The courts are insane. How can they order Napster to do something that isn't technologically possible...even for a well-funded group like SDMI?
I have an idea - I happened to be browsing freshmeat a few minutes ago, and noticed this program called findimagedupes which performs a "visual diff" of image files and proceeds to weed out images it thinks are "visually similar".. It claims a 98% success rate...
Couldn't a similar technology be used to "profile" an known commercial song then find mp3s that were "audibly similar"? As good as current speach recognition technology is getting, isn't this just simple waveform analysis? Couldn't this be applied to entire songs? The idea being that by the time the song is altered enough to NOT be audibly similar it would be undesirable anyway. This way napster could stay open and allow swapping of non-commercial music, but if a label finds napster is allowing trading of a copyrighted song the label simply uploads the "profile" (or maybe "fingerprint"?) of the song for them to scan against.
Maybe I'm just talking out my head.. Is something like this even feasible? (legit question)
W2K is the least stable OS I've ever used. Point being, I can't trust an OS that was out for less than a month when it had to get a major "service pack" in order to function at all.
In order to function in what way? I've done plenty of W2k installs (both professional and server) that work fine out of the box. I really think SP1 was more of a marketing tactic than anything else. How many people do you know that said "Win2k? I won't upgrade until the first service pack comes out!". I can't tell you how many times I heard that.
This isn't JUST microsoft hatred. How many of you have run out to put kernel 2.4.0 on your production server boxen? Not me.
Besides increased stability, win2k has some nice things going for it... Their Distributed File System is just plain sexy. I can have my users map '\\virtserver\share1', and have that share point to any share on ANY machine (not just win32). If I want to move the physical files to any other server, I just change the pointer.. I don't have to run around to each PC remapping drives. You can even have it do poor-man's load balancing by pointing the virtual share to two or more shares on different servers. Nifty stuff. Too bad no one has hacked NMBD/SMBD to do this.:(
Of course, when I was in puberty, ritalin made me damned near psychotic -- angry all the time and prone to violent outbursts that left me wondering what was going on, even as they were occuring.
Eh? I thought this was everyone's adolescence..:) It was certanly mine and I was never on ritalin.
Graduating from high school a few years ago, and soon to be graduating college, I can definitely attest that being a "geek" has moved up a few notches.
I have to agree. Like many here, I was pretty much an outcast geek in high school.. I'm 24 now, BTW.. Last summer I started working the door at a local night club here and started seeing a lot of the people I graduated with almost 7 years ago. I always say it's amazing how much we (geeks and nerds) were picked on in high school, but how we're now worshipped as WE'RE the ones driving the BMW's and making large amounts of money.. Funny how times change..
What do you expect people to say? "Hooray, now I won't be as confused by all the choices next time I buy a video card?"
Actually, I was thinking something along these lines.. As others have said, the 3d hardware life-cycle seems to be about 6 months. Now, I don't know about you, but I can't afford to throw away $200+ every six months whenever 3dblah comes out with the New VoodooNextBestThingForce card... And God forbid you make the wrong decision when you buy one. My last 3d card purchase was a VoodooBanshee. Anyone remember those? 3dfx basically took a Voodoo 2 and added the Banshee extentions to it, which NO ONE used, so it's now basically an overpriced Voodoo 2.
The way I see it, if 3d chipset manufacturers get out of this arms race and slow the life cycle to about a year, and spent the extra time to tweak the drivers for better performance, everyone wins. This also benefits game developers.. With the typical game development time being two years or so, I imagine it's a very difficult to hit moving target for a developer to keep up.
I can appreciate changing the title to fit American terminology, but how do you Americanise the rest of it?
I can think of one example: In the episode where they had to build a crane (lift?) to rescue two underwater minis.. As an american it didn't have the impact as, say, rescuing a VW bug, or a honda civic or something I'm more familiar with than a mini. Just an observation..
I've had this thought myself.. Like in the tractor pull episode where each team just "happened" to find a fully running engine and four inflated tires... Or in the flying machines episode where the one team found a relatively untorn tarp. Who the hell puts tarps in a junkyard?!
