So this guy spent a couple thousand bucks to have a TV with a picture that looks worse than my $200 Philips (and much worse than his former TV, a nice 32" Toshiba). And he was apparently happy with it.
It took a while, but I finally convinced a friend to buy a decent 27" or 32" CRT set to replace his 20-year-old near-dead one.
He wants a plasma, because it "will look so good", and "take up less space". (Not in a useful way--he won't be getting rid of the cabinet the TV currently sits on. You can't put anything in front of the screen, because you'd block the picture. You can't put anything behind, because you wouldn't see it.)
All he watches is 4:3 broadcast programs. So my arguments basically revolve around buying a set for what you want to use it for. Movie buffs want 16:9, and will not care about pillarbox when watching 4:3.
The other point was, get a nice but low-end set to replace the dead one now. When the plasma, LCD, DLP and soon OLED market settles down and the prices become something resembling reasonable, you've got a replacement for the newer-but-still-dying bedroom TV.
That's all far too logical for the average consumer, it seems.
IBM's revision history of AIX is in their proprietary (and discontinued) CMVC product.
Behind the scenes it can be either RCS or SCCS storing the deltatext.
IIRC, the change log comments are stored in an SQL database of your choice, along with all the other metadata for bug/feature tracking and release management.
So, sure, they could just do something like:
Report -view fileView -where "releasename like 'bos%'"
(It's been 5 years since I worked with CMVC, I've forgotten the real column and view names.)
But the point is, why should they have do? And does SCO also want that correlated with bug or feature numbers, descriptions, design plans, test plans, and so on? That's all in CMVC as well. Except, of course, for the design and planning that takes place outside of CMVC.
Generally, development change log entries are useful when you're looking at the file and wanting to know how it got that way.
Now, IBM could always just do:
Report -view fileView -where "comments LIKE '%steal from UNIX%'"
Except, of course, this is no longer about code from UNIX getting into Linux. It's about code IBM (and that other company IBM bought a while back) wrote, that they included with AIX and Dynix, and then later contributed to Linux. So the code was never present in AT&T UNIX. It was written by IBM itself.
All that matters is that boilerplate contract that SCO says means anything IBM wrote reverts back to AT&T (and therefore its successors).
And anyone who believes that IBM would accept a contract like that has never dealt with them or their legal contract. Which is what the business about that amendment is about.
If you've got sparc hardware, x86 stuff is a downgrade path you don't want to follow.
Depends a lot on what you're doing. SPARC might be OK at high-throughput jobs, but IA32 and PowerPC just smash it to little bits for things that are less sequential.
Also, Solaris' local filesystem (UFS) gets the pants beat off it by EXT3 (and, to a lesser extent, AIX JFS2). Even if you turn on journalling, which makes for a nice speed boost on Solaris 8 and up.
In fact, for local file I/O, you're better with Solaris on IA32 than Solaris on SPARC.
I'm not actually sure what SPARC hardware is good for these days. Every time I benchmark something, it loses. Granted, our best SPARC machine is an 8-way UltraSPARC-III 1.2 GHz. So maybe a faster SPARC chip might keep up with PowerPC and Intel a little better.
#ident "@(#)clear.sh 1.8 96/10/14 SMI"/* SVr4.0 1.3 */ # Copyright (c) 1987, 1988 Microsoft Corporation # All Rights Reserved
# This Module contains Proprietary Information of Microsoft # Corporation and should be treated as Confidential.
BTW, for a 2 LOC shell script, it has at least 2 bugs: it creates an unnecessary process, and it suppresses error messages so you cannot diagnose failures.
You're thinking of the old Mac Toolbox ROM from the Old World machines.
On New World machines, they check for Apple-specific entries in the Open Firmware device map. There's a whole device tree that won't be present on a non-Apple machine.
So, theoretically, if you could work up enough Forth to get the appropriate entries on a non-Apple machine, it should work....
Another trick is that OS X only works with USB keyboards and mice, not with PS/2 devices. IBM pSeries machines still have PS/2 inputs. And RS-232 serial. And IEEE 1284 parallel. And video cards OS X has never heard of. And....
I'll probably flamed for this, but I don't need the right to make backup copies of my DVDs.
Just because you don't need a right doesn't mean other people don't need that same right.
I, for example, have no need for maternity or parental leave. But I think we should keep it anyway.
