.
(I've got a few modded lightsabers and other crap, including ones into which the blade completely retracts. (Also, some extra bulbs, mounting hardware, lightsaber sound chips...)
My plans included some simple open circuits to be completed by grabbing the hilt at various points.
What worked for me, was when she got her own copy of City of Heroes. Now we both run around and obliterate the bad guys together. We just talk to each other while gaming, and it works out pretty well. Of course, the noise from the game begs the addition of a Teamspeak server in the apartment, but that's a different story altogether.
FIRRIB, amongst others. "Frenzy is Red, Rumble is Blue."
Of course, Rumble was NEVER blue. The toy was red, and the cartoon model was purple.
The toys, incidentally, were identical aside from the colors. Same molds and everything. Same deal with Laserbeak and Buzzsaw, Bluestreak and Smokescreen, Prime and Magnus' cabs, Starscream, Skywarp, and Thundercracker, and so on.
Every time I see a cyclist on the sidewalks, I get a strong urge to shove something into their spokes. The rules are there for a reason. Some jackass shifted into top speed careening down the sidewalk is going to hurt a pedestrian. They can stay to the right on the streets, and that's that. Get the hell off of my walkway unless you're planning on keeping one foot on the ground at all times.
And seriously, would it kill you bicyclists to operate responsibly on the streets? Just because you take up less space doesn't mean that you have the right to try to cut off everyone in dense urban traffic, run traffic lights, etc. Maybe if there weren't so many braindead bike messengers, I wouldn't notice it so much, but it's things like this which tell me a few things:
1) Bikes belong on the street. 2) Bike lanes must exist. 3) Cyclists should be licensed.
If you're going fast enough to hurt someone, you should be forced to take a test and own up to some responsibility for your actions.
In fact, it was such a ripoff that they even had Marvel slap their name on it!
As I recall, the reasoning behind Mutant X was that Marvel has some agreement with Fox regarding any X-Men TV series, but they weren't getting anywhere, so they scrambled to get *some* mutant-related show on the air with any other network.
Mutant X is basically just X-Men tweaked to the point where isn't legally X-Men, and can therefore be aired on UPN. Of course it's crap, but I doubt it can be called a ripoff when it's done by the same people. Unoriginal, sure. Derivative, certainly. Ripoff? Not so much.
You see, you *want* to see through a retinal display, so that's not a problem at all. It's also designed to account for your ability to focus, so it should look like it's further away than it actually is. In short, yes, there's compensation for any distortion.
However, the eye that's getting the feed will adjust to the higher intensity light, killing your night vision in one eye. If it's a monochrome display, which most are, and in red, to boot, you simply won't be able to see much red out of that eye for a while after you stop using it.
I don't know if that leads to any long-term damage, and I'm inclined to say that it shouldn't do anything considerably worse than spending the same amount of time in a dark room staring at a CRT, but i have no professional training to back that up.
Current: 12" Powerbook/60GB Cruzer SD reader 1 32 MB SD card 1 512 MB SD card Logitech MX 900 Bluetooth mouse Composite video cable Various audio adapters Gameboy Advance SP w/ three games, rotated as I see fit GBA SP USB charger Sprint Treo 600 T-Mobile Nokia 3595 Umbrella Retractable headphones Noise-reducing headphones Bic Grip permanent marker Pentel Techniclick mechanical pencil Bic Z4 pen Tin of mints Bag: Targus Sport Deluxe Notebook Backpack
That's a light loadout, with just enough to let me handle various problems, and vaguely comfortably crash anywhere if needed. I've carried more, but I don't need all of it these days:
CD wallet (half blanks, half various rescue CDs) Hotsync cable (I used to use a ZipLinq-style cable, but it flaked out) RioVolt MP3/CD player (since outdated by the Treo) GBA e-reader 3" CD Wallet for Gamecube games CD wallet for PS2/DC games 4 NiMH AA batteries, 2 AAA's, plus a wall charger
Probably more stuff... but I can't recall. I'm slowly working on trimming down the load, but the Targus bag is probably the most important thing I carry these days. It's got enough room for damned near anything I'd want to lug with me. Needs more pockets, though.