The conspiracy theorist in me also wonders about Who's Line is it anyway.. During most of the scenes they are staring HEAVILY at the camera as if reading off a telepromptor. I'm sure SOME of it is improvised, but I highly doubt the whole show is as they want you to believe. That said, it's still IM(ns)HO the funniest show on TV, scripts or no scripts.
Let's face it, if a high paid dot-commie in a posh club in SoMa snorts coke, it's perceived as normal and fully acceptable. The police won't go into the club and raid it, because they won't want to upset the owners and the powerful partygoers.
While there may be some truth to that statement, I think the main reason poilice aren't eager to raid clubs every night is if Joe DotCom wants to go to a club and take E or snort coke all night, who is he hurting? Maybe himself, but that's about it. Now if Jimmy Crackhead is out on the street robbing and stealing to pay for his crack habit, then the police have a much bigger problem. I've worked security in a night club for the past three years, and the police that work in our club could care less about the drug users there, because they don't hurt anyone.
That said, club drugs are under increasing fire all over the country. Florida lost a WONDERFUL rave scene because of the stupid war on (some) drugs. Atlanta is coming close to loosing theirs due to the WoD. It's a shame, really. In ANY grouping of young people (ravers, college students, dot-com techies, etc) you're going to have a higher-than-usual percentage of drug users.
It's like Chef said: "Children, there's a time and place for everything, and it's called college".
let's use an analogy to real life: what if you had a site like drugnews.com, that tells you everything about the newest drugs released, their latest effects, and maybe has a forum with various people who know how to get those drugs and whom you can email etc.
Umm, you mean sites like erowid.org, the lycaeum, dancesafe, and bluelight, just to name a few? Yeah, heaven forbid we put unbiased information on drugs on the net so that people can make informed decisions for themselves rather than having the governments FUD shoved down their throats.
Perhaps you also want to be upset about books like Pihkal, which has trip reports and labratory sythesises for hundreds of drugs? What about books like Total Synthesis which give detailed instructions for the synthesis of amphetamines? Yeah, better make those illegal, too.
For the record, I could care less about making illegal substances in my bathtub, but I think it's my right to read how they are made should I choose to put them in my body.
But what are the implications of these laws? The implications are simple: the physical space that I consider my private space -- my home, my car -- is being given away, given up, and sold down the river by government to big business. We'll soon not be able to 'touch' hardware inside our homes.
I don't mean this as a flame, but I want to point out that big business and the government have been controlling what you do with your hardware (home, car, etc) for years. Can you roll the odometer back on your car (legally)? If you want to build an addition onto your house can you just put up some plywood and duct tape it together (legally)? There have always been laws (odometer fraud, building regulations, etc) in place to control our lives and control our posessions "for own own good" (said tounge-in-cheek style).
I'm not arguing these are GOOD laws, as I do agree that NO ONE should be able to control a piece of hardware once I pay my hard-earned money for it. It's just a case of the gubment saving us citizens from ourselves.
BTW, I think a better car analogy would be if Ford had designed his cars to run on FordFuel and sold them for $1000, but expected you to pay $10/gallon for his FordFuel then attacked you with lawyers if you modified your car to run on normal gas. As has been stated over and over again, it's a flawed business plan.
According to this article at Yahoo, there are some "inconsistencies" as to the whereabouts of the drives.. Apparently that area was searched several times before, and now suddenly the drives appeared there under questionable circumstances.. Seems to me if you were going to take the drives out joyriding and suddenly the nation becomes up in arms about them missing, you'd return them to some obscure place and they say "ohhhh, silly us, we didn't search behind the copier".
It's fairly common knowledge that one of Microsoft's private newsgroups is called the Microsoft Dance Music Association (MDMA). For those of you who aren't familiar, MDMA is the chemical name for the drug Ecstasy.
