I've only read it once, but I don't see how it undermines the Betamax decision. I don't see how it would outlaw P2P, etc.
If a technology has no substantial noninfringing use, it would be at risk, but it is already at risk under the current law.
If a technology does have a substantial noninfringing use, then it seems to me that all the makers/sellers of that technology have to do is only promote the noninfringing use, refuse to provide tech support to people having trouble with infringing uses, and stuff like that.
What I mean by selling the software to build music stores rather than putting out a music store and player themselves, Microsoft wins if anyone other than Apple ends up at the top. Look at all the big names jumping into the music store business: Walmart, Amazon, Sony, and no doubt many more will follow.
Apple is betting that everyone else will fail. Microsoft is betting that at least one besides Apple will succeed.
Banks can be stupid. I knew someone who did a consulting job and got one big paycheck at the end. He went to the bank that the account the check was drawn on was at, and said "I'd like to open a new account, deposit this check, and get $1000 cash back". They told him there was a several day hold on deposits to new accounts, so he would not be able to get his $1000 back right then.
After a while of trying to convince them that this made no sense, he gave up, got up from the new accounts desk, walked over to a teller, and said "I'd like to cash this check". It was a big check, and apparently it was guite a hassle for the teller to deal with, but after much work on the part of the teller, he was handed his huge wad of cash.
He then walked back to the new accounts desk, carefully took out $1000 from the wad of cash, and set the rest down on the desk and said "I'd like to open a new account with this". That, of course, worked.
You still need to use Creative's software. Their players do not implement the USB mass storage interface. They are not like iPod, or iRiver, or Archos, where you just plug it in and it works for file storage.
Their protocol has been reverse engineered, and software is available for Linux to use these players...but what if Creative breaks that in a firmware update?
It will not surprise me if Apple vs. Microsoft in music goes the same way Apple vs. Microsoft went with computers.
Apple sells computers. Microsoft sells software to the people that make computers that compete against Apple. Microsoft doesn't really compete against Apple. They let others do that, and they reap the profits. (And if Apple somehow manages to win in "Apple vs. Everyone Else"", Microsoft cleans up as the leading seller of Mac applications).
The situation in Music looks very similar. Apple sells a player. Microsoft sells software (WMA and operating systems) to people making competing players. Apple has a music store. Microsoft sells software (DRM software, databases, web servers, etc) to build music stores.
What Apple is doing is more sexy, but Microsoft's approach is probably going to make a lot more money in the long run.
The Creative players don't work directly as USB hard drives. You have to sue special software to use them for file storage. That's a fatal flaw in my book.
Copy the mp3 files to the iPod - check. Via USB - check. Have iPod add the mp3 files to the playlist and play them when I push the play button - no worky.
If I only wanted to transport files I would burn them to DVD and take them with me. The whole appeal of the iPod isn't moving files around, it is playing them as music - and to do that you need to upload them using some bullshit loader. Perhaps the linux crowd has rubbed off on me a little, I'm thinking Free as in Freedom.
Maybe I'm wrong, but according to the documentation if you are going to play the file as music, you are putting it on the iPod via the AppleSoft loader software.
OK, let's give more Mac trolls a chance to waste some moderator points.
OK, this is interesting. My Archos 15 gig is almost perfect, but I need more space. I've thought about the 40 gig iPod, but the price is a bit too high. However, at $400, that changes things. Wait until there is a $30-$50 off sale at Amazon, and a $100 off promotion for signing up for a year of Audible.com (which I've been interested in trying), and that gets it down to $250-$280 (Amazon is one of the dealers at which you can use the Audible discount). I'd snap one up in an instant then.
Copy the mp3 files to the iPod - check.
Via USB - check.
Have iPod add the mp3 files to the playlist and play them when I push the play button - no worky.
If I only wanted to transport files I would burn them to DVD and take them with me. The whole appeal of the iPod isn't moving files around, it is playing them as music - and to do that you need to upload them using some bullshit loader. Perhaps the linux crowd has rubbed off on me a little, I'm thinking Free as in Freedom.
Maybe I'm wrong, but according to the documentation if you are going to play the file as music, you are putting it on the iPod via the AppleSoft loader software.
