it sounds like you're implying that right now, region free and macro vision disabled dvd players are hard to find, tihs isn;t true. it may well be for america where the other regions might as well not exist, but in the UK a huge number of dvd players are sold "hacked". my sony auto changes to the correct region and plays without that silly old macrovision (which I've never really made use of, I just had done on principle)
IMHO plasma isn;t going to be the flatscreen tech that succeeds, I reckon it'll be some variant on tft panel. plasma's resolution isn't great, it's heavy and gets very hot. I reckon that some form of lcd display will be what eventually takes over from crt, it's lighter, will become cheaper I think, higher resolution (enough for hdtv), thinner (ie able to be designed into more stylish enclosures) and is prolly better for power.
well, in the UK, most good modern widescreens generate extra data themselves anyway. all 100hz sets for one, they interpolate extra frames to eliminate flicker and often they generate extra scan lines too. some of the original tv's didn't look wonderful in these modes, but now the processing is getting extremely good.
it's excellent when you're watching from a high quality source (like dvd or a very good tv signal) but when you watch an old vhs recording then it really has it's work cut out trying to make things look pretty.
might be to you, but it's not to us. we have widescreen which is doing pretty well, quite a few WS sets in the uk onw, it's almost getting hard ot buy a new 4:3) but not HDTV. ofcourse PAL is a higher res and has a better colour system than ntsc anyways so it's not quite so critical. dvd's can look pretty stunning
as an aside, I watched aliens SE the other night with some friends on my 32" widescreen tv and I was appalled at the quality of encoding. it was awful, like watching a dodgy avi, well, not that bad:) you could see great swathes of the same colour, maybe I'm just getting more discerning but I watched the mummy at the weekend and it's a testament to how far dvd encoding as come. it was a stunningly good transfer.
case 3: simple, package his earlier stuff with some of his later stuff so that the consumer gets a "valued packed" option. besides, why does the presence of his old stuff detract from the sales of his new stuff? surely it would bolster sales of the new stuff? besides, it's only really public domain if it's out in public.
case 4: I'm sorry but the author should "write more stuff". how many plumbers fix one set of pipes and then expect to life forever off the proceeds?
case 5: actually, iirc, the silmarillion was released by tolkien himself, it was the epic "my fathers ramblings in 14 volumes" that was by his son as I recall. anyways, in this case, it's probably our loss. in any system there will be gains and losses. the trick is to balance these so that we try and get an even and fair system. look at "abandonware" games for example. you can't buy them if you tried, no-one is supporting them, you're not hurting anyone by copying them but the co's will still bring in the heavies if you pirate them. why? what good comes from doing so?
perhaps if things like that went into the public domain then ppl who have come into games playing in the last 5 years might find out what "gameplay" means and go on to create genuinely good games (as opposed to *another* fps)
perhaps some work could be done on when copyright should start? right now it's from creation of the work but if you take sometihng like LoTR then when does it begin? it was written over decades as I recall. perhaps start copyright from the date of exposing the work to the public eye? perhaps requiring registration to acheive copyright?
I don't understand this. why? I mean as far as I am concerned, if I buy a lappie with xp installed (god forbid;) then I own a laptop and a licence to use xp. should the laptop get crushed by a rampaging tapir then I expect my licence to use xp to still be valid and I shold be able to install it on another machine. after all, I paid for the damn thing.
so what you're saying is that "image is nothing, taste is evetrything" eh ?:)
actually, i have to agree, I'll take that pepsi challenge anytime. pepsi is okay if somewhere doesn't have coke, but coke is noticeably better (and prolly worse for my teeth)
yeah, I paid the local shop extra to put a computer together to match my specifications. I paid for all the parts I wanted in the machine (2xp3, abit vp6, 512meg ram, 40g hd, etcetc) and I have them one single solitary instruction. just one. I pointed out that I had 3 ide devices (HD, dvd and zip 250) and I had 4 internal ide interfaces. make sure each ide device gets an interface to itself I said.
a week later when they had finished the build (a week? it's half an hours work followed by a day of burnin testing) and did they do it? did they fsck.
why did I pay that extra money again?
sometimes it's worth building it yourself no matter what.
well, if what you need to uprade is part of the base, but not part of the kernel, then cd ito that directory and "make ; make install". ie for userland tools and stuff.
ie if ping is discovered to have a major security bug then you can cvsup to the latest stable cd into/usr/src/sbin/ping and make install. if the problem is for something that interacts with the kernel (ie ps, top) then you'd be advised to make world to keep everything in sync but alot of the userland tools can be done individually if you're careful.
I'd recommend that you try and keep up to date in general, ie don't keep doing this on a 4.0 release bx as more and more of your stuff will get out of date:)
it has never been at war with eastasia at all, eastasia are our allies.