I make backups of my DVDs for travelling. I've had enough commercially-pressed DVDs fail that I want to leave them at home, safe in their cases, as much as possible. (One disc failed utterly, I've got dozens that don't work well in some players--but the copy works fine.)
I also make backups to remove User Prohibited Operation flags and region protection flags of discs I use frequently. I consider this Fair Use. It's still illegal for me to sell copies, so why do I have to sit through the FBI warning? But that's nothing: why should the DVD player's subtitle or audio track selector be locked out, forcing you to navigate the menus? Especially when there's 40 seconds of video before you can get to the menu?
but then we tax the media to death to protect the people who might be hurt if you were to copy
So, if you were somehow able to import media without paying the levy, it would still be legal to copy onto that media.
I was going to make some comment about the "protection" only being for Canadian artists, but I actually don't know enough on that part, so I won't say it... this time.
Uncle George considers his latest version to be the "definitive" edition of the Trilogy;
That's it, I'm going to transfer my laserdiscs to DVD instead of buying the new editions.
The THX LDs are the from the original theatrical release. If only I had a laserdisc machine with Dolby AC-3.... Ah well, ProLogic is better than nothing.
If you don't want to waste them, burn a CD-RW instead.
Except they're slower, and you have to erase them, and I've had a bunch more -RWs fail than -Rs. The ones with the big hole that developed in the dye layer were kind of a giveaway....
I do use DVD-RW when I'm not sure if what I'm doing is going to work properly. My fastest CD-RW is 4x, so that's hard to compete with 16x CD-R. (My drives are all fairly old. I've still got a 6x SCSI CD burner that was quite slick back in its day... doesn't get turned on much anymore. There's a 150 MB tape drive in the same case, which also isn't much use anymore. My camera has more storage than that.)
Back on topic,
the business card and 8cm CD-Rs are cute, but they're like 5-10x the price of a 10cm CD-R, so all you're saving is space.
Can't speak about cable, but I recently priced out a new ADSL provider.
I decided to go with $33.95CDN/month for 3.0m down/800k up, 20 GB/month transfer limit, with a static IP address and no (0) blocked ports. You have to buy your own modem ($80 if you shop around).
For $41.95/month, you can get the same service (including static IP and no blocked ports) with unlimited transfer. Since I never go near the 20 GB mark, I didn't bother with the unlimited. (Actually, my old provider was unlimited, but had dynamic IP, blocked port 25, invisible router-enforced proxy cache on 80, mandatory modem rental, and they recently teamed up with MSN.)
I drew up a web page summarizing all the geek-useful attributes of a bunch of DSL services, but no way in heck am I pointing/. at my poor little webserver... and that 20GB transfer limit.
In turn the $10 an hour that was being paid to metter reading could now be spent on street repair, water maitenace, park care, physical security, or insert an endless list[...]
All of which require people to do the work, they aren't simply "buy something big and expensive made somewhere else". So they'd be able to transfer the meter-readers to new jobs, some of which might be more interesting.
The money isn't going to vanish. Even if they stop taking it in taxes, there'll probably be more people going out to dinner, or the movies. Granted, some will be spent on merchandise made overseas, which doesn't help local economy as much. (Though you still have the truckers, and dock, warehouse and store employees....)
If you read the linked article on FileMaker's website, it says:
Now store multiple database tables in one file instead of having to break them up into multiple files.
I've been using FileMaker at home since it was made by Claris, back at version 3.0. It's always been relational. You build relations between files--one file is one table. Now you can have multiple tables in one file. And you can still build a relation to a table in another file, so you've got the best of both.
In fact, using the free demo of 3.0, I built a database with about 25 relations in it, entirely without the manual. Consequently, I was out to the store the next day and bought the real thing. I've upgraded to 5.0 and 7.0 since.
I'm not sure how much "re-writing" is required to upgrade, I just load all my databases from the old version into the new one and let it create new files in the current format. I've never had to change the database definitions.
(It would be nice to turn a couple of my DBs into a "single file with multiple tables", but hey, it works fine in multiple file mode, so like others say, why break it?)
There are times when it Would Be Nice to throw some really grotty SQL into the system. But they're fairly rare.
many broadband networks allow the user the release the lease on their IP address, and get a new one almost immediately.