I've got nothing to add...just repeating that guy's comments so the "Mod anything that doesn't kiss Apple's ass as 'troll'" crowd will have to waste more of their moderator points.
There is Linux software to do the magic necessary to get an iPod to recognize music that you copy to it, so you can basically get around this flaw of the iPod.
It may surprise some Mac users, but some of us actually have our music organized on our hard drives using directories. When we want to play an album, we go to the directory that it is in, and tell our MP3 player software to simply play all the files in that directory. We don't need or use playlists. When we use a portable, we don't want fancy syncing software. We just want to copy our files from our hard disk, organized the way we've organized them there, and then on the player select directories and say "play everything there".
More like, "look out, the iPod might get so far ahead, you can't even see it from the back of the pack."
This assumes you believe Apple's market share claims. However, there is something that doesn't add up. We can believe Apple's unit sales claims, because if those aren't accurate, they would get in serious trouble with the government (becuase they are a public company).
However, if you take Apple's market share numbers, use those to calculate the total portable player yearly unit slaes, and then take that and subtract it from the total yearly unit sales of MP3 decoder chips, you have a bunch of chips left over. Subtract out all the other uses you can think of for MP3 decoder chips...and you are still left with a vast amount that are unaccounted for.
Apple has way more mindshare than any other player, but I don't think their market share is as big as most people think.
As other people pointed out, spammers rely more on lists of known working email addresses than on guessing random userids on a given domain
I suspect that this depends on the domain. Mine is a three letter domain under.net, and I suspect that contributed to a lot of the spam to my catch-all when I had it enabled. Spammers probably guess that I'm an ISP.
Another thing to consider is bounce messages. Spammer sends spam, forging random@yourdomain addresses as the sender. If you've got a catch-all, you get the bounces from those.
It allows you to have multiple identities and thus determine where spam comes from. Want to subscribe to a free registration website that requires a valid email address? It the site is yourfreepron.com log in as yourfreepron@yourdomain.com.
You don't need a catch-all for that. You just need a hosting service that lets you set up forwarders. So, in your example, I'd simply set up a forwarder for yourfreepron@mydomain.net to forward to myrealaddress@mydomain.net. My hosting service adds an "Envelope-To" header line that tells what address the mail was for, so I can then easily filter it on my end.
This gives me all the throw-away addresses I want for spam protection and other purposes, without having to deal with the spam to a catch-all address.
Maintenance: Unlike other games,a MMORPG requires continual expense on the part of the company in the form of bandwidth, server upgrades, maintenance, etc. That's what the monthly fee goes towards - the ongoing costs
A large part of that monthly fee is pure profit. Sony has mentioned this in interviews, and it can also be seen by looking at the numbers Mythic has released for DAoC. DAoC has 250k subscribers, so is grossing over $3 million a month. Considering that DAoC cost them $1.5 million to develop and launch (including the cost of buying the servers), it is hard to imagine that game maintenance or server upgrades come anywhere near $3 million a year, let alone $3 million a month. Bandwidth is a few hundred thousand dollars a month, tops.
The significance of Asimov's three laws is not in the details, but in their very existence. Before Asimov's robot stories, most fictional robots were seen as inherently dangerous--they would grow to resent their essentially slave status, and, like human slaves, will rise up and revolt against their masters.
What Asimov brought to robotics (besides the word itself, which appears to have been coined by Asimov, although I believe he himself said he was sure he had heard it before he used it) was the notion that they were simply tools. A robot would resent being a slave no more than a car or screwdriver does. Also, like other tools that can be dangerous, there would be safeguards. Hence, the three laws.
I just looked at this, a gf FX5200 128mb utterly badass video card for less than 60 bucks
I have a hard time believing an FX5200 will be acceptable for Doom3. I've tried it in other games. In City of Heroes, it was acceptable if I turned the resolution down to 1024x768 and cut down various quality settings. In Dark Age of Camelot, it was a slideshow.
Let's face it folks, Duke Nukem Forever isn't coming out. 8 years for one game?