What happens when a farm gets its own converter, and uses it to power their facilities?
And then, what if they move on to some newer electric or hydrogen-powered tractors and harvesters? They don't need high speed, just high torque.
Set up some experimental farm with all-electric equipment, (hell, design it if it doesn't exist already,) and have it start producing as much corn/grass/hemp as possible, and convert the entire wad to ethanol, then to hydrogen, and get that farm off of the electric grid. Take any spare ethanol, and sell it off every month, shipped off in tanker-trailers across the nation. You're burning fossil fuels to transport gasoline, why not burn them to transport ethanol until the whole infrastructure is converted to this hydrogen economy?
Yes, it's a pipe dream, but so was oil for quite some time. It took us a hell of a lot of investment to get the efficiency that we currently enjoy in petroleum production and distribution. We're going to have to invest all over again to move to an alternative fuel, it's just going to take some group with the guts to try it to get anything moving.
The iPod wasn't the first very-large-storage MP3 device, but it was the first to not suck.
The Creative Nomad beat it to market, but even with gobs more space than the 5GB first-gen iPod, it was also much larger, less reliable, slower to start, and painfully slow to load up that first time. The iPod, by comparison, was smaller, faster, and easier to use.
In the PDA market, though, it's a lot trickier. Apple took the MP3 player and boiled it down to what they thought users wanted: a portable jukebox that they wouldn't leave at home. PDA users are more finicky. Some just want a digital equivalent of a day planner and rolodex, while others seem to want a full-blown internet-ready device with video and mp3 playback and so on. I know that my Palm-phone makes a decent organizer, but it's not a great movie player, and it's certainly far from the iPod when it comes to audio playback. Even web browsing isn't all that great, but it's as good as one would expect from such a small screen. For it's core functions, it's great. For everything else, it's okay. For some oddball tasks, it sucks. Apple would either have to make the perfect kitchen-sink device, or the best damned digital organizer/assistant ever, in an era where everyone seems to be buying some oversized brick with Bluetooth, 802.11, two memory slots, and at few hours, at best, of battery life.
It would be a tricky move, although I'd be really interested to see Apple try.
But Bionicle brings in the cash. It's a building theme with a story, and as such, it's been doing well, especially since it's all homegrown.
The trick isn't to look at Bionicle as a building kit for vehicles and structures, but to see it as an action figure building kit. This has become especially obvious as the limb pieces have become more and more diverse. Sure, it's slightly limiting, but it's also the single best source for ball-joint parts, which on their own aren't so bad.
Kids buy it because their cool action figures. Everyone else seems to like ripping them apart for the useful pieces, and making some pretty wicked looking skeletons of whatever creature comes to mind.
My mother has a history of migraines. I got my first one when I was very young, but I've had the auras, light and sound sensitivity, vomiting, and screaming agony since then.
The worst part? My triggers include most nuts, and chocolate, as well as sesame. This ruins vast sweeping categories of food, although it's been better in recent years, as I've built up a tolerance, or something. I can't explain it, but I can last longer between trigger consumption before getting migraines.
I've also been on Fioricet since I was 14 or so. It works exactly as you mention. It knocks me out, and I wake up feeling better, if a little drugged. Since then, I've been moved on to Imitrex, which has a lower success rate, but I can stay awake and mostly alert with it. I don't advise driving when on it, but that's from personal experience, not anything I saw on the label.
These days, I've become cheap. I pop a couple of aspirin and chug a cup of strong coffee when I feel a migraine coming on, and hope that it'll go away. So far so good. I'm beginning to think that the headaches were linked to my growth spurts, since they've gotten so much less painful in recent years.
You don't, but think like someone half as smart as you. Or even 2/3rds, for that matter. That passenger may be watching a DVD on his laptop, playing a game, or just digging up something "interesting" on his screen. When this passenger mentions this to the driver, his attention will be pulled away from the road, and towards the laptop.