You know, a randomly-changing IP number bugged the snot out of me from a pure UNIX geek perspective--I want my own inbound-only mailserver, and I won't take the risk of lost mail during the DNS update lag when my IP number changes. (For Web and SSH, I don't care so much.)
This is the first time I've considered reassinging IPs to be a bad idea from an accountability perspective. (Mainly due to not having had a reason to think about it before... it's so obvious.)
Which all leads me to wonder, do these "residential" ISPs that force all users onto changing IPs do it so they have an "easy out" from
requests to help with attacks from their networks.
And I just thought it was so people who didn't know how to use DNS redirectors couldn't run servers.
That's Sun's "We'll never break down your doors and ask to see your proof-of-licensing" licensing model.
The main thing they offer with that is conveneince. Want to slap a new deveopment or test box together? It's licensed. Need a cluster for a few weeks? Rent the machines, you've already licensed the software.
The only audit they perform for the number of employees is via the company's financial filings--which have to be made anyway.
It seemed a lot more interesting when the BSA and Microsoft were going to everyone and asking to prove they had enough/the right licenses.
This is no longer a 'flaw', it is now part of the way VCRs and TVs are made. You're right about the automatic gain control, but it is the SPEED of AGC that makes Macrovision work.
Macrovision works by screwing with the signal levels in the overscan region at the top of the picture. It will make the signal much, much stronger than it should be--including the sync.
Typically, TVs would have a 'fast' AGC, fast enough to adjust the picture gain on a line-by-line basis (effectively, calibrating off the horizontal sync pulse on each line). So when they get to the visible part of the screen, the signal is back to normal, and the picture is fine.
And also typically, most VCRs would have a 'slow' AGC--the gain for the entire field (or even frame) is set by averaging the previous frame.
Now, not all video displays and VCRs work this way. My family's old TV had a slowish fast-AGC--and dodgy horizontal sync. If you played a Macrovisioned tape on it, the top of the picture would go wobbly. (Brightness was OK.) I've got several old Amiga monitors hooked up to DVD players around the house, and they have slowish AGC; the picture fades in and out when Macrovision is on.
And, more usefully, I have an old Panasonic PV-4780 VCR, from back when Hi-Fi Stereo was new--ca. 1987. It has fast AGC, and makes a beautiful, crisp copy of ANYTHING. And I finally got around to replacing the drive belts so it doesn't chew tapes anymore... except that I don't use VHS anymore; fixing the machine was a "principle of the thing" kind of thing.
Nowadays, most VCRs have Macrovision detection circuits, which scramble the picture even more than the slow AGC would.
It's just too durn bad too. I'm sure so many of us were heartbroken to see them go. Just because they were legitimate doesn't mean they weren't a pain in the ass.
And legitimate is a far cry from ethical.
I was talking to someone who works at an outbound telemarketer in Canada. (He hates his company and his job, but has rent to pay....)
Their business is to sell a special kind of MasterCard to people who can't get a regular card. This one works like a debit card--you pay first, then you can charge items to the card until the account is run out. And there's a hefty annual fee for the service. None of which they tell the mark I mean customer about before-hand. And, since they're selling to people desperate for credit, they have a fairly high success rate.
Also, they are told to tell customers who ask that they are calling from New York, not Toronto.
I couldn't believe a company like that is allowed to operate, given the laws both here and in the US about fraud. Unfortunately, he didn't tell me the name of the firm.
But why should someone need to know about a service that they don't know about, let alone want to use?
If you want to use something, sure, go and learn about it. But if you're not interested in it, why should you have to learn about it just to turn it off?
Plus, I think the PowerPC AIX development was underway BEFORE r5
AIX has run on PowerPC chips since 3.2.5, circa 1993. This was the PowerPC 601, in the RS/6000 7011 Model 250. (Earlier models of the 7011 used the truly awful RSC (RISC Single Chip) CPU, which was the 7-chip (or was it 9?) low-end POWER CPU wedged onto a single die.) Development of a certain OS from Cupertino was done with the aid of both POWER- and PowerPC-based RS/6000 systems from IBM, including IBM's compilers and a cross-linker to generate Mac executables with AIX.
Version 4 of AIX allowed AIX to run on non-Microchannel PowerPC machines, both RS/6000 and Personal Computer, as well as Microchannel POWER, POWER2 and PowerPC. Modern POWER3 and POWER4 CPUs are really high-end PowerPC designs with the POWER brand-name.