Right. It can't ever come out. It's been so hyped, and so delayed, that the expectation will be too high if it ever does come out. It will not only have to be the best game anyone has ever seen, it will have to be better than anything even hinted at from other companies, or it will disappoint, and flop massively.
That is an impossible burden to meet. By the time they can implement, they are obsolete. They are trapped in the kind of project where the best they can do is get a year or so in, and then realize that the bar has been raised again and they need to start over with a new architecture. This will happen over and over, until they give up.
[...]Microsoft convinced them that Janus will work, despite their recent record of bug free coding, and we're going to have a repeat of the DeCSS fiasco?
Microsoft DRM for WMA seems to be holding up pretty well. All the cracks I've seen are equivalent to "burn a CD and rip it". E.g., it seems successful in limiting people to doing exactly what they are licensed to do.
Probably best to save the snide remarks for when someone actually cracks it.
If you own a domain, do a catch-all email for you domain. If you are registering for www.abc.com, use abc@your-domain.com , if you are registering for slashdot.org, use slashdot@your-domain.com. Hence, you can trace who are the spammer
A problem with a catch-all is that you get a huge amount of spam on it from spammers trying to guess user names.
My hosting plan includes unlimited forwarders, so I just set up a forwarder for, say, slashdot@mydomain to myaddress@mydomain. Their mail software puts an "Envelope-To" header in that tells what address the mail was for, so I can then filter it in procmail on my end to a slashdot mailbox.
It's not quite as convenient as a catch-all, in that when I create a new address, I have to go to the control panel web page for my site and add the forwarder, but the reduction in spam is worth it.
Well, I see a bunch of people are describing balcony mounts, even though the person asking for help does not have a balcony, so I'll describe my balcony mount. My balcony has a rail on the walls, and I took advantage of that.
You can't see them in the photo, but at the bottom of the wood beam there are a couple of rubber feet. The zig-zag shaped metal thingy attached to the side and jammed up under the rail is actually a doorstop (at least, that's what it was labeled at Home Depot).
To get the cables into the apartment, I cut away about an inch of the weatherstipping at the top edge of the door, and run the cable through there. When the door is closed, it does slightly pinch the cable, but not enough to cause a problem. Here is a photo of the cables.
This has worked very well, and when I move, the damage to the apartment will be minimal.
If your job requires you to be available outside of normal hours, then it seems to me your responsibility is to provide a phone number at which you can be reached. If they want something more than that, such as a text messaging system or email system, then it is their responsibility to provide it.
As far as the type of phone number you provide (cell-phone or regular), that should be up to you, as long as you can be reached at that number during the hours you are required to be reachable.
If you have a cell phone, but do not want them to have your cell phone number, then you should give them your non-cell number, and when you are away from that phone (and no one is there to take a call for you and call your cell phone), set up call forwarding to your cell phone.
It is not clear how or why you deduced that sending out a signal is equivalent to leaking information. Radar is sent out as a pulse of nothing but energy. There's no data or anything of value other than the reflection of the radar signal back to the craft
OK, let's take radar. You can get the direction of the transmitter. Do that from a few different places, and you can get the location of the transmitter. From the energy of the pulse at your end, you can estimate the total power of the transmitter. Compare the pulse arrival times at several places, and you can find out how often the radar makes a sweep. The pulse duration and frequency distribution probably would tell you something about how the transmitter works.
For radar in a plane, you could use the doppler effect to get the speed of the plane.
Slashdot Mirror
If a technology has no substantial noninfringing use, it would be at risk, but it is already at risk under the current law.
If a technology does have a substantial noninfringing use, then it seems to me that all the makers/sellers of that technology have to do is only promote the noninfringing use, refuse to provide tech support to people having trouble with infringing uses, and stuff like that.
Apple is betting that everyone else will fail. Microsoft is betting that at least one besides Apple will succeed.
After a while of trying to convince them that this made no sense, he gave up, got up from the new accounts desk, walked over to a teller, and said "I'd like to cash this check". It was a big check, and apparently it was guite a hassle for the teller to deal with, but after much work on the part of the teller, he was handed his huge wad of cash.
He then walked back to the new accounts desk, carefully took out $1000 from the wad of cash, and set the rest down on the desk and said "I'd like to open a new account with this". That, of course, worked.