You're right, though. The clicking of keys shouldn't be a distraction. There are just a million other things that *would* be for any driver who lacks common sense, and there are plenty of those out there.
As a side note, on my last road trip, we had a laptop with a wireless connection, cell phones, MP3s, the whole nine yards of "Stupid things you don't do on the road." We just ran them all from the middle row, and the guy riding shotgun got to be the CD-swapping, peripheral-plugging, map-reading bitch. The end result of distraction to the driver was zero, since he didn't care, and was too busy driving to pay attention to the gear being used. It didn't hurt that we just didn't *feel* like using it most of the time, since there's really no major enhancement that a computer provides to a road trip that can't be handled by a good pick of CDs and a pile of AAA maps.
I had a Treo 300 handset (great tool, those smartphones,) but the flip had snapped off. It's apparently a fairly common defect in the design, so when I complained to Sprint, I made sure to tell them that they'd have to do better than just sending me another Treo 300.
They hemmed and hawed at this for a while, and then number portability started up. Suddenly, a two-year contract extension was offered, and they shipped out a Treo 600 at no charge. Now I've got a much better phone, on the same network, and I still have one of the cheapest plans available anywhere (I can't beat $10/month for all the data I could ever want, and T-Mobile just doesn't work in a lot of areas for me.)
Before anyone asks why I'd permit a two-year contract extension, it's really quite simple. I can't use the phone I want on any other network (CDMA Treo 600,) and I certainly can't use it the way I want to for a lower price with any carrier, anywhere.
I should've added "I've heard" or "apparently" to my comment.
Regardless, that's good news for me. I can now grab a multi-button bluetooth mouse. I've been less concerned about the FUD and more concerned about just getting a usable mouse, and the apparent lies were effective enough to stall me up until now.
Wait... you made the MS BT mouse work with the internal adapter in the 12" PB?...how? That's been the biggest issue with the MS mouse, since it turned out that they weren't following the Bluetooth spec properly.
On a cluster basis, sure. I was referring to my own Mac, which is obviously a different case altogether.
Still, the main reach of either project is to run OS X programs while sticking with a non OS X base OS. If you're not bothering, then you don't really need Darwin support at all. Just slap NetBSD/PPC on a G4/PPC970 (eventually, if it's not already done,) and go to town.
If I just needed a diskless PPC system with two ethernet ports and a serial console, I agree. Apple would be the last vendor I'd go to, and I certainly wouldn't regret that choice.
For that matter, why not run OS X and handle UNIX programs via Fink?
If you're going for Insane Hack Value, they're all about as viable. The nice part of NetBSD is that is runs on damned near anything. If I don't have to fire up an OS X instance from within my Open Source OS of choice to run OS X binaries, hey, that's pretty cool.
I'd imagine OS X binaries on NetBSD/PPC is just another instance of "because I can." Then again, I've really found no major disadvantage to running OS X versus Linux on my Mac. They work differently, but for the most part, they're just as capable.
Slashdot Mirror
What's interesting is the reasoning behind it.
"I want DRM because I'm being forced to use it."
Not that the poster is saying that exactly, but he wishes to respect copyright law while having digital music. As such, DRM support is pretty much required. I wonder if this will be the final dividing line?
Those willing to use DRM to have legitimate access to copyrighted material, versus those who oppose DRM in any form, preferring that the users simply remain honest?
(I'll leave out the copyright violators from this one, since they're not going to want DRM, but aren't about to pay for music anyway...)
I want plans.
No, really.
(I've got a few modded lightsabers and other crap, including ones into which the blade completely retracts. (Also, some extra bulbs, mounting hardware, lightsaber sound chips...)
My plans included some simple open circuits to be completed by grabbing the hilt at various points.
What worked for me, was when she got her own copy of City of Heroes. Now we both run around and obliterate the bad guys together. We just talk to each other while gaming, and it works out pretty well. Of course, the noise from the game begs the addition of a Teamspeak server in the apartment, but that's a different story altogether.