Version 5 of AIX is the 3rd version to run on PowerPCs. (Version 1 ran on Microchannel i86 machines (PS/2), and Version 2 ran on RT/PC (IBM's first RISC machine).)
As annoying as that was, it was a critical part of Radio Shack's business. Giving a correct name and address would just get you a flyer every month. About 20% of the months business would be people coming in grasping that flyer looking for stuff.
Tough shit. I don't have to be a willing partner in some company's business strategy. I don't have to be polite to cold-call telemarketers, I don't have to be polite to door-to-door trespassers (that "No Soliciting" sign means something), I don't have to read all the billboards on the bus shelters.
And firms do NOT have the right to my identity. Not even for warranty purposes. Any company which refuses to honor a warranty with a purchase recipt can talk to me about it in Small Claims Court. They're not getting those stupid cards filled out and mailed in, and the store gets squat.
And if you phone me from my bank, credit card company, phone company, and so on, I'm not going to believe you're who you say you are. Especially if you call from "BLOCKED ID" and cannot transfer me to a supervisor.
There was a bug in XMMS ID3 decoder that would sign-extend an 8-bit byte to 32-bits, resulting in a negative number, which it would then discard as being (correctly) insane. Since this was the length field, nothing was usable in the rest of the tag--it couldn't skip to the next record.
Consequently, any file with a comment field between 128 and 255 bytes long would have no tags showing up.
It's fixed in 1.2.10.
(BTW, SoundJam and iTunes both record the information needed to do a CDDB query on the disc in the comment field, so you can refresh the info data without having to drag out the CD.)
I don't know about you, but I have yet to find a jukebox for Linux which (a) I can get to compile and (b) works anywhere near as nicely as iTunes.
Every time I try a so-called jukebox program, I go back to xmms. For all its lack of "media management", at least it plays correctly (without clicks & pops) and doesn't crash part-way.
I like iTunes (though, being non-American and non-European, have no iTMS music to worry about) because it is easy to use and works well. I don't want to program my computer just to listen to music.
I saw a list of Apple trademarks once, most of which had never been used.
Hey, my ancient LaserJet 4 is STILL running EtherTalk, on that fancy new 10baseT networking wire--you know, the kind with the oversize telephone plug on the end? (I do have all the kit to hook it up via thinnet, but it and a disused hub are the only things left I've got with both 10base2 and 10baseT.)
Anyone want to buy an ancient LaserJet 4? I've been eyeballing one of those fancy ones that can print on both sides....
As someone who's using 120 gb HDs (my external cage is only ATA-5...) for backup, what exactly is wrong with it?
Cheap, fast, no worries about dirt getting into the mechanism. I put 3.5" drives in mobile racks into an external 5.25" FireWire & USB2 cage, so I can pull a drive and take it offsite... just like tape, only in my price range. And without having to mess with head cleaning cartridges.
Slashdot Mirror
It took a while, but I finally convinced a friend to buy a decent 27" or 32" CRT set to replace his 20-year-old near-dead one.
He wants a plasma, because it "will look so good", and "take up less space". (Not in a useful way--he won't be getting rid of the cabinet the TV currently sits on. You can't put anything in front of the screen, because you'd block the picture. You can't put anything behind, because you wouldn't see it.)
All he watches is 4:3 broadcast programs. So my arguments basically revolve around buying a set for what you want to use it for. Movie buffs want 16:9, and will not care about pillarbox when watching 4:3.
The other point was, get a nice but low-end set to replace the dead one now. When the plasma, LCD, DLP and soon OLED market settles down and the prices become something resembling reasonable, you've got a replacement for the newer-but-still-dying bedroom TV.
That's all far too logical for the average consumer, it seems.
Behind the scenes it can be either RCS or SCCS storing the deltatext.
IIRC, the change log comments are stored in an SQL database of your choice, along with all the other metadata for bug/feature tracking and release management.
So, sure, they could just do something like:
(It's been 5 years since I worked with CMVC, I've forgotten the real column and view names.)
But the point is, why should they have do? And does SCO also want that correlated with bug or feature numbers, descriptions, design plans, test plans, and so on? That's all in CMVC as well. Except, of course, for the design and planning that takes place outside of CMVC.