I find this both amusing and worrying. amusing because this goes against everything the US is supposed to stand for (the land of th free?) and worrying because I'm sure england won;t be far behind.
if this is implemented then it is essentially commiting surveilance on a massive percentage of the american and america-visiting public without any due cause. it's an extremely short jump to link this with all the other worrying databases full of more info than you'd think.
hmm.. one person has bought tickets for 4 but he booked them in 2 pairs of seats situated far from each other? could it possibly be a family where the parents want some peace and quiet from their teenage kids perhaps? yet they might have their past travel plans checked, driving licences, passports, ciminal records, financial status, previous purchases (fertiliser eh? you can make explosives out of thatyou know), medical records (well, they might have a history of mental instability)... and so the list goes on.
I thought people in the US hada constitutional right to privacy and the right not to be searched unjustly (even ifthey don't know it). it looks to me like another attempt to quietlybring the US into being a police state while asking everyone "but what about the children?". yes, there are bad people out there, but I think that when you're looking at things like this then the cure is worse than the disease.
well, I have an bb gun at home, small crappy thing that fires little plastic balls. if I shoot it at a normal pressed cd the cd will shatter, or leave an amusing hole. if I fire it at a cdr the bb will bounce off and leave th cdr looking good.
they do have a certain amount of structural integrity and it would surprise me if a 2yo could snap a cdr (or a cd for that matter) with their bare hands
okay, so thats true, but it would also be a breach of copyright. my point is that you a) don't have to copyright anything, is it by it's nature copyrighted by virtue of you having created it and b) you don't have to ublish it anywhere which you have to do with patents
apm is supported reasonably well I think (I very rarely use apm myself) but acpi is not supported in STABLE or RELEASE. it's in 5-CURRENT at the mo and I don't know when it's likely to be MFC'd
no, thats patents. anything you write is copywrited by default (due to the berne convention I believe) whether you publish it or not. if you cracked into m$ and handed the windows souce to all and sundry I'm sure copyright would catch you eventually.
I think linux and bsd are intrinisically less friendly to spyware as most of the things windows does to sneak into the system require root on a unix box to do. if you want to install a program outside of the home dir then you've usually got to be root. if a program is going to autorun, there are only so many places they can go, and those places are nice easy text files where mod's are easy to spot (hey, I don't remember putting that in.cshrc).
if the programs and going to really infest a machine then they either need root's help or they need to install themselves as a trojan and hack root on their own, and thats a different ball game.
is there any reason that something like UWB could not be applied to a wired technology? I mean they are promising 1G soonish over the air, I'd guess that if there was an electric mediumthen they would get lots of range and not need to be nearly so judicious about being nice to other frequencies as there is nothing to compete with.
a homeowner has a duty of care to keep their house safe and can be sued if negligent yes? to th extent that if a burglar breaks in and cuts themself on something then they can sue the homeowner.
would this be taken across, ie could someone sue a software company for failure in software they pirated?
I don't think this is true, I have a tivo and I refuse to record anything in anything other than maximum quality. while I would love more space to record on (and in time I might well throw another drive in) ubt I have a 32" widescreen tv and the artifacting and loss of quality atthe lower levels is too obvious. even max quality is less than perfect, but it's more than vhs and thats fine by me.
I would rather have increased quality than increased recording space. for preference, of course, both.
I've looked into MPEG compression and yes, they do use lots of tricks, they have to or else they wouldn't be able to squeeze so much data onto a dvd, however you have to bear in mind that the resolution of a dvd is, what? 720x480 or something like that. which you're trying to stretch out over a huge surface area. while modern tv's with digital processing do their best to smooth it out there is still only so much data to go around. this is why we need stuff like HDTV (which we in the UK haven't a hope of seeing in the next 5 years at least).
however I would think that if dvd's look so bad for you then perhaps you should take a closer look at your equipment. I have a 100hz 32" panasonic widescreen tv and a sony dvd player and a well encoded, high bitrate dvd looks pretty stunning IMHO. if you pause it, sit 5" away from the screen and start paging through frame by frame then you are going to see errors but MPEG wasn't designed for that. it's designed for movies, not static images. it takes full advantage of all the failings of our eyes to dump masses amounts of data. sure, laser discs were great, but they weren't exactly easy to store.
until we have those fluro-holographic discs (with 100+ clear layers of data on) show up then we'll have to make do as best we can.