It's not as bad as you make it sound... I have direcpc at home and am very happy with it. I'm able to download 60-80 megs in one sitting at 400k before getting FAP'ed[1]. I've even had times where it has burst up to 600k during a download.
[1]Being FAP'ed refers to DirecPC using their Fair Access Policy as reasoning for throttling your bandwidth once you've downloaded a certain amount in a timeframe which they won't specify. More info on FAP can be found by searching alt.satellite.direcpc with deja and looking for FAP.
Ok, shoot me if I'm missing something obvious because I don't follow the mozilla project.. But it was my understanding that one of the first things mozilla gave communicator when mozilla was first created as Roaming Access. I use this daily to share bookmarks between home and work and find it invaluable.
What happened to roaming access in Mozilla? Was it scrapped during the first major rewrite? Is it ever going to be included? Inquiring minds want to know...
Slashdot Mirror
I have an idea - I happened to be browsing freshmeat a few minutes ago, and noticed this program called findimagedupes which performs a "visual diff" of image files and proceeds to weed out images it thinks are "visually similar".. It claims a 98% success rate...
Couldn't a similar technology be used to "profile" an known commercial song then find mp3s that were "audibly similar"? As good as current speach recognition technology is getting, isn't this just simple waveform analysis? Couldn't this be applied to entire songs? The idea being that by the time the song is altered enough to NOT be audibly similar it would be undesirable anyway. This way napster could stay open and allow swapping of non-commercial music, but if a label finds napster is allowing trading of a copyrighted song the label simply uploads the "profile" (or maybe "fingerprint"?) of the song for them to scan against.
Maybe I'm just talking out my head.. Is something like this even feasible? (legit question)
Shayne
S'cuse me while I go hurl....
Shayne
In order to function in what way? I've done plenty of W2k installs (both professional and server) that work fine out of the box. I really think SP1 was more of a marketing tactic than anything else. How many people do you know that said "Win2k? I won't upgrade until the first service pack comes out!". I can't tell you how many times I heard that.
This isn't JUST microsoft hatred. How many of you have run out to put kernel 2.4.0 on your production server boxen? Not me.
Besides increased stability, win2k has some nice things going for it... Their Distributed File System is just plain sexy. I can have my users map '\\virtserver\share1', and have that share point to any share on ANY machine (not just win32). If I want to move the physical files to any other server, I just change the pointer.. I don't have to run around to each PC remapping drives. You can even have it do poor-man's load balancing by pointing the virtual share to two or more shares on different servers. Nifty stuff. Too bad no one has hacked NMBD/SMBD to do this. :(
Shayne
Of course, when I was in puberty, ritalin made me damned near psychotic -- angry all the time and prone to violent outbursts that left me wondering what was going on, even as they were occuring.
Eh? I thought this was everyone's adolescence.. :) It was certanly mine and I was never on ritalin.
Shayne
Graduating from high school a few years ago, and soon to be graduating college, I can definitely attest that being a "geek" has moved up a few notches.
I have to agree. Like many here, I was pretty much an outcast geek in high school.. I'm 24 now, BTW.. Last summer I started working the door at a local night club here and started seeing a lot of the people I graduated with almost 7 years ago. I always say it's amazing how much we (geeks and nerds) were picked on in high school, but how we're now worshipped as WE'RE the ones driving the BMW's and making large amounts of money.. Funny how times change..
Shayne
What do you expect people to say? "Hooray, now I won't be as confused by all the choices next time I buy a video card?"
Actually, I was thinking something along these lines.. As others have said, the 3d hardware life-cycle seems to be about 6 months. Now, I don't know about you, but I can't afford to throw away $200+ every six months whenever 3dblah comes out with the New VoodooNextBestThingForce card... And God forbid you make the wrong decision when you buy one. My last 3d card purchase was a VoodooBanshee. Anyone remember those? 3dfx basically took a Voodoo 2 and added the Banshee extentions to it, which NO ONE used, so it's now basically an overpriced Voodoo 2.