Generally, development change log entries are useful when you're looking at the file and wanting to know how it got that way.
Now, IBM could always just do:
Except, of course, this is no longer about code from UNIX getting into Linux. It's about code IBM (and that other company IBM bought a while back) wrote, that they included with AIX and Dynix, and then later contributed to Linux. So the code was never present in AT&T UNIX. It was written by IBM itself.All that matters is that boilerplate contract that SCO says means anything IBM wrote reverts back to AT&T (and therefore its successors).
And anyone who believes that IBM would accept a contract like that has never dealt with them or their legal contract. Which is what the business about that amendment is about.
Depends a lot on what you're doing. SPARC might be OK at high-throughput jobs, but IA32 and PowerPC just smash it to little bits for things that are less sequential.
Also, Solaris' local filesystem (UFS) gets the pants beat off it by EXT3 (and, to a lesser extent, AIX JFS2). Even if you turn on journalling, which makes for a nice speed boost on Solaris 8 and up.
In fact, for local file I/O, you're better with Solaris on IA32 than Solaris on SPARC.
I'm not actually sure what SPARC hardware is good for these days. Every time I benchmark something, it loses. Granted, our best SPARC machine is an 8-way UltraSPARC-III 1.2 GHz. So maybe a faster SPARC chip might keep up with PowerPC and Intel a little better.
You're thinking of the old Mac Toolbox ROM from the Old World machines.
On New World machines, they check for Apple-specific entries in the Open Firmware device map. There's a whole device tree that won't be present on a non-Apple machine.
So, theoretically, if you could work up enough Forth to get the appropriate entries on a non-Apple machine, it should work....
Another trick is that OS X only works with USB keyboards and mice, not with PS/2 devices. IBM pSeries machines still have PS/2 inputs. And RS-232 serial. And IEEE 1284 parallel. And video cards OS X has never heard of. And....
Just because you don't need a right doesn't mean other people don't need that same right.
I, for example, have no need for maternity or parental leave. But I think we should keep it anyway.
I make backups of my DVDs for travelling. I've had enough commercially-pressed DVDs fail that I want to leave them at home, safe in their cases, as much as possible. (One disc failed utterly, I've got dozens that don't work well in some players--but the copy works fine.)
I also make backups to remove User Prohibited Operation flags and region protection flags of discs I use frequently. I consider this Fair Use. It's still illegal for me to sell copies, so why do I have to sit through the FBI warning? But that's nothing: why should the DVD player's subtitle or audio track selector be locked out, forcing you to navigate the menus? Especially when there's 40 seconds of video before you can get to the menu?
Keep in mind, the right to copy is separate from the levy.
So, if you were somehow able to import media without paying the levy, it would still be legal to copy onto that media.
I was going to make some comment about the "protection" only being for Canadian artists, but I actually don't know enough on that part, so I won't say it... this time.
That's it, I'm going to transfer my laserdiscs to DVD instead of buying the new editions.
The THX LDs are the from the original theatrical release. If only I had a laserdisc machine with Dolby AC-3.... Ah well, ProLogic is better than nothing.
Except they're slower, and you have to erase them, and I've had a bunch more -RWs fail than -Rs. The ones with the big hole that developed in the dye layer were kind of a giveaway....
I do use DVD-RW when I'm not sure if what I'm doing is going to work properly. My fastest CD-RW is 4x, so that's hard to compete with 16x CD-R. (My drives are all fairly old. I've still got a 6x SCSI CD burner that was quite slick back in its day... doesn't get turned on much anymore. There's a 150 MB tape drive in the same case, which also isn't much use anymore. My camera has more storage than that.)
Back on topic, the business card and 8cm CD-Rs are cute, but they're like 5-10x the price of a 10cm CD-R, so all you're saving is space.
I decided to go with $33.95CDN/month for 3.0m down/800k up, 20 GB/month transfer limit, with a static IP address and no (0) blocked ports. You have to buy your own modem ($80 if you shop around).
For $41.95/month, you can get the same service (including static IP and no blocked ports) with unlimited transfer. Since I never go near the 20 GB mark, I didn't bother with the unlimited. (Actually, my old provider was unlimited, but had dynamic IP, blocked port 25, invisible router-enforced proxy cache on 80, mandatory modem rental, and they recently teamed up with MSN.)