Slashdot Mirror
it sounds like you're implying that right now, region free and macro vision disabled dvd players are hard to find, tihs isn;t true. it may well be for america where the other regions might as well not exist, but in the UK a huge number of dvd players are sold "hacked". my sony auto changes to the correct region and plays without that silly old macrovision (which I've never really made use of, I just had done on principle)
dave
IMHO plasma isn;t going to be the flatscreen tech that succeeds, I reckon it'll be some variant on tft panel. plasma's resolution isn't great, it's heavy and gets very hot. I reckon that some form of lcd display will be what eventually takes over from crt, it's lighter, will become cheaper I think, higher resolution (enough for hdtv), thinner (ie able to be designed into more stylish enclosures) and is prolly better for power.
anyone agree?
dave
well, in the UK, most good modern widescreens generate extra data themselves anyway. all 100hz sets for one, they interpolate extra frames to eliminate flicker and often they generate extra scan lines too. some of the original tv's didn't look wonderful in these modes, but now the processing is getting extremely good.
it's excellent when you're watching from a high quality source (like dvd or a very good tv signal) but when you watch an old vhs recording then it really has it's work cut out trying to make things look pretty.
dave
might be to you, but it's not to us. we have widescreen which is doing pretty well, quite a few WS sets in the uk onw, it's almost getting hard ot buy a new 4:3) but not HDTV. ofcourse PAL is a higher res and has a better colour system than ntsc anyways so it's not quite so critical. dvd's can look pretty stunning
:) you could see great swathes of the same colour, maybe I'm just getting more discerning but I watched the mummy at the weekend and it's a testament to how far dvd encoding as come. it was a stunningly good transfer.
as an aside, I watched aliens SE the other night with some friends on my 32" widescreen tv and I was appalled at the quality of encoding. it was awful, like watching a dodgy avi, well, not that bad
hey ho
dave
well, in a situation like that, where I am happy that I am morally (to me at least :) in the right, then microsoft can kiss my shiny daffodil arse.
;)
dave
case 3: simple, package his earlier stuff with some of his later stuff so that the consumer gets a "valued packed" option. besides, why does the presence of his old stuff detract from the sales of his new stuff? surely it would bolster sales of the new stuff? besides, it's only really public domain if it's out in public.
case 4: I'm sorry but the author should "write more stuff". how many plumbers fix one set of pipes and then expect to life forever off the proceeds?
case 5: actually, iirc, the silmarillion was released by tolkien himself, it was the epic "my fathers ramblings in 14 volumes" that was by his son as I recall. anyways, in this case, it's probably our loss. in any system there will be gains and losses. the trick is to balance these so that we try and get an even and fair system. look at "abandonware" games for example. you can't buy them if you tried, no-one is supporting them, you're not hurting anyone by copying them but the co's will still bring in the heavies if you pirate them. why? what good comes from doing so?
perhaps if things like that went into the public domain then ppl who have come into games playing in the last 5 years might find out what "gameplay" means and go on to create genuinely good games (as opposed to *another* fps)
perhaps some work could be done on when copyright should start? right now it's from creation of the work but if you take sometihng like LoTR then when does it begin? it was written over decades as I recall. perhaps start copyright from the date of exposing the work to the public eye? perhaps requiring registration to acheive copyright?
idea's on a postcard folks
dave
3 times only? a) how does it know? and b) why limit it. you've paid for xp to be on it, fair and square as I see it
god I'm feelin belligerent today
dave
I don't understand this. why? I mean as far as I am concerned, if I buy a lappie with xp installed (god forbid ;) then I own a laptop and a licence to use xp. should the laptop get crushed by a rampaging tapir then I expect my licence to use xp to still be valid and I shold be able to install it on another machine. after all, I paid for the damn thing.
whats wrong with this logic?
dave
so what you're saying is that "image is nothing, taste is evetrything" eh ? :)
actually, i have to agree, I'll take that pepsi challenge anytime. pepsi is okay if somewhere doesn't have coke, but coke is noticeably better (and prolly worse for my teeth)
dave
so why keep this going and can their calculator division which was mking money hand over fist?
dave
yeah, I paid the local shop extra to put a computer together to match my specifications. I paid for all the parts I wanted in the machine (2xp3, abit vp6, 512meg ram, 40g hd, etcetc) and I have them one single solitary instruction. just one. I pointed out that I had 3 ide devices (HD, dvd and zip 250) and I had 4 internal ide interfaces. make sure each ide device gets an interface to itself I said.
a week later when they had finished the build (a week? it's half an hours work followed by a day of burnin testing) and did they do it? did they fsck.
why did I pay that extra money again?
sometimes it's worth building it yourself no matter what.
dave
well, if what you need to uprade is part of the base, but not part of the kernel, then cd ito that directory and "make ; make install". ie for userland tools and stuff.
/usr/src/sbin/ping and make install. if the problem is for something that interacts with the kernel (ie ps, top) then you'd be advised to make world to keep everything in sync but alot of the userland tools can be done individually if you're careful.
:)
ie if ping is discovered to have a major security bug then you can cvsup to the latest stable cd into
I'd recommend that you try and keep up to date in general, ie don't keep doing this on a 4.0 release bx as more and more of your stuff will get out of date
dave
it has never been at war with eastasia at all, eastasia are our allies.