You still need to use Creative's software. Their players do not implement the USB mass storage interface. They are not like iPod, or iRiver, or Archos, where you just plug it in and it works for file storage.
Their protocol has been reverse engineered, and software is available for Linux to use these players...but what if Creative breaks that in a firmware update?
Apple sells computers. Microsoft sells software to the people that make computers that compete against Apple. Microsoft doesn't really compete against Apple. They let others do that, and they reap the profits. (And if Apple somehow manages to win in "Apple vs. Everyone Else"", Microsoft cleans up as the leading seller of Mac applications).
The situation in Music looks very similar. Apple sells a player. Microsoft sells software (WMA and operating systems) to people making competing players. Apple has a music store. Microsoft sells software (DRM software, databases, web servers, etc) to build music stores.
What Apple is doing is more sexy, but Microsoft's approach is probably going to make a lot more money in the long run.
The Creative players don't work directly as USB hard drives. You have to sue special software to use them for file storage. That's a fatal flaw in my book.
If I only wanted to transport files I would burn them to DVD and take them with me. The whole appeal of the iPod isn't moving files around, it is playing them as music - and to do that you need to upload them using some bullshit loader. Perhaps the linux crowd has rubbed off on me a little, I'm thinking Free as in Freedom.
Maybe I'm wrong, but according to the documentation if you are going to play the file as music, you are putting it on the iPod via the AppleSoft loader software.
OK, let's give more Mac trolls a chance to waste some moderator points.
OK, this is interesting. My Archos 15 gig is almost perfect, but I need more space. I've thought about the 40 gig iPod, but the price is a bit too high. However, at $400, that changes things. Wait until there is a $30-$50 off sale at Amazon, and a $100 off promotion for signing up for a year of Audible.com (which I've been interested in trying), and that gets it down to $250-$280 (Amazon is one of the dealers at which you can use the Audible discount). I'd snap one up in an instant then.
If I only wanted to transport files I would burn them to DVD and take them with me. The whole appeal of the iPod isn't moving files around, it is playing them as music - and to do that you need to upload them using some bullshit loader. Perhaps the linux crowd has rubbed off on me a little, I'm thinking Free as in Freedom.
Maybe I'm wrong, but according to the documentation if you are going to play the file as music, you are putting it on the iPod via the AppleSoft loader software.
I've got nothing to add...just repeating that guy's comments so the "Mod anything that doesn't kiss Apple's ass as 'troll'" crowd will have to waste more of their moderator points.
There is Linux software to do the magic necessary to get an iPod to recognize music that you copy to it, so you can basically get around this flaw of the iPod.
It may surprise some Mac users, but some of us actually have our music organized on our hard drives using directories. When we want to play an album, we go to the directory that it is in, and tell our MP3 player software to simply play all the files in that directory. We don't need or use playlists. When we use a portable, we don't want fancy syncing software. We just want to copy our files from our hard disk, organized the way we've organized them there, and then on the player select directories and say "play everything there".
This assumes you believe Apple's market share claims. However, there is something that doesn't add up. We can believe Apple's unit sales claims, because if those aren't accurate, they would get in serious trouble with the government (becuase they are a public company).
However, if you take Apple's market share numbers, use those to calculate the total portable player yearly unit slaes, and then take that and subtract it from the total yearly unit sales of MP3 decoder chips, you have a bunch of chips left over. Subtract out all the other uses you can think of for MP3 decoder chips...and you are still left with a vast amount that are unaccounted for.
Apple has way more mindshare than any other player, but I don't think their market share is as big as most people think.
I suspect that this depends on the domain. Mine is a three letter domain under .net, and I suspect that contributed to a lot of the spam to my catch-all when I had it enabled. Spammers probably guess that I'm an ISP.
Another thing to consider is bounce messages. Spammer sends spam, forging random@yourdomain addresses as the sender. If you've got a catch-all, you get the bounces from those.
You don't need a catch-all for that. You just need a hosting service that lets you set up forwarders. So, in your example, I'd simply set up a forwarder for yourfreepron@mydomain.net to forward to myrealaddress@mydomain.net. My hosting service adds an "Envelope-To" header line that tells what address the mail was for, so I can then easily filter it on my end.