I drew up a web page summarizing all the geek-useful attributes of a bunch of DSL services, but no way in heck am I pointing /. at my poor little webserver... and that 20GB transfer limit.
All of which require people to do the work, they aren't simply "buy something big and expensive made somewhere else". So they'd be able to transfer the meter-readers to new jobs, some of which might be more interesting.
The money isn't going to vanish. Even if they stop taking it in taxes, there'll probably be more people going out to dinner, or the movies. Granted, some will be spent on merchandise made overseas, which doesn't help local economy as much. (Though you still have the truckers, and dock, warehouse and store employees....)
Hmmm.
My main reason for upgrading to FMP 7 was to get rid of the last program I had running in Classic....
Sounds like I need to consider an export-redesign-import cycle on some of the databases too.
Thanks, I was going to tidy up the house, not the database, tonight... the database is a lot more fun.
If you read the linked article on FileMaker's website, it says:
I've been using FileMaker at home since it was made by Claris, back at version 3.0. It's always been relational. You build relations between files--one file is one table. Now you can have multiple tables in one file. And you can still build a relation to a table in another file, so you've got the best of both.
In fact, using the free demo of 3.0, I built a database with about 25 relations in it, entirely without the manual. Consequently, I was out to the store the next day and bought the real thing. I've upgraded to 5.0 and 7.0 since.
I'm not sure how much "re-writing" is required to upgrade, I just load all my databases from the old version into the new one and let it create new files in the current format. I've never had to change the database definitions.
(It would be nice to turn a couple of my DBs into a "single file with multiple tables", but hey, it works fine in multiple file mode, so like others say, why break it?)
There are times when it Would Be Nice to throw some really grotty SQL into the system. But they're fairly rare.
You know, a randomly-changing IP number bugged the snot out of me from a pure UNIX geek perspective--I want my own inbound-only mailserver, and I won't take the risk of lost mail during the DNS update lag when my IP number changes. (For Web and SSH, I don't care so much.)
This is the first time I've considered reassinging IPs to be a bad idea from an accountability perspective. (Mainly due to not having had a reason to think about it before... it's so obvious.)
Which all leads me to wonder, do these "residential" ISPs that force all users onto changing IPs do it so they have an "easy out" from requests to help with attacks from their networks.
And I just thought it was so people who didn't know how to use DNS redirectors couldn't run servers.
The main thing they offer with that is conveneince. Want to slap a new deveopment or test box together? It's licensed. Need a cluster for a few weeks? Rent the machines, you've already licensed the software.
The only audit they perform for the number of employees is via the company's financial filings--which have to be made anyway.
It seemed a lot more interesting when the BSA and Microsoft were going to everyone and asking to prove they had enough/the right licenses.
Macrovision works by screwing with the signal levels in the overscan region at the top of the picture. It will make the signal much, much stronger than it should be--including the sync.
Typically, TVs would have a 'fast' AGC, fast enough to adjust the picture gain on a line-by-line basis (effectively, calibrating off the horizontal sync pulse on each line). So when they get to the visible part of the screen, the signal is back to normal, and the picture is fine.
And also typically, most VCRs would have a 'slow' AGC--the gain for the entire field (or even frame) is set by averaging the previous frame.
Now, not all video displays and VCRs work this way. My family's old TV had a slowish fast-AGC--and dodgy horizontal sync. If you played a Macrovisioned tape on it, the top of the picture would go wobbly. (Brightness was OK.) I've got several old Amiga monitors hooked up to DVD players around the house, and they have slowish AGC; the picture fades in and out when Macrovision is on.
And, more usefully, I have an old Panasonic PV-4780 VCR, from back when Hi-Fi Stereo was new--ca. 1987. It has fast AGC, and makes a beautiful, crisp copy of ANYTHING. And I finally got around to replacing the drive belts so it doesn't chew tapes anymore... except that I don't use VHS anymore; fixing the machine was a "principle of the thing" kind of thing.
Nowadays, most VCRs have Macrovision detection circuits, which scramble the picture even more than the slow AGC would.
And legitimate is a far cry from ethical.
I was talking to someone who works at an outbound telemarketer in Canada. (He hates his company and his job, but has rent to pay....)