There are smaller hamsters. The thing is, each one still needs to eat, and still then there's the issue of hamster urine.
Not fun.
FIRRIB, amongst others.
"Frenzy is Red, Rumble is Blue."
Of course, Rumble was NEVER blue. The toy was red, and the cartoon model was purple.
The toys, incidentally, were identical aside from the colors. Same molds and everything. Same deal with Laserbeak and Buzzsaw, Bluestreak and Smokescreen, Prime and Magnus' cabs, Starscream, Skywarp, and Thundercracker, and so on.
Silly fans.
Oh no you don't...
Every time I see a cyclist on the sidewalks, I get a strong urge to shove something into their spokes. The rules are there for a reason. Some jackass shifted into top speed careening down the sidewalk is going to hurt a pedestrian. They can stay to the right on the streets, and that's that. Get the hell off of my walkway unless you're planning on keeping one foot on the ground at all times.
And seriously, would it kill you bicyclists to operate responsibly on the streets? Just because you take up less space doesn't mean that you have the right to try to cut off everyone in dense urban traffic, run traffic lights, etc. Maybe if there weren't so many braindead bike messengers, I wouldn't notice it so much, but it's things like this which tell me a few things:
1) Bikes belong on the street.
2) Bike lanes must exist.
3) Cyclists should be licensed.
If you're going fast enough to hurt someone, you should be forced to take a test and own up to some responsibility for your actions.
Well, I can't argue with a scientist, especially one who's *met* the X-Men on numerous occasions.
Tell me, does the size changing really come in handy?
In fact, it was such a ripoff that they even had Marvel slap their name on it!
As I recall, the reasoning behind Mutant X was that Marvel has some agreement with Fox regarding any X-Men TV series, but they weren't getting anywhere, so they scrambled to get *some* mutant-related show on the air with any other network.
Mutant X is basically just X-Men tweaked to the point where isn't legally X-Men, and can therefore be aired on UPN. Of course it's crap, but I doubt it can be called a ripoff when it's done by the same people. Unoriginal, sure. Derivative, certainly. Ripoff? Not so much.
It's a little nastier than that, I'm afraid.
You see, you *want* to see through a retinal display, so that's not a problem at all. It's also designed to account for your ability to focus, so it should look like it's further away than it actually is. In short, yes, there's compensation for any distortion.
However, the eye that's getting the feed will adjust to the higher intensity light, killing your night vision in one eye. If it's a monochrome display, which most are, and in red, to boot, you simply won't be able to see much red out of that eye for a while after you stop using it.
I don't know if that leads to any long-term damage, and I'm inclined to say that it shouldn't do anything considerably worse than spending the same amount of time in a dark room staring at a CRT, but i have no professional training to back that up.
> You try opening up a normal car door with only 11 inches of space on the side of the car. Yes, 11 inches of space.
While this is true, and amazingly cool, this is Slashdot. You try getting the average slashdotter *out* of the car with only 11 inches of space.
Current:
12" Powerbook/60GB
Cruzer SD reader
1 32 MB SD card
1 512 MB SD card
Logitech MX 900 Bluetooth mouse
Composite video cable
Various audio adapters
Gameboy Advance SP w/ three games, rotated as I see fit
GBA SP USB charger
Sprint Treo 600
T-Mobile Nokia 3595
Umbrella
Retractable headphones
Noise-reducing headphones
Bic Grip permanent marker
Pentel Techniclick mechanical pencil
Bic Z4 pen
Tin of mints
Bag: Targus Sport Deluxe Notebook Backpack
That's a light loadout, with just enough to let me handle various problems, and vaguely comfortably crash anywhere if needed. I've carried more, but I don't need all of it these days:
CD wallet (half blanks, half various rescue CDs)
Hotsync cable (I used to use a ZipLinq-style cable, but it flaked out)
RioVolt MP3/CD player (since outdated by the Treo)
GBA e-reader
3" CD Wallet for Gamecube games
CD wallet for PS2/DC games
4 NiMH AA batteries, 2 AAA's, plus a wall charger
Probably more stuff... but I can't recall. I'm slowly working on trimming down the load, but the Targus bag is probably the most important thing I carry these days. It's got enough room for damned near anything I'd want to lug with me. Needs more pockets, though.