This gives me all the throw-away addresses I want for spam protection and other purposes, without having to deal with the spam to a catch-all address.
A large part of that monthly fee is pure profit. Sony has mentioned this in interviews, and it can also be seen by looking at the numbers Mythic has released for DAoC. DAoC has 250k subscribers, so is grossing over $3 million a month. Considering that DAoC cost them $1.5 million to develop and launch (including the cost of buying the servers), it is hard to imagine that game maintenance or server upgrades come anywhere near $3 million a year, let alone $3 million a month. Bandwidth is a few hundred thousand dollars a month, tops.
Yes, Capek created "robot". Asimov appears to have created "robotics".
What Asimov brought to robotics (besides the word itself, which appears to have been coined by Asimov, although I believe he himself said he was sure he had heard it before he used it) was the notion that they were simply tools. A robot would resent being a slave no more than a car or screwdriver does. Also, like other tools that can be dangerous, there would be safeguards. Hence, the three laws.
Try almost every online music store that isn't run by Apple.
I have a hard time believing an FX5200 will be acceptable for Doom3. I've tried it in other games. In City of Heroes, it was acceptable if I turned the resolution down to 1024x768 and cut down various quality settings. In Dark Age of Camelot, it was a slideshow.
Right. It can't ever come out. It's been so hyped, and so delayed, that the expectation will be too high if it ever does come out. It will not only have to be the best game anyone has ever seen, it will have to be better than anything even hinted at from other companies, or it will disappoint, and flop massively.
That is an impossible burden to meet. By the time they can implement, they are obsolete. They are trapped in the kind of project where the best they can do is get a year or so in, and then realize that the bar has been raised again and they need to start over with a new architecture. This will happen over and over, until they give up.
Microsoft DRM for WMA seems to be holding up pretty well. All the cracks I've seen are equivalent to "burn a CD and rip it". E.g., it seems successful in limiting people to doing exactly what they are licensed to do.
Probably best to save the snide remarks for when someone actually cracks it.
I'm not impressed. The Spanish in the 15th century in their voyages to the New World and back were getting thousands of miles per galleon.
If you've got a PocketPC and Wifi, just keep your music on your home computer, and run a streaming server, to stream the music to your PocketPC.
A problem with a catch-all is that you get a huge amount of spam on it from spammers trying to guess user names.
My hosting plan includes unlimited forwarders, so I just set up a forwarder for, say, slashdot@mydomain to myaddress@mydomain. Their mail software puts an "Envelope-To" header in that tells what address the mail was for, so I can then filter it in procmail on my end to a slashdot mailbox.
It's not quite as convenient as a catch-all, in that when I create a new address, I have to go to the control panel web page for my site and add the forwarder, but the reduction in spam is worth it.
Here is a photo.
You can't see them in the photo, but at the bottom of the wood beam there are a couple of rubber feet. The zig-zag shaped metal thingy attached to the side and jammed up under the rail is actually a doorstop (at least, that's what it was labeled at Home Depot).
To get the cables into the apartment, I cut away about an inch of the weatherstipping at the top edge of the door, and run the cable through there. When the door is closed, it does slightly pinch the cable, but not enough to cause a problem. Here is a photo of the cables.
This has worked very well, and when I move, the damage to the apartment will be minimal.
As far as the type of phone number you provide (cell-phone or regular), that should be up to you, as long as you can be reached at that number during the hours you are required to be reachable.
If you have a cell phone, but do not want them to have your cell phone number, then you should give them your non-cell number, and when you are away from that phone (and no one is there to take a call for you and call your cell phone), set up call forwarding to your cell phone.
OK, let's take radar. You can get the direction of the transmitter. Do that from a few different places, and you can get the location of the transmitter. From the energy of the pulse at your end, you can estimate the total power of the transmitter. Compare the pulse arrival times at several places, and you can find out how often the radar makes a sweep. The pulse duration and frequency distribution probably would tell you something about how the transmitter works.
For radar in a plane, you could use the doppler effect to get the speed of the plane.