Their business is to sell a special kind of MasterCard to people who can't get a regular card. This one works like a debit card--you pay first, then you can charge items to the card until the account is run out. And there's a hefty annual fee for the service. None of which they tell the mark I mean customer about before-hand. And, since they're selling to people desperate for credit, they have a fairly high success rate.
Also, they are told to tell customers who ask that they are calling from New York, not Toronto.
I couldn't believe a company like that is allowed to operate, given the laws both here and in the US about fraud. Unfortunately, he didn't tell me the name of the firm.
But why should someone need to know about a service that they don't know about, let alone want to use?
If you want to use something, sure, go and learn about it. But if you're not interested in it, why should you have to learn about it just to turn it off?
Hence the arguments for "off by default".
AIX has run on PowerPC chips since 3.2.5, circa 1993. This was the PowerPC 601, in the RS/6000 7011 Model 250. (Earlier models of the 7011 used the truly awful RSC (RISC Single Chip) CPU, which was the 7-chip (or was it 9?) low-end POWER CPU wedged onto a single die.) Development of a certain OS from Cupertino was done with the aid of both POWER- and PowerPC-based RS/6000 systems from IBM, including IBM's compilers and a cross-linker to generate Mac executables with AIX.
Version 4 of AIX allowed AIX to run on non-Microchannel PowerPC machines, both RS/6000 and Personal Computer, as well as Microchannel POWER, POWER2 and PowerPC. Modern POWER3 and POWER4 CPUs are really high-end PowerPC designs with the POWER brand-name.
Version 5 of AIX is the 3rd version to run on PowerPCs. (Version 1 ran on Microchannel i86 machines (PS/2), and Version 2 ran on RT/PC (IBM's first RISC machine).)
Tough shit. I don't have to be a willing partner in some company's business strategy. I don't have to be polite to cold-call telemarketers, I don't have to be polite to door-to-door trespassers (that "No Soliciting" sign means something), I don't have to read all the billboards on the bus shelters.
And firms do NOT have the right to my identity. Not even for warranty purposes. Any company which refuses to honor a warranty with a purchase recipt can talk to me about it in Small Claims Court. They're not getting those stupid cards filled out and mailed in, and the store gets squat.
And if you phone me from my bank, credit card company, phone company, and so on, I'm not going to believe you're who you say you are. Especially if you call from "BLOCKED ID" and cannot transfer me to a supervisor.
The region flags are in the IFO block, not in the CSS key region. I believe the Macrovision flag is there as well.
It can be really annoying if you duplicate something to play on region locked players and forget to clear the region lockout flags.
There was a bug in XMMS ID3 decoder that would sign-extend an 8-bit byte to 32-bits, resulting in a negative number, which it would then discard as being (correctly) insane. Since this was the length field, nothing was usable in the rest of the tag--it couldn't skip to the next record.
Consequently, any file with a comment field between 128 and 255 bytes long would have no tags showing up.
It's fixed in 1.2.10.
(BTW, SoundJam and iTunes both record the information needed to do a CDDB query on the disc in the comment field, so you can refresh the info data without having to drag out the CD.)
I don't know about you, but I have yet to find a jukebox for Linux which (a) I can get to compile and (b) works anywhere near as nicely as iTunes.
Every time I try a so-called jukebox program, I go back to xmms. For all its lack of "media management", at least it plays correctly (without clicks & pops) and doesn't crash part-way.
I like iTunes (though, being non-American and non-European, have no iTMS music to worry about) because it is easy to use and works well. I don't want to program my computer just to listen to music.
Hey, my ancient LaserJet 4 is STILL running EtherTalk, on that fancy new 10baseT networking wire--you know, the kind with the oversize telephone plug on the end? (I do have all the kit to hook it up via thinnet, but it and a disused hub are the only things left I've got with both 10base2 and 10baseT.)
Anyone want to buy an ancient LaserJet 4? I've been eyeballing one of those fancy ones that can print on both sides....
Heck, for logging, drop the bitrate as low as you can get away with. Throw quality out the window, go for recording time/megabyte.
As someone who's using 120 gb HDs (my external cage is only ATA-5...) for backup, what exactly is wrong with it?
Cheap, fast, no worries about dirt getting into the mechanism. I put 3.5" drives in mobile racks into an external 5.25" FireWire & USB2 cage, so I can pull a drive and take it offsite... just like tape, only in my price range. And without having to mess with head cleaning cartridges.