Sure, it's currently a fat steaming load of crap.
What happens when a farm gets its own converter, and uses it to power their facilities?
And then, what if they move on to some newer electric or hydrogen-powered tractors and harvesters? They don't need high speed, just high torque.
Set up some experimental farm with all-electric equipment, (hell, design it if it doesn't exist already,) and have it start producing as much corn/grass/hemp as possible, and convert the entire wad to ethanol, then to hydrogen, and get that farm off of the electric grid. Take any spare ethanol, and sell it off every month, shipped off in tanker-trailers across the nation. You're burning fossil fuels to transport gasoline, why not burn them to transport ethanol until the whole infrastructure is converted to this hydrogen economy?
Yes, it's a pipe dream, but so was oil for quite some time. It took us a hell of a lot of investment to get the efficiency that we currently enjoy in petroleum production and distribution. We're going to have to invest all over again to move to an alternative fuel, it's just going to take some group with the guts to try it to get anything moving.
The iPod wasn't the first very-large-storage MP3 device, but it was the first to not suck.
The Creative Nomad beat it to market, but even with gobs more space than the 5GB first-gen iPod, it was also much larger, less reliable, slower to start, and painfully slow to load up that first time. The iPod, by comparison, was smaller, faster, and easier to use.
In the PDA market, though, it's a lot trickier. Apple took the MP3 player and boiled it down to what they thought users wanted: a portable jukebox that they wouldn't leave at home. PDA users are more finicky. Some just want a digital equivalent of a day planner and rolodex, while others seem to want a full-blown internet-ready device with video and mp3 playback and so on. I know that my Palm-phone makes a decent organizer, but it's not a great movie player, and it's certainly far from the iPod when it comes to audio playback. Even web browsing isn't all that great, but it's as good as one would expect from such a small screen. For it's core functions, it's great. For everything else, it's okay. For some oddball tasks, it sucks. Apple would either have to make the perfect kitchen-sink device, or the best damned digital organizer/assistant ever, in an era where everyone seems to be buying some oversized brick with Bluetooth, 802.11, two memory slots, and at few hours, at best, of battery life.
It would be a tricky move, although I'd be really interested to see Apple try.
Holy crap, I'm the biggest idiot ever.
Kids buy them because they're cool action figures.
Yes, I'm nitpicking my own post. Someone should, I'd like to think that I'm better than this.
But Bionicle brings in the cash. It's a building theme with a story, and as such, it's been doing well, especially since it's all homegrown.
The trick isn't to look at Bionicle as a building kit for vehicles and structures, but to see it as an action figure building kit. This has become especially obvious as the limb pieces have become more and more diverse. Sure, it's slightly limiting, but it's also the single best source for ball-joint parts, which on their own aren't so bad.
Kids buy it because their cool action figures. Everyone else seems to like ripping them apart for the useful pieces, and making some pretty wicked looking skeletons of whatever creature comes to mind.
Damn right.
My mother has a history of migraines. I got my first one when I was very young, but I've had the auras, light and sound sensitivity, vomiting, and screaming agony since then.
The worst part? My triggers include most nuts, and chocolate, as well as sesame. This ruins vast sweeping categories of food, although it's been better in recent years, as I've built up a tolerance, or something. I can't explain it, but I can last longer between trigger consumption before getting migraines.
I've also been on Fioricet since I was 14 or so. It works exactly as you mention. It knocks me out, and I wake up feeling better, if a little drugged. Since then, I've been moved on to Imitrex, which has a lower success rate, but I can stay awake and mostly alert with it. I don't advise driving when on it, but that's from personal experience, not anything I saw on the label.