I find this both amusing and worrying. amusing because this goes against everything the US is supposed to stand for (the land of th free?) and worrying because I'm sure england won;t be far behind.
if this is implemented then it is essentially commiting surveilance on a massive percentage of the american and america-visiting public without any due cause. it's an extremely short jump to link this with all the other worrying databases full of more info than you'd think.
hmm.. one person has bought tickets for 4 but he booked them in 2 pairs of seats situated far from each other? could it possibly be a family where the parents want some peace and quiet from their teenage kids perhaps? yet they might have their past travel plans checked, driving licences, passports, ciminal records, financial status, previous purchases (fertiliser eh? you can make explosives out of thatyou know), medical records (well, they might have a history of mental instability)... and so the list goes on.
I thought people in the US hada constitutional right to privacy and the right not to be searched unjustly (even ifthey don't know it). it looks to me like another attempt to quietlybring the US into being a police state while asking everyone "but what about the children?". yes, there are bad people out there, but I think that when you're looking at things like this then the cure is worse than the disease.
dave
well, I have an bb gun at home, small crappy thing that fires little plastic balls. if I shoot it at a normal pressed cd the cd will shatter, or leave an amusing hole. if I fire it at a cdr the bb will bounce off and leave th cdr looking good.
they do have a certain amount of structural integrity and it would surprise me if a 2yo could snap a cdr (or a cd for that matter) with their bare hands
dave
okay, so thats true, but it would also be a breach of copyright. my point is that you a) don't have to copyright anything, is it by it's nature copyrighted by virtue of you having created it and b) you don't have to ublish it anywhere which you have to do with patents
dave
hang on, I thought that 2.5 was bleeding edge and 2.4 *was* the latest stable release tree? should everyone be using 2.2 still?
dave
apm is supported reasonably well I think (I very rarely use apm myself) but acpi is not supported in STABLE or RELEASE. it's in 5-CURRENT at the mo and I don't know when it's likely to be MFC'd
dave
no, thats patents. anything you write is copywrited by default (due to the berne convention I believe) whether you publish it or not. if you cracked into m$ and handed the windows souce to all and sundry I'm sure copyright would catch you eventually.
dave
I think linux and bsd are intrinisically less friendly to spyware as most of the things windows does to sneak into the system require root on a unix box to do. if you want to install a program outside of the home dir then you've usually got to be root. if a program is going to autorun, there are only so many places they can go, and those places are nice easy text files where mod's are easy to spot (hey, I don't remember putting that in .cshrc).
if the programs and going to really infest a machine then they either need root's help or they need to install themselves as a trojan and hack root on their own, and thats a different ball game.
dave
is there any reason that something like UWB could not be applied to a wired technology? I mean they are promising 1G soonish over the air, I'd guess that if there was an electric mediumthen they would get lots of range and not need to be nearly so judicious about being nice to other frequencies as there is nothing to compete with.
comments anyone?
here's a thought.
a homeowner has a duty of care to keep their house safe and can be sued if negligent yes? to th extent that if a burglar breaks in and cuts themself on something then they can sue the homeowner.
would this be taken across, ie could someone sue a software company for failure in software they pirated?
dave
I don't think this is true, I have a tivo and I refuse to record anything in anything other than maximum quality. while I would love more space to record on (and in time I might well throw another drive in) ubt I have a 32" widescreen tv and the artifacting and loss of quality atthe lower levels is too obvious. even max quality is less than perfect, but it's more than vhs and thats fine by me.
I would rather have increased quality than increased recording space. for preference, of course, both.
dave
I've looked into MPEG compression and yes, they do use lots of tricks, they have to or else they wouldn't be able to squeeze so much data onto a dvd, however you have to bear in mind that the resolution of a dvd is, what? 720x480 or something like that. which you're trying to stretch out over a huge surface area. while modern tv's with digital processing do their best to smooth it out there is still only so much data to go around. this is why we need stuff like HDTV (which we in the UK haven't a hope of seeing in the next 5 years at least).
however I would think that if dvd's look so bad for you then perhaps you should take a closer look at your equipment. I have a 100hz 32" panasonic widescreen tv and a sony dvd player and a well encoded, high bitrate dvd looks pretty stunning IMHO. if you pause it, sit 5" away from the screen and start paging through frame by frame then you are going to see errors but MPEG wasn't designed for that. it's designed for movies, not static images. it takes full advantage of all the failings of our eyes to dump masses amounts of data. sure, laser discs were great, but they weren't exactly easy to store.
until we have those fluro-holographic discs (with 100+ clear layers of data on) show up then we'll have to make do as best we can.
dave
simple question, is there a british or even european EFF or equivalent that is campaigning for our rights in these arena's on this side of the pond?
dave
that he's not so much leaving microsoft as merely changing departments. it's all the same company isn't it?
dave