The way I see it, if 3d chipset manufacturers get out of this arms race and slow the life cycle to about a year, and spent the extra time to tweak the drivers for better performance, everyone wins. This also benefits game developers.. With the typical game development time being two years or so, I imagine it's a very difficult to hit moving target for a developer to keep up.
Shayne
System Requirements
- Windows OS
- Internet Explorer 5.0+
(sigh) You'd think a company that builds their business model AROUND linux would be a little better about supporting linux.Shayne
Shayne
I can think of one example: In the episode where they had to build a crane (lift?) to rescue two underwater minis.. As an american it didn't have the impact as, say, rescuing a VW bug, or a honda civic or something I'm more familiar with than a mini. Just an observation..
Shayne
The conspiracy theorist in me also wonders about Who's Line is it anyway.. During most of the scenes they are staring HEAVILY at the camera as if reading off a telepromptor. I'm sure SOME of it is improvised, but I highly doubt the whole show is as they want you to believe. That said, it's still IM(ns)HO the funniest show on TV, scripts or no scripts.
Shayne
...readable assembler.
While there may be some truth to that statement, I think the main reason poilice aren't eager to raid clubs every night is if Joe DotCom wants to go to a club and take E or snort coke all night, who is he hurting? Maybe himself, but that's about it. Now if Jimmy Crackhead is out on the street robbing and stealing to pay for his crack habit, then the police have a much bigger problem. I've worked security in a night club for the past three years, and the police that work in our club could care less about the drug users there, because they don't hurt anyone.
That said, club drugs are under increasing fire all over the country. Florida lost a WONDERFUL rave scene because of the stupid war on (some) drugs. Atlanta is coming close to loosing theirs due to the WoD. It's a shame, really. In ANY grouping of young people (ravers, college students, dot-com techies, etc) you're going to have a higher-than-usual percentage of drug users.
It's like Chef said: "Children, there's a time and place for everything, and it's called college".
Shayne
Umm, you mean sites like erowid.org, the lycaeum, dancesafe, and bluelight, just to name a few? Yeah, heaven forbid we put unbiased information on drugs on the net so that people can make informed decisions for themselves rather than having the governments FUD shoved down their throats.
Perhaps you also want to be upset about books like Pihkal, which has trip reports and labratory sythesises for hundreds of drugs? What about books like Total Synthesis which give detailed instructions for the synthesis of amphetamines? Yeah, better make those illegal, too.
For the record, I could care less about making illegal substances in my bathtub, but I think it's my right to read how they are made should I choose to put them in my body.
Shayne
I don't mean this as a flame, but I want to point out that big business and the government have been controlling what you do with your hardware (home, car, etc) for years. Can you roll the odometer back on your car (legally)? If you want to build an addition onto your house can you just put up some plywood and duct tape it together (legally)? There have always been laws (odometer fraud, building regulations, etc) in place to control our lives and control our posessions "for own own good" (said tounge-in-cheek style).
I'm not arguing these are GOOD laws, as I do agree that NO ONE should be able to control a piece of hardware once I pay my hard-earned money for it. It's just a case of the gubment saving us citizens from ourselves.
BTW, I think a better car analogy would be if Ford had designed his cars to run on FordFuel and sold them for $1000, but expected you to pay $10/gallon for his FordFuel then attacked you with lawyers if you modified your car to run on normal gas. As has been stated over and over again, it's a flawed business plan.
Shayne
.... whackin' yer cluestick? :)
Shayne
It's fairly common knowledge that one of Microsoft's private newsgroups is called the Microsoft Dance Music Association (MDMA). For those of you who aren't familiar, MDMA is the chemical name for the drug Ecstasy.
Shayne
[1]Being FAP'ed refers to DirecPC using their Fair Access Policy as reasoning for throttling your bandwidth once you've downloaded a certain amount in a timeframe which they won't specify. More info on FAP can be found by searching alt.satellite.direcpc with deja and looking for FAP.
Shayne
What happened to roaming access in Mozilla? Was it scrapped during the first major rewrite? Is it ever going to be included? Inquiring minds want to know...
Shayne