These days, I've become cheap. I pop a couple of aspirin and chug a cup of strong coffee when I feel a migraine coming on, and hope that it'll go away. So far so good. I'm beginning to think that the headaches were linked to my growth spurts, since they've gotten so much less painful in recent years.
You don't, but think like someone half as smart as you. Or even 2/3rds, for that matter. That passenger may be watching a DVD on his laptop, playing a game, or just digging up something "interesting" on his screen. When this passenger mentions this to the driver, his attention will be pulled away from the road, and towards the laptop.
You're right, though. The clicking of keys shouldn't be a distraction. There are just a million other things that *would* be for any driver who lacks common sense, and there are plenty of those out there.
As a side note, on my last road trip, we had a laptop with a wireless connection, cell phones, MP3s, the whole nine yards of "Stupid things you don't do on the road." We just ran them all from the middle row, and the guy riding shotgun got to be the CD-swapping, peripheral-plugging, map-reading bitch. The end result of distraction to the driver was zero, since he didn't care, and was too busy driving to pay attention to the gear being used. It didn't hurt that we just didn't *feel* like using it most of the time, since there's really no major enhancement that a computer provides to a road trip that can't be handled by a good pick of CDs and a pile of AAA maps.
No, really, i don't.
What do you mean, RH would send a package? Do you mean they'd release new software, or newer versions of software?
For the most part, RHN gave me a lot of backported fixes, but rarely (if ever) a new version of the software itself.
I think I'm getting lost in the semantics here.
I had a Treo 300 handset (great tool, those smartphones,) but the flip had snapped off. It's apparently a fairly common defect in the design, so when I complained to Sprint, I made sure to tell them that they'd have to do better than just sending me another Treo 300.
They hemmed and hawed at this for a while, and then number portability started up. Suddenly, a two-year contract extension was offered, and they shipped out a Treo 600 at no charge. Now I've got a much better phone, on the same network, and I still have one of the cheapest plans available anywhere (I can't beat $10/month for all the data I could ever want, and T-Mobile just doesn't work in a lot of areas for me.)
Before anyone asks why I'd permit a two-year contract extension, it's really quite simple. I can't use the phone I want on any other network (CDMA Treo 600,) and I certainly can't use it the way I want to for a lower price with any carrier, anywhere.
1 year = 12 months
Progeny cost = $5/month
RHN cost = $60/year
12 months x $5/month = $60/year
Did I miss something on the website that's screwing up my math?
I should've added "I've heard" or "apparently" to my comment.
Regardless, that's good news for me. I can now grab a multi-button bluetooth mouse. I've been less concerned about the FUD and more concerned about just getting a usable mouse, and the apparent lies were effective enough to stall me up until now.
Thanks!
Wait... you made the MS BT mouse work with the internal adapter in the 12" PB? ...how? That's been the biggest issue with the MS mouse, since it turned out that they weren't following the Bluetooth spec properly.
On a cluster basis, sure. I was referring to my own Mac, which is obviously a different case altogether.
Still, the main reach of either project is to run OS X programs while sticking with a non OS X base OS. If you're not bothering, then you don't really need Darwin support at all. Just slap NetBSD/PPC on a G4/PPC970 (eventually, if it's not already done,) and go to town.
If I just needed a diskless PPC system with two ethernet ports and a serial console, I agree. Apple would be the last vendor I'd go to, and I certainly wouldn't regret that choice.
For that matter, why not run OS X and handle UNIX programs via Fink?
If you're going for Insane Hack Value, they're all about as viable. The nice part of NetBSD is that is runs on damned near anything. If I don't have to fire up an OS X instance from within my Open Source OS of choice to run OS X binaries, hey, that's pretty cool.
I'd imagine OS X binaries on NetBSD/PPC is just another instance of "because I can." Then again, I've really found no major disadvantage to running OS X versus Linux on my Mac. They work differently, but for the most part, they're just as capable.
I'm sure that Earth, Wind and Fire may have some issues with being 2/3rds patented by